This is a good medical guide to begin Lithuanian, especially in preparation for travel, but there is always more to know.
Tag: #grammar
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- Every language uses interjections. And it should come as no surprise that a rich language like Russian is rich with fun interjections.
- In the simplest of terms, Turkish vowel harmony allows you to leave your mouth in a certain position for an entire word, rather than forcing you to reshape your mouth with every syllable.
- Who needs a book for vocabulary? Just use the language and you'll learn a lot! Here's how I learned Turkish comparatives and superlatives.
- Here's my quick rundown of possession (using suffixes) in Turkish grammar. It's easier than you think.
- In this post, I explain how I've been able to learn to form the Turkish past tense easily and quickly.
- ben is the Turkish first person pronoun, but like many languages with strong conjugation patterns, the subject is omitted and used for clarification or emphasis.
- In this post, I share my what I've learned about negating verbs in the Turkish language.
- There are two characters in the Russian alphabet that will leave you perplexed for a long time as you take on the challenge of this new language: the soft sign (ь) and the hard sign (ъ).
- Ongoing action in Turkish is indicated by the -iyor ending. Here's what I've discovered about how it's used.
- Just as with everything else with learning Italian, it turns out that using the conditional tense isn't hard at all, and it's certainly not the complicated matter that people make it out to be.
- For anyone looking for an easy and fun language to really get you interested in learning a new language, you can't really go wrong with Tagalog.
- Learning a Germanic language if you already know another Germanic language is much easier than learning a language within a completely different branch or family.
- Each language feels different when it hits your ear, and feels strange as it exits your mouth — often leaving your tongue twisted into a new, uncomfortable shape.
- We've learned about the reflexive pronouns ci and vi, and the partitive pronoun ne, but the Italian pronouns ci, vi, and ne all have secret powers that other pronouns don't have.
- The Italian partitive is a special kind of pronoun which functions as a back-reference. It refers back to a direct object specified in a previous sentence - or possibly later in the current sentence.
- The bottom line is that grammar is important. It's not something you can just ignore, and hope to 'pick up along the way'.
- Today, we'll look at a few more useful Italian word patterns I've found.
- A few weeks ago, I wrote a basic introduction to Catalan, having never heard it spoken before. Here are my new impressions.
- Here are some essential Italian word patterns that every learner of the language will encounter.
- Lithuanian is basically the parent language to all the modern Slavic languages, and as such, it uses perfective and imperfective aspects on all verbs, denoted by use of prefixes.
- In my last post, I talked about the importance of learning word patterns when learning Italian. Today, I want to focus on verb + prep. + infin. patterns.
- In many ways, our brains are nothing more than elaborate pattern matching machines, evolved to recognize faces, landmarks, predators, smells, food sources.
- In my Italian studies so far this year, I've run into several situations where a word can mean two completely different things.
- I've always thought of Catalan as a dialect of Spanish. In fact, I've often heard those two names together in one phrase: Catalan Spanish.
- In this post, we're talking about essential Italian phrases that you should know to be able to describe about yourself for basic survival.
- Today we'll look at some vital descriptive words in Italian that every learner should know.
- There's an incredible amount that can be done after learning a few basic verbs and their conjugation. Here are a few really useful verbs for Italian.
- Recently, one of my Russian friends pointed out to me that I had used зачем incorrectly, and that these two words are most definitely not interchangeable.
- In this post, I'll teach you basic essentials in Italian and how to ask for them.
- In this post, I'll teach you the question words in Lithuanian and how to ask questions.
- French is an official language in 29 countries. It is spoken by 136 million people as a primary language.
- Today I'll show you how to be courteous and polite when speaking Italian.
- In this post, I'll teach you how Italians greet each other and other essential Italian phrases.
- Pronouns are among the most used of any word in any language, and they have many uses. Today I'd like to take a look at some of the ways they are used in Italian.
- Today, I'd like to explore how that works in the so-called Romance languages... though I prefer to think of them as Vulgar Latin languages.
