I want to learn a Celtic language

I haven't actually looked at Norwegian or Swedish (I should just to see what they look like), so I can't say much on that. I just thought the article I found was interesting. I'll have to look for the article again and link it here so you can read it. The language that really surprised me on the list (besides Norwegian and Swedish) was Portuguese, I don't know why, but Spanish being on the list like I said didn't surprise me.

And German capitalization is kind of weird for me, like seeing words in the middle of sentences capitalized, right now I'm still on Duolingo getting a base so to speak, and with it not explaining anything, nothing makes sense to me. When I get more into the language I'll probably understand more about why things are the way they are. Puncuation will probably confuse me aswell.

And yeah you can correct the translation on my signature, I found the translation on a website where people can put up translations to songs, so I figure it probably isn't totally correct, but it's close enough. The song just pretty much fit how I feel sometimes, I listen to it every so often and it's just kind of an angry song, the funny thing is the album it's on all but two songs are in English, this one and another one are in German, just a random fact about the band. I listen to another band that sings both in German and English. But yeah you can correct my signature.

Here's the link to the article I was talking about.

https://www.europelanguagejobs.com/b...glish-speakers

That's a good site (sarcasm). Especially fond of the second to last paragraph: "Language learning also has incredible effects on the brain and helps to keep alziemers (sp?) at bay, no matter what age you are." Someone was in a lot of hurry to finish that article.

Joking aside, I think I understand what they're getting at with those Scandinavian languages. At least from the descriptions I can derive that Swedish and Norvegian, coming from a common ancestor with English, took sort of parallel paths with English, dropping complex conjugation of verbs, etc.

And now a random fact about Welsh: there's no central rule for the formation of plurals. There's many groups of words that make plurals in a specific way - some adding "au" others "on" - and a lot of words that just... do their own thing.

And that's how you determine that a language has never been a lingua franca and has mostly been restricted to casual speech. At least according to one book I read, English regularized and dropped a lot of features in response to the sheer number of people trying to learn it throughout history... And Welsh just sat there, neglected, accumulating irregular endings... I may need a different approach. On this path the thorns are really transforming into firepits and bear traps.

...Oh, the problems in your signature:

"wenn ein neuer Tag der Unendlichkeit beginnt" should be "when a new day of infinity begins" - the article "der" here is the possessive form of the feminine definite article "die" for "Unendlichkeit" (which is a feminine noun, with a handy ending "-keit").

Then the lines "Lieber allein" are just parts of the earlier "Ich bin lieber allein" so it doesn't make sense to translate them differently. They should be "Rather alone" or, I suppose, "Rather be alone".

Finally, "als im Strom allen Lebens unterzugeh'n" - "Lebens" is the singular possessive form of the masculine noun "Leben". So the translation should be "than to go under in the stream of all life", which, I think, adds a poetic note with "life" becoming an abstract, collective term.

The article was okay I guess, I just found it interesting, the line about Alzheimers I seen an article on here not to long ago about how being bilingual (or rather multilingual) can ward off the disease, how much truth there is to that I really don't know, but I found it interesting that it was even studied.

I found another article about how setting goals can help keep one motivated to learn a language, both short term amd long term. My long term goal is to be able to read and write in German, and I haven't set any short term goals yet, which I should do. An example short term goal that was given in the article was "in a week I want to learn 400 of the most basic German words" (not the exact words in the quote but it's close to what I read. That seems like a rather unobtainable goal for a weeks time in my opinion. Still an interesting article. Though like with the last one it seems like it was written too fast, one sentence was incomplete before moving on to the next. I did make some progress I can now count up to twenty in German so there's that. And a good sentence/phrase to use after a sleepless night "Ich bin sehr müde", yeah I like that phrase.

Thanks for correcting my signature, I'll go in and fix it.

Well, I don't know about "learn" learn, but... well, for one, children are supposed to learn like 10 new words a day, and in Mnemosyne (flashcards) the daily limit (not a hard one, more of a suggestion) for new cards is 15 (which, with a lot of experience, makes quite a bit of sense to me)... Yeah, that doesn't compute.

