Your favorite language websites

Clark   Saturday, November 29, 2003, 20:16 GMT
Thanks Mjd. I had not clue as to what the reason was, but this does not surprise me. I am sure there are hundreds of these types of examples among the two versions of Portuguese.
Tom   Saturday, November 29, 2003, 23:34 GMT
Templar: Did you actually use the courses?

Clark: You might want to check out monolingual dictionaries. For example, I have a German dictionary that gives at least one example sentence for each word + phonetic transcription. I'm sure you would like a good monolingual dictionary even more than Wordreference.com.
Pentatonic   Sunday, November 30, 2003, 02:23 GMT
Tom, I'm not sure what you mean because the German dictionary at WordReference.com has lots of example sentences:
http://wordreference.com/de/en/

I also find http://dict.leo.org/ interesting.
Tom   Sunday, November 30, 2003, 12:32 GMT
You're right, it does have examples, but they are mostly short phrases (not full sentences), so you can't learn a lot of grammar from them. They also tend to focus on the idiomatic uses of a word (as opposed to regular usage).

Thanks for recommending the other dictionary! I wasn't aware of an online German dictionary with such a large number of example sentences. I think it must have more examples than any paper dictionary I've seen as well! I will definitely bookmark this.
Tom   Sunday, November 30, 2003, 12:34 GMT
Here's a direct link to the DWDS dictionary that dict.leo.org uses:
http://www.dwds.de/cgi-bin/dwds/test/query.cgi?wdg=1
Tremmert   Sunday, November 30, 2003, 13:58 GMT
>> what's the big deal about yourdictionary.com?

If you click the 'grammars' link near the top it takes you to:

http://www.yourdictionary.com/grammars.html

Which has links to grammar tutorials on languages from Ainu to Zarma (whatever those are ;)) For some languages the also include links to online dictionaries, newspapers, real-audio broadcasts, for example see the German links:

http://www.yourdictionary.com/grammars2.html#german
Tremmert   Sunday, November 30, 2003, 14:02 GMT
I've also tried the first few Deutsche-Welle courses and they seem good, although it takes me forever to download them with my connection...
Tom   Sunday, November 30, 2003, 19:19 GMT
Ah, grammar tutorials...

Behold the German adjective declension table:
http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Hall/1238/nouns.html#adject

Anyone who says they aren't scared of this is a goddamn liar.
Lou   Monday, December 01, 2003, 11:39 GMT
For German speakers, a good site is:
www.ego4u.com
I have also found some useful exercises on:
www.englishforjapanese.com
Simon   Monday, December 01, 2003, 14:03 GMT
I gave up on German after discovering that the feminine dative and genetive were the same as the masculine nominative.

Dutch has everything I ever wanted from German without all the tedious parts I didn't want.
Tremmert   Monday, December 01, 2003, 17:58 GMT
Surely English is the only languages that calls 'Hollans' Dutch and 'Deutsch' German?
Clark   Monday, December 01, 2003, 19:40 GMT
Well, in the defence of English, it was not until the late 19th early 20th century that there was even a distinction between Dutch and German. All people who spoke a Germanic dialect (ex. German or Dutch) would have been called speakers of "Dutch."

I guess that is not really defending English; just merely pointing out that it is only the last couple hundred years that the English language has had more than one word to describe two languages.

Simon, I gave up on both German and Dutch when I discovered French seems to be the most logical to me. No declensions, verbs are straight-forward and the grammar and vocabulary are similar enough to English where it is easy to get around in the language :-P
Juan   Monday, December 01, 2003, 22:16 GMT
How about "dictionary.reference.com". I use that and I find it quite useful. It may not be the best but it meets my needs.
Juan   Monday, December 01, 2003, 22:20 GMT
"All people who spoke a Germanic dialect (ex. German or Dutch) would have been called speakers of "Dutch.""

Really, Clark?! Holland is such a puny country in comparison to Germany, woulndn't it be the other way round?
Clark   Tuesday, December 02, 2003, 01:31 GMT
Yep, it's true! Read some old books or read some linguistic books, and you will see that Dutch was the standard for both German and Dutch essentially.

Personally, I think eaither Hollandic or Netherlandic should be used in place of Dutch. When I talk about the Pennsylvania Dutch, I usually refer to the language spoken in the Netherlands as "Netherlandic" so as not to confuse PA German/Dutch with Dutch/Netherlandic.

Also, people started calling the PA Germans "PA Dutch" because the German word for German, "Deutsch" sounds like the English word "Dutch." SO this might have had something to do with it as well.