Lingotopia

Today, the 14th of June 2018 marks the start of the Soccer World Cup in Russia. I'm looking forward to exciting matches, I love learning languages, I'm interested in other cultures and I enjoy taking part in challenges. So, why not combine all of that and take up a World Cup challenge? Starting from today I want to post every day a couple of sentences in the languages of the participating countries, some fun facts about them and of course links to music and resources in those languages. I know it's a tad crazy but I won't write whole essays but keep the blog posts rather short. And a lot of countries share the same official languages so I can group them together. My knowledge in the following languages goes from tiny little bit (Serbian), basic (Arabic, Portuguese) over intermediate (French, Spanish) to advanced (English). Spanish : Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Spain, Panama, Peru, Uruguay. Arabic : Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia French : B...

What is the first day of the week? As in the picture above, often Monday is regarded as the first day of the week because in many countries it is the start of the working week. And in Chinese, the days of the week are numbered from Monday as literally "first day of the week" (星期一/周一 xingqiyi/zhouyi) to Saturday as the "sixth day of the week" (星期六/周一). Only the Sunday has a special name as "sunday" or "heaven day" (星期日/星期天/周日). Ok, problem solved. But, wait a minute. Isn't in Christian church Sunday regarded as the first day of the week? That would make Monday the second day of the week. Yes, so the Portuguese are right. In Portuguese, the days of the week are counted as in Chinese, but Monday is as "segunda-feira" the second day of the week and Friday is as "sexta-feira" the sixth day. Saturday (sábado) and Sunday (domingo) have separate names. Well, it must be a Christian thing then to count the days of the week like...

Painting by Syrian artist Mohammed Ghanoum  Read about him (in German) here: Der-Schoengeist-der-mit-Farbe-um-Syrien-kaempft Whenever learning a language one often faces the following problems:  the written and the oral variants are quite different the regional variants vary greatly, sometimes up to the point, that they are mutually unintelligible So, for instance, I am learning European Spanish because I'm traveling to Spain more often than to Latin American countries and also I speak the Southern variant of Mandarin used in Shanghai rather than the Beijing variant, which is actually the one used in most textbooks for foreigners. When learning Arabic it is even more difficult to choose a variant to learn. See the following comic and you get my point.  Comic by itchyfeet ( http://www.itchyfeetcomic.com/ ) So, when I decided to learn Arabic I chose to learn Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) first and later to learn to speak Levantine dialect s...

Today I read an article on italki titled "The 3 Hardest Languages To Learn (And Why You Should Learn Them)":  https://www.italki.com/discussion/144616 . This article is just ridiculous. It discussed Arabic, Chinese and Japanese and it was obvious that author hadn't learned any of the discussed languages because the article was full of errors. It states: "Written Japanese is fiendishly complicated, combining five different writing systems, kanji, hiragana, katakana, Arabic and Roman." I have no clue, where the author got this weird idea from. Japanese doesn't use the Arabic script all! One could argue that the Japanese use Arabic numerals, but calling that "Arabic writing system" is a bit over the top in my opinion, since the Arabic numerals actually originate from India and are just called "Arabic numerals" because they were introduced to Western countries by Arabs. In Arabic other numerals are used:  ١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩٠. And the article say...