Lesson/Guide Requests

[GrandPiano]

Would anyone be interested in Mandarin Chinese lessons? My current level is sort of basic-intermediate, but I think it's good enough for the kinds of lessons given here. Plus, it will give me a motivation to keep studying.

If you can explain everything well (and preferably provide some kind of optional exercises), I'd be willing to give following them a shot.

I've been meaning to start taking advantage of more of the lessons available here.

Well, of course there'll be exercises. I've never done this before, but I'll try to explain everything the best that I can.

[GrandPiano]

OK, I've started the Mandarin lessons! Please let me know what you guys think, so I know whether or not to continue.

[shimobaatar]

OK, I've started the Mandarin lessons! Please let me know what you guys think, so I know whether or not to continue.

Looks good so far. I subscribed to the thread, but I didn't post anything because I didn't have anything to respond to in particular, and I didn't want to interrupt the "flow of the thread", as has been said at least once.

Edit: Not a huge deal, in my opinion, but you might want to capitalize "Chinese" in the thread's title.

[GrandPiano]

Edit: Not a huge deal, in my opinion, but you might want to capitalize "Chinese" in the thread's title.

Oh, shoot, it is uncapitalized. I will fix that now.

[Sumelic]

Would anyone be interested in a guide to spoken French? I know it's a bit of a "vanilla" language, and there seem to be a fair amount of other people on the forum who know it already. I've taken 4 years and a bit, so I'd be comfortable with introducing all of the basics. I was thinking to do something different, I might present the words in phonemic IPA rather than the main orthography. (Despite the fact that I say "spoken French", I've never lived in France, so what I really mean is more like "standard 2nd-language-learner's French free from notable archaisms or over-formal locutions" rather than actual colloquial French used in places like Paris or Quebec.)

[Prinsessa]

If you could make it shorter than Wikipedia's extremely long descriptions, that'd be great.

[GrandPiano]

I'd be very interested. I don't know what you mean by a "vanilla" language; sure, it's a very commonly learned language by Europeans and Americans, but it has plenty of interesting qualities, at least phonologically/phonetically: Nasal vowels, liaison, a voiced uvular fricative, front rounded vowels, a labial-palatal approximant… *sighs*

Not to mention the orthography. It's has a pretty regular spelling-to-sound correspondence (although I can't say the same about sound-to-spelling), but it has so many weird conventions, especially with all of the silent letters. I would actually prefer if you included the spelling (along with the IPA, of course), but I don't know if others share the way I feel about the orthography.

[Sumelic]

I'd be very interested. I don't know what you mean by a "vanilla" language; sure, it's a very commonly learned language by Europeans and Americans, but it has plenty of interesting qualities, at least phonologically/phonetically: Nasal vowels, liaison, a voiced uvular fricative, front rounded vowels, a labial-palatal approximant… *sighs*

Not to mention the orthography. It's has a pretty regular spelling-to-sound correspondence (although I can't say the same about sound-to-spelling), but it has so many weird conventions, especially with all of the silent letters. I would actually prefer if you included the spelling (along with the IPA, of course), but I don't know if others share the way I feel about the orthography.

Hah, yeah, that's pretty much all that I meant (PIE, Western European, Romance language). But certainly, every individual language has interesting things about it, no matter how familiar the language seems.

If you'd like, I can include the orthography. I feel like it would be better to start with a representation of the sounds, because some of the spelling conventions are liable to cause confusion for learners, but I can also introduce the orthographic representations afterwards. It certainly has its quirks, although to me it makes a fair amount of sense (now Irish, thats's a language with really weird spelling conventions!).

[GrandPiano]

I'd be very interested. I don't know what you mean by a "vanilla" language; sure, it's a very commonly learned language by Europeans and Americans, but it has plenty of interesting qualities, at least phonologically/phonetically: Nasal vowels, liaison, a voiced uvular fricative, front rounded vowels, a labial-palatal approximant… *sighs*

Not to mention the orthography. It's has a pretty regular spelling-to-sound correspondence (although I can't say the same about sound-to-spelling), but it has so many weird conventions, especially with all of the silent letters. I would actually prefer if you included the spelling (along with the IPA, of course), but I don't know if others share the way I feel about the orthography.

Hah, yeah, that's pretty much all that I meant (PIE, Western European, Romance language). But certainly, every individual language has interesting things about it, no matter how familiar the language seems.

If you'd like, I can include the orthography. I feel like it would be better to start with a representation of the sounds, because some of the spelling conventions are liable to cause confusion for learners, but I can also introduce the orthographic representations afterwards. It certainly has its quirks, although to me it makes a fair amount of sense (now Irish, thats's a language with really weird spelling conventions!).

I think I'd prefer to see the spellings from the beginning, alongside the pronunciation, rather than have it introduced later. Those that aren't interested in the written language don't have to look at the orthography. Perhaps you could have two sets of exercises, one with the orthography and one with IPA. I'm planning on doing a similar thing with the Mandarin lessons (and an update for that is comming): One set of exercises will use traditional characters, and the other will use simplified characters.

[shimobaatar]

I think I might be interested, but only if the orthography were included. That's just me, though.

[Sumelic]

It looks like the consensus is to introduce spelling at the same time as pronunciation. I'm thinking I'll use glossing conventions for the example sentences.

[shimobaatar]

I'd personally appreciate glosses.

[Shemtov]

I'm currently teaching myself Mongolian. Would anybody be interested in lessons once I reach a higher level?

[shimobaatar]

I'm currently teaching myself Mongolian. Would anybody be interested in lessons once I reach a higher level?

I think that would be very interesting!

[thetha]

I'd enjoy mongolian lessons as well

[qwed117]

Itd be pointless of me to repeat what others have already said, but I like Mongolian too much to give up that opportunity.

I would like to learn Mongolian too. (It'll be a shame though if we'll have to use Cyrillic though)

[Shemtov]

. (It'll be a shame though if we'll have to use Cyrillic though)

Yeah, the book I'm using uses the Cyrillic exclusively

[clawgrip]

I have been interested in Mongolian for a while, but I know next to nothing (I do know how to say "I love you" though).

All but one of the Mongolians I've met have been from Inner Mongolia, and pretty much all of them wrote in Mongolian script instead of Cyrillic. Yet all the books I've come across are about Mongolia Mongolian in Cyrillic. Not only are the dialects different, but I can't really figure out Mongolian vowels anyway, and how they are represented in Cyrillic I seem to recall not make much sense to me. So if you can clarify anything, I would look forward to it.

[Shemtov]

I'm sorry to say that I couldn't handle a non-IE non-Semetic language right now (college and all) so I stopped doing Mongolian, but I do plan to return to it.
Anyway, is there anyone here who can do lessons on Bangla Lipi (Bengali script)?

[clawgrip]

I want to say that I could probably brush up on it a bit and do it, but Bangla has a bunch of weird vowels and things going on, so I am not confident I could do it.