If you’re looking to listen to the language you are studying online, Foreign Internet Radio has a huge range of languages to choose from. Just choose the language you are interested in hearing – you can also select between talk and music radio – and you will get a listing of a wide range of [...]
Archive for August, 2009
Numbers in Amharic
Posted in Amharic, tagged Amharic Numbers, Learning Amharic on August 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
As with anything, with learning Amharic we have to start somewhere so to start with let’s learn some numbers in Amharic. The Amharic Number System There are a lot of unique aspects to Amharic and one of those is the numbering system which works a bit differently than that of English. The biggest difference is [...]
Typing in Amharic
Posted in Amharic, tagged Learning Amharic, Typing Amharic on August 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
You can type in Amharic just as you do in Hindi by setting up the language in Windows and downloading appropriate fonts. Another solution is using a program like Keyman. Keyman version 7 is only available free for 30 days after which point you did need to purchase a license. But the prior version is [...]
The Devanagari Independent Vowels
Posted in Hindi, tagged Hindi script, Learning Hindi, typing Hindi on August 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
So we touched briefly on the basic history of Devanagari and how the script works. Now let’s get down to looking at some of the actual letters, their pronunciation and how to type them. Independent Vowel Characters and their Pronunciation: अ – a as in about आ – ā as in father इ – i [...]
Conjugation of ‘Ir’
Posted in Spanish, tagged Ir, Spanish conjugation, to go on August 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I am sure that I’m not the only one who loves to learn everything but the conjugations. Unfortunately (or fortunately) conjugations are a critical part of many languages and Spanish uses them far more than English. It’s unfortunate in that there is a great deal of memorization involved, but fortunate in that those annoying conjugations [...]
To Be or Not to Be in Spanish
Posted in Spanish, tagged estar, ser, to be in Spanish on August 17, 2009 | 1 Comment »
In a lot of ways ‘to be’ in Spanish is quite straightforward. However, at the same time the concept of verbally differentiating between types of state of being is quite foreign to English speakers. For English speakers: ‘The cat is orange. That is a cat on the table.’ In both cases the same word, ‘is’, [...]
History of the Devanagari Script and Its Basics
Posted in Hindi, tagged Hindi script on August 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
History While Hindi and Urdu are very similar in grammatical structure, the languages from which much of their vocabulary draws from differs (Sanskrit for Hindi and Persian/Arabic for Urdu). However, the most noticeable difference comes when viewing the writing where Urdu has a distinctly Arabic look and Hindi has the Devanagari script. Devanagari, ‘script of [...]
Learning Amharic
Posted in Amharic, tagged Learning Amharic on August 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Amharic is the official language of Ethiopia and while it does not have as many speakers as Hindi or Spanish, there are still a decent number of people, not just in Ethiopia that use Amharic. Like Hindi it is another language that is not based on the Latin alphabet and which also has a great [...]
Boy, Girl, Man and Woman in Hindi
Posted in Hindi, tagged Hindi Vocabulary on August 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Now that we can see the Hindi script, we can start looking at some simple nouns so that we can practice talking about people. To start with we’ll talk about a boy, a girl, a man and a woman. Below are these four words typed out along with pronunciation and how they are spelled and [...]