- In this post, I talk about 'improper prepositions' in Italian and how to learn them.
- Today I want to suggest one more way to convey superlatives, and add a few notes on usage.
- In addition to regular comparative forms, there are also some irregular comparatives and superlatives for Italian adjectives and adverbs.
- In this post, I'll show you how to form Italian comparatives and superlatives.
- I have long had intentions of learning about Lithuania, its culture, and its language, since that is an important part of my own heritage.
- Instead of pluralizing the second person, or adding a title (like sir), Italians abstract into the third person. In the singular, this means that they call each other 'she'.
- Italian prepositions are those short words which express conditions, directions, specifications, places and times, such as of, over, to, from, etc.
- Unlike English, where we have several prepositions to make distinctions about locations, Russian primarily uses only two. It's often confusing, and seemingly arbitrary, choosing between в and на.
- In this post, I'll explain in simple terms how to form and use the Italian imperative.
- When describing an action that was ongoing at some time in the past, you need to use an imperfect verb tense, and that is what the imperfetto is.
- It most likely started in Rome, with the Latin pronouns tu and vos, but these days it can be seen in many languages throughout the world.
- oday, we're going to cover il passato remoto, the Italian verb tense used to describe things that happened long ago.
- Similar to the past perfect subjunctive, the congiuntivo trapassato, or pluperfect, is formed by applying the subjunctive to the passato prossimo.
- The congiuntivo passato, or past perfect subjunctive, is really just the subjunctive form of the passato prossimo.
- The congiuntivo imperfetto, or imperfect subjunctive, describes an uncertain verb action that was ongoing in the past.
- The congiuntivo presente, or present subjunctive, describes an uncertain verb action in the present tense.
- Today, I'd like to start by talking about what the subjunctive mood is, and where and how it is used.
- Today I want to share the amazing formula with which Russian verbs become perfective or imperfective.
- Today, I would like to discuss the difference between perfective and imperfective verbs.
- One of the most widely used of all Italian prefixes is nothing more than the letter s-.
- Prefixes are one of my favorite aspects of Italian, because understanding them makes the language easy and interesting.
- Sooner or later with Esperanto, you have to cross the bridge from simple subject-verb-object statements and questions to complex descriptions of causes and comparisons.
- I'm going to need to know how to ask and answer questions in Esperanto if I have any hope of becoming fluent in one week.
- Today I will outline the concepts of prepositions, prefixes, and suffixes — essential concepts in the language of Esperanto.
- In today's post, I'll teach you Italian question words and how to ask questions.
- The declension of nouns is often a scary topic for native English speakers, but it doesn't have to be.
- The simple future tense is easy to form in Italian. As with everything, you start by dropping the verb's ending, and then adding the future ending.
- Unlike the rag-tag collection of prefixes in the English language, the Russian prefixes are complete and clear, and rather well-defined.
- One of the most common ways of forming the past tense is il passato prossimo, or what we know in English as the present-perfect tense.
- Understanding reflexive verbs in Italian is not only vital for certain verbs, but also opens the door to advanced grammatical constructs.
- While the concept of reflexive verbs is mostly unused in English, it is a vital concept in almost all other languages.
- Today I'll teach you how to form and use diminutives in the Italian language.
- Today we're going to continue exploring the Italian forms of 'to be' by learning to use the continuous tense.
- The phrase stare per [...] indicates action on the verge of happening. It is always followed by an infinitive verb.
- Today I am going to discuss the difference in Spanish between ser and estar, both verbs with mean 'to be'.
- The English language uses the verb 'to be' for almost everything, but the Russian language almost doesn't use it at all.
- The verbs essere and stare both translate as 'to be' in most uses, but they represent two different concepts.
- Now that we understand noun gender and articles, the next thing to explore is possession, and the adjectives used to describe it.
- Today I'll teach you how to use and understand articles in Italian grammar.