I mean, well, I - having also been reading articles - have read that there's two sides to both cramming and steady study. With just cramming stuff like crazy you remember more in the short term (but quickly forget), whereas with spaced repetition information persists longer, but it doesn't come up so easily in the short term... That is all to say, I can see a scenario with 400 words a week, just not very... interesting, I would say.

I however... don't even know, either short term or long term goals with Welsh... I mean, what kind of writing ability can I expect if I don't have anything to read for practice... I actually just thought I'd complete a single textbook and call that an interesting linguistic adventure. But the situation with textbooks isn't accommodating. Well, at least with the kind which would make that journey in some way satisfying (like, 400 pages).

But speaking of practice, I've already mentioned that I write in a diary in Polish. Well, one thing you could adopt from that, with you new-found number wisdom, is writing out dates in German... It might be more of a challenge than it sounds. At least in Polish it took me 4 months of everyday practice to finally remember the names of the months (although Polish has its completely native names, as opposed to Roman-based in German).

Yeah, cramming isn't good, I've done that for tests in school (especially when I went to University), and I forgot everything by time the test came around. I still have to figure out short term goals, maybe learn 10 new words in a week, that way I'm not cramming words down my throat, but still learning words. Maybe I should buy a book that is in German and give myself a timetable of when I want to beable to read it, maybe a year down the road beable to read an actual book, not just a book of short stories (which I should buy and give myself a timetable on reading that too). Or another goal to beable to understand a song in German without having to look up the translation, because after finding out the translation of the song in my signature was wrong, I may want to figure it out on my own (though I may still look up a rough translation just to get an idea of what it could be). I'm just not good with making and sticking to goals, that's my problem, that amd motivation.

Thanks for the suggestion of writing out dates in German, the names of the months aren't too different (and some are even the same just pronounced differently) than they are in English. The days of the week will be harder for me but I do know every day of the week ends in "tag" which makes it easier. The numbers will be the most confusing for dates, I'm only at 20 so I have a long way to go in remembering numbers.

I don't know if buying a book as a future to-do is a great idea. I, for one, am feeling really overwhelmed with a similar situation right now. Bought a thick German grammar with exercises about a year ago on an impulse because I was feeling terrible. And it's sitting there, both on my shelf and my to-do list, together with a website where I registered to improve my French vocabulary, plus a Youtube channel that I bookmarked for Dutch vocabulary and listening skill. And then I have to find some way to study Welsh, although this last one is in a different vein... Well, it's actually barely similar to your situation at all, now that I think about it. Still, I belive making purchases like that in advance is unwise... But if you want something book-wise that is far beyond your level :-) I'm registered on a forum for German aspiring writers (or aspiring German writers?): Index - Deutsches Schriftstellerforum I find it especially valuable because you get a healthy mixture of people trying to write all literary-like and also just speaking to each other colloquially... They even post song texts there, apparently.

Does the name Wolfgang Hohlbein ring a bell? Not for me, but it should. Apparently he's the most (or one of the most) popular fantasy writers in Germany, with like 140 million books sold (which is, I think, more than there are German speakers in the world, so at least one of those millions should have reached me). What's even more perplexing is the way I managed to stumble upon him - apparently there's a broken link on Amazon which takes you to a wrong book from an audiobook. Anyway, I really enjoyed the first chapter of the sample. Unfortunately, the link also took me to the last part of the trilogy, so I had to go look up the first part, and now have to see if I also like the beginning of that. (The book itself is called "Flut", just in case you're wondering.)

The book was just an idea for a goal, I just need to figure out a good short term goal, the short stories book (Amazon has a lot of them) is a goal for me to beable to read, the one I want also has parts in English that help with reading the stories, and the stories start out easy and get harder as you go along. But that isn't really a short term goal as I'm still at the stage where I'm learning words and phrases. Books are a thing for me probably because I'm used to textbooks when it came to learning Spanish in school, but now there are more resources online and stuff like that so it'll make things easier too.

