Learn the Russian alphabet in two hours!

 Russian, Scripts  No Responses »
May 072012
 
the russian/cyrillic alphabet is used in this book

If you want to learn Russian, you should probably learn the Russian alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet (which is basically the Russian alphabet) is also used in many other countries like Belarus, the Ukraine, Bulgaria, Mongolia, and Serbia. Learning this alphabet is not actually hard. It is possible to learn the Russian alphabet in two hours. And it is not hard. In fact, I have (somewhat) learned the Russian alphabet after less than one hour of “studying” it.

Basically, this website divides the Russian alphabet into four groups:

          Group 1:  5 Letters are same as English,
          Group 2:  6 Letters are similar to Greek,
          Group 3:  6 Letters are same as English,
                      but pronounced differently,
          Group 4: 16 Letters are distinctly Russian.
                   33 Letters total.

They are not hard to learn, if you learn them by groups. They will be even easier to learn if you know the Greek alphabet.

So, here is the link to the full tutorial: http://www.dorogadomoj.com/es07pop.html#otdel7

(if that link doesn’t work, you can try the Wayback Machine. If the Wayback Machine doesn’t work…then that’s a problem…)

Top Ten Kråkesølv Songs

 Norwegian, Top Ten  No Responses »
May 032012
 

I like the Norwegian band Kråkesølv a lot. They are not very popular and they don’t even have an English Wikipedia page, although they do nave a Norwegian one. Wikipedia says, “Kråkesølv er et kritikerrost rockeorkester fra Bodø, etablert i desember 2007.” (Kråkesølv is a critically-acclaimed rock band from Bodø, established in December 2007)

Their songs are in the Bodø dialect of Norwegian. Norwegian is not a very hard language to learn, although you might have difficulties learning the Bodø dialect since there is a significant lack of learning materials.

Kråkesølv means “mica”, which is the name of a mineral that looks like crystal.

I do not think you really need to understand the lyrics to enjoy the music. Anyways, I’ve provided the English translations of the songs in parentheses. Also, I am only including songs from Kråkesølv’s first album, Trådnøsting. I like it better than their second/other album, “Bomtur til Jorda”.

Trivia: Kråkesølv is so unpopular on the internet. If you type one of their songs into Google without the å or the ø, nothing relevant will come up 70% of the time.

So anyways, without further ado, I present this list:

Continue reading »

How many languages do you speak? (semi-rant)

 Complaints and Rants, Languages  No Responses »
Apr 272012
 

Sometimes in discussions, this question comes up. Then, someone says, “Hey Daniel, how many languages do you speak?” This is actually quite hard to answer. I speak two languages, English and Chinese, naturally. This means that I don’t need to think about what I’m going to say; it comes out of my mouth naturally. Hence the name. But, this process of listing languages can be very complicated (see below). Why? To some people I speak three languages. To some other people, I speak four. Or five. Or six.

Continue reading »

Boston-More than a feeling (Norwegian subtitles)

 Norwegian  No Responses »
Jan 202012
 

This is a translation of Boston’s “More than a feeling” into Norwegian. By the way, I’m not very good at speaking Norwegian.

Jeg har lært norsk…men jeg snakker IKKE norsk…Jeg prøvde å oversette denne sangen…jeg er amerikansk

No Copyright Infringement Intended. All audio rights belong to their respective owners. Norwegian translation by Daniel, but he does NOT guarantee the accuracy.

 Posted by at 11:53 am

Why Norwegian is easy – 1

 English, Languages, Norwegian  No Responses »
Dec 072011
 

Norwegian and English are both Germanic languages and that makes them related to each other. Just how related? Take a look at this sentence from nettavisen.no, a Norwegian news site:

Nordmann falt ut av vindu - døde

Well, Nordmann you can seperate into Nord (looks like English word “north”) and mann (sounds like English word “man”). So what do you think Nordmann means?

Ok then, how about the next few words: “falt ut av vindu“. If you say falt out loud it kind of sounds like falled, which is the incorrect past tense of to fall. But what if you couldn’t make that connection? Well, you could skip a few words and see the word vindu. You could probably figure out that this means window. So what bad things happen at a window? One could fall out of one. Plus, “falt ut av vindu” sounds like “falls out of window”.

The last word is døde. If you look at that word by itself, you can’t really tell what it means. But you do know that a Norwegian fell out of a window, right? So what’s interesting about that? It would be more interesting if he died…I sound sadistic right now. But anyways, newspapers care mostly if someone has died. Now, the adjective of dead in Norwegian is død (an e is added at the end because Nordmann is definite singular).

So right now we know about a Nordmann who apparently falt ut av vindu and is now døde. But where did this happen? What else happened? Here’s the next/first sentence:

En nordmann falt natt til lørdag ut fra et hotellvindu i Aalborg i Danmark, og døde av skadene, melder danske TV 2.

Well, you could probably tell that en nordmann means a Norwegian (en is just a indefinite article like a/an in ENglish. In this case, en is used as an indefinite article for a masculine noun).

We already know falt is the pass tense of fall (which is fell). So let’s look at the next three words natt til lørdag. This is a bit confusing…the word til in the middle sounds like ’til (until) in English. So maybe it means from natt until lørdag. You might need a little bit of basic Norwegian knowledge to understand this bit. Natt means night (not too different). Lørdag means Saturday. So natt til lørdag means night to Saturday.

Ut fra et hotellvindu are the next few words. Ut sounds like out. Fra means from. You’ll learn this very early when/if you learn Norwegian because it’s in the phrase jeg kommer fra… which means I come from. Let’s skip the word et. Next is hotellvindu. You can separate this into two familiar words hotell and vindu. Hotell looks like a misspelled version of hotel and we already know vindu means window. So ut fra et hotellvindu means out from a window of a hotel. Now remember et? This is the indefinite article for neutral gender words.

Now, there’s a city called Aalborg in Denmark. The next few words identify the location of the hotell. They are i Aalborg i Danmark. You know that Aalborg is a city in Denmark. Danmark looks like Denmark (except misspelled), right? So you know that Aalborg is IN Denmark. What do you think i means (hint: in)?

Next they say that the nordmann fell out of the window of a hotel in Aalborg, Denmark, og døde av skadene. Og means and. We already know døde means dead and av means of. So he is “dead of” something…but what? Skadene is a variant of skade which means damage. So he died of damage? A damage to a person usually comes in the forms of wounds/bruises/scars/etc.

The last few words are melder danske TV 2. Hmmm…TV 2 sounds like something to do with television. Maybe this story appeared on television and maybe TV 2 is some kind of channel? Maybe this channel is in Denmark (therefore it makes the channel Danish), where the death occurred? What does melder mean? It is the present tense of å melde, which means to report. So Danish TV 2 reported this, probably.

So, let’s conclude that sentence. It means the following: A Norwegian fell Friday night from a hotel window in Aalborg in Denmark, and died of his injuries, according to Danish TV 2. That sounds right…

Thanks for reading this. You want to comment on this blog post?

Article Source

(I don’t own that article nor do I have anything to do with it other than this blog post).

 Older Entries