The name doesn't sound familiar to me, but I'll look up the book and see if is on Amazon the U.S. site and put it in my wishlist for the future to get when I get better at German.

Yesterday I was talking with a friend of mine who lives in Germany, told him about wanting to learn German and thought he'd laugh at me (he didn't he said no German would laugh at me because they know how hard the language is). Well I told him things that I'd get stuck on (grammar, genders and vocabulary), he did say that genders are a beast, he did give me reassurance though he said "aber das schaffst du" which he told me translates to "you will make it", well Google is translating that to "but you can do that", but I think my friend is right since he's a native speaker. I'm hoping to get to a point where I can communicate with him in his language, another long term goal.

What drew my attention here is "learning words and phrases" in a sort of derogatory manner. I'm not sure how you meant it to sound, but from my experience, learning words and phrases is kind of the bulk and core of language study. I mean, in any case there's more different words than rules that govern their use, not to mention that in any language new words are always getting created or borrowed (which, I guess, from this point of view, makes this a futile task, but such is life... or as people who don't know French say, "c'est la vie").

This is a strange point of confusion, considering that we've already spoken about literal translation. They're both right, but the most literal translation of the verb schaffen is "manage"... well, of one of the verbs, because there's kind of two verbs that are spelled the same in the present tense, but conjugated differently in the past tense: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schaffen

Anyway, you could translate your friend's words as "but you manage that", but no one speaks like that in English.

Well... I don't know if I actually know German well enough to write a game in it. I've just spent a few minutes trying to figure out a way to say "How did you end up here?" ...The two key problems are "end up" (perhaps unsurprisingly), and "here". The explanation for the last one is that in German there isn't just a simple "here" - "hier", but there are forms in common usage that have mostly gone extinct in English, like hither and hence... And no, I can't translate those into German off the top of my head. Partly because I'm not sure if it doesn't depend on the verb with which you use them... Oh, well.

No, I didn't mean it in a derogatory manner, I apologize if it came across that way, it can be difficult to tell tone from text. I just meant I was still at the very beginning stages of everything.

Yeah, his translation is probably better since he is a native speaker, but I just had to see the literal translation too to see if there was anything different.

A little off topic from what you wrote, but you writing "bier" reminded me of seeing a song come across my newsfeed on Facebook last night, it's called "Sonne" and I could actually translate some of the lyrics in the chorus, they are,

"Eins, hier kommt die Sonne
Zwei, hier kommt die Sonne
Drei, sie ist der hellste Stern von allen
Vier, hier kommt die Sonne"

I could translate everything except "Drei, sie ist der hellste Stern von allen". I did click on the translation to see what it translated to and the lyrics roughly translate to (correct me if I'm wrong on anything)

"One, here comes the sun
Two, here comes the sun
Three, it is the brightest of all stars
Four, here comes the sun"

That's the translation I got, but I was happy with myself that I could understand most of the chorus before having to look up the translation.

As for the video game idea, the idea of a video game sooinds like a good one. But you are right about English having a few forms of the word "here", with the other two not really said anymore, they are at times, but it isn't that common to hear and other forms of the word "here".

I did find two apps that I downloaded, one is a dictionary app, (it's not the best compared to the sites you linked me too, but it does have phrases where the words are used), and an app called German grammar in use, that one goes through different things like verbs, sentence structure, just different grammar things, so that'll help. There is one more I'm thinking of downloading which is called German Listening, that one will has articles you can read and hear being read to you, plus you can make your own dictionary/flashcards, and if you don't understand a word in the article all you have to do is click on it for the translation. Looks like a good app, but may wait a bit to download it as it's above my abilities right now. Atleast there are apps out there that can help you learn a language.

There's more apps than you can shake a stick at, and most of them are a swindle. Just kidding, I haven't even checked that many apps out. But considering, well, you know, the market, which consists of people pumping out as many clones as they can... Well...

Anyway, I still have some hope about the game idea. But beyond the grammatical complications, I still don't have any good idea as to what it could be about. Took a shower with the specific intention to figure that out (if that makes any sense), only got so far as it could be about searching for a person (in a foreign land, I suppose). And also, at the start you get told an absurdly complicated word (which is most of them in German :-)) and have to eventually figure out what and why. Except the problem with this idea is that, depending on your level, it might not be complicated enough... or instead, too complicated... But it's kind of interesting. A mystery...

Oh, about the lyrics. Nothing really wrong with the translation, except I don't see why the word order has to be changed in the third line. It sounds just as fine in English. That is - "It is the brightest star of all".

Have you looked at the Wikipedia German page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language#Grammar ? I'm considering basing most of my Welsh grammar study on Wikipedia, honestly. It seems to have most of the necessary information, although it's mixed heavily with jargon and can be tedious. But I find tediousness is a problem that most language textbooks share, so... It's kind of an obvious resource, but you might have avoided it, just like I have, due to its reputation.

The apps I found were a surprise to me, these you don't have to pay for, they're free, but some have ads that make you have to get through before going on to say the next lesson. Hopefully there aren't any errors with the grammar app, but the dictionary app isn't the best, it translated "der" to "that" instead of "the" so it may word for some things but not others.

The song I found the translation on a website that has translations of song lyrics, and for this song there were around 29 translations to it, I went with the first one. It does make more sense to have the third line as "it is the brightest star of all", I even did that translation in my head because it made more sense than "it is the brightest of all stars", but I posted what I saw on the website. Like I said I was able to translate the first, second, ANF fourth lines, but the third I had to look up it was only a couple words I didn't know, I knew "drei" and "Stern" "ist", and "der", "sie" I though usually translates to "she" (well according to Duolingo that is one translation), or "they" so I don't know where or how it translates to "it's". It's like another song that I always seem to have stuck in my head called "Reich mir die Hand" which where ever I look is translating to "Give me your Hand", but "reich" means "rich" and "die" is "the" so how the H*ll is it translating to "Give me your Hand"? These types of translations are also what I'm getting and going to get stuck on.

The ideas you're coming up with for the video game are good, the complicated word idea sounds good, my friend shared with me a word (it was actually a title of a law), and the word had to have been atleast 20 letters long, he didn't give me the exact translation, but it looks like it could translate to a whole sentence, but was all one word (and there was no way in H*ll I could pronounce it). You would probably have to find a word that is inbetween too complicated and not complicated enough (I wouldn't know any yet though).

I didn't check Wikipedia out because it didn't occur to me to even check for anything there, I did look at it and bookmarked it, and the title of the law my friend shared with me is an example in the article of how long a word can be, looking at it again it looks like it's atleast 30 letters long, luckily the article broke it up and translated it, so now I know what it means.

Well, "sie" is "die Sonne" which is a girl (look at the article), although I don't know how you're going to convey that in English (which doesn't have grammatical gender, may I remind you )... Except, of course, "die Sonne" is also "der Stern" which is a boy. I think you should give the translator a little slack.

And "reich" means "rich" but it's also the imperative singular conjugation of the verb "reichen", which means, well, "reach" (or for best results in this context - "give"). I won't say that I quite understand the situation with "die Hand", but it's not impossible based on my knowledge of Spanish (as just a random example of another foreign language), where there's a lot of situations with a definite article before the noun, although also a reflexive pronoun before the verb - "se cepilló los dientes"... Wait, "cepilló"? Gah, my Spanish is really getting rusty... -"self brushed the teeth", sort of... On the other hand, I don't remember this being the rule in German or really any Germanic languages. That's more an Italic habit. But it's not impossible.

Wait, what? Vienna, of all places, has the highest quality of life in the world? ...I mean, I have nothing against Vienna, but a bit unexpected... And that is just to say that der deutsche Sprachraum is pretty well-off and has many surprises in store.

Gaelic is the best Celtic language ever. All I remember from the 1980s is The Pogues song, "Pogue Mahone" (Gaelic for "kiss my arse").