Need a little help please:)

Hey

Very long story....but I wonder would anybody be able to translate the following sentence into Czech?:

"Sorry, I thought you were somebody else Did you work in Ireland?"

C

 

"Promiňte, myslel(a) jsem, že jste někdo jiný. Nepracoval(a) jste v irsku?"

 

Hey Kibicz Thanks for that)

What does (a) mean?

C

 

the (a) indicates the feminine form of the verb

so if you are a female, you would say "myslela jsem" - and if the person you are addressing is a female you would use "nepracovala jste"

 

Thanks. We don't really do that with the English language, but, in Irish Gaelic (which I only speak a little of because is soooo difficult) alot of words and pre-fixes change for female useage.

C

 

hee hee yeah most languages do This is why English is one of the easier to learn.

But Czech and Irish have a lot in common!

And Irish isn't difficult, Des Bishop learned it in a year remember! And it only has 4 cases, Czech has 7! We should be grateful!

 

yeah right - i've taken a look at what you do with prepositions

 

I had 14 years of Irish in school and I still couldn't master it....and I was fairly fluent in French after just 6) Maybe I will blame my Irish teacher.

As for Slavic languages, I have a tiny vocab of Polish and Lithuanian words, mainly because I have friends from there.

Actually, I tried learning Czech to impress a Czech girl, she is living in Ireland. I found it quite difficult.....words without vowels are tough to master)

C

 

It is common mistake considering Latvian and Lithuanian as slavic languages. Those might look similar to slavic languages, but actually is baltic language.

There however is the Balto-Slavic language group, which consists of the Baltic and Slavic languages, belonging to the Indo-European family of languages.

Kind of Babylon . For me those two languages seems to be much less understandible (česky bych "napsal limitně se blížící k nule") then any germanic or romance languages.

 

Languages are taught very badly in secondary schools, even here I think.
One of my students showed me the things she had to learn for the Maturita exam and it was so filled with mistakes and ridiculous grammar I nearly cried. The thought of people spending hours learning sentences no one will ever be able to understand!

I'm sure there are many good teachers and many exceptions.. but look at say Engish File, published by oxford, there is so much practice and production and games and conversations in it. Then compare it to the books published by the same people but for the use in a secondary school which must target an exam instead..
there's nothing to discuss, nothing to do, just learn grammar grammar grammar, then they forget it the next day because they've never used it. I've had students proudly tell me "I study English 10 years" with teachers who knew something of methodology and books and (of course! students with motivation!) they should be at least upper intermediate, and possibly fluent (depending on the person) but they're where students should be after a year.
Just drilling and drilling and drilling, you couldn't learn esparanto with the way they teach Irish, let alone a real language.
I have a good understanding of Irish from the amount of RnaG I listened to, but I can't have a basic conversation.
And my German! I can't put a sentence together in German! But I can quite easily understand everything I need to survive in Germany or Austria, because in fairness German and English are nice and closely related

aus = out
gang = way (as in walkway not as in method)

ausgang = way out

try doing something logical like that with Czech?

Vencesta

Of course it doesn't work usually when it comes to making German words, but it works fine for understanding. (this was of course a very simple example but it's how my brain works in German!)





Hee hee I like the idea of learning Czech to impress a Czech girl.. maybe I'm doing that too.. but the Czech girl I'm trying to impress is my teacher so I guess my motivation is different!

 

+1

 

Hey Alexx

You are quite right. I was mixing up the Language groups. There are ancient Baltic languages, very few of which survive, that are totally different from the present day Lithuanian, Latvian etc.

The newer languages share some things in common with Slavic languages. I guess through historical mixing/co-habitation.

C

 

I completely agree with you regarding the teaching of languages. However a certain ammount of grammer is necessary. For example, I have several East European friends working in Ireland. They can speak English perfectly, however because they learn it by conversation in everyday life, every word is spelt phonetically. This is very obvious when we are e-mailing eachother and I can barely understand them! :lol:

Yes, its funny about comprehending languages. If I watch an Irish language tv programme, I know exactly what they are saying, but, if I had to, I would struggle to put one sentence together

As for the Czech girl......I still really really like her. But, my chance is blown. A small part was my fault by over-playing my hand. But, unfortunately, I fell in love with the moodiest girl in the Czech Republic....if not the World!!!

How about you....are you Czech or do you just live there?

 

Can anybody tell me what this means?

"ano, v lete, tak mi osviezte pamat kde sme sa stretli, v ktorom meste?"

 

*
idiom "osvěžit paměť" = to remind, remember

 

you can say "refresh my memory" in english as well

 

Memory refresh is most often associated with modern dynamic random access memory. Every dynamic memory in your computer needs to be refreshed 10000000000000000000 times per second otherwise the information will be lost.

 

Is that even possible. I know computers are fast, but that's an awful lot of refreshing going on.

Bibax....we use that both ways, equally common

Computer refreshing it's memory
and
Refresh my memory, please, that was so long ago.
.........
Oh yea, now I remember.

 

I should add this.....

Refresh my memory......this was used long before it was adopted into computer jargon.

 

Of course grammar is necessary! It is one third of a language! Pronunciation, Grammar, Vocabulary, all you need to be understood! Just three things! hee hee

But there are hundreds of ways to teach grammar, not just charts and drills. A student should do more talking in a lesson than a teacher, otherwise they will forget everything in a matter of hours. So first the grammar is presented (the students should analyze it and be allowed to discover the rules themselves "e.g. What do you think this sentence means? What forms of the Verbs are being used? Then they make their own chart, or fill in the gaps in one that you give them.,
Then it is practiced through some passive game or activity (such as a gap fill, close, crossword puzzle, running dictation, error correction, jumbled up words, reading exercise, quiz, key word transformation, listening to a song which uses the target grammar, listening to a listening exercise which uses the target grammar, , then produced through an active game or activity. (board game, quiz, role play, discussion, conversation, (e.g. for conditionals What would you do if... ) deduction game,
blah blah blah blah blah this is off the top of my head, there are loads more ways, if you can make something fun or interesting while still having it be challenging and relevant than peoples will engage with it better and they will remember it longer. When I was a kid I could remember ridiculously complicated rules when they were necessary to play some game we had invented, but sitting down and having a teacher shout at me for 6 hours a day didn't seem to do the trick. It's the same for adults, our minds are programmed to remember only what we look at with interest. So even if the exercise is a traditional gap fill, if one student has the answers and the other student is trying to guess them for points, suddenly it becomes much more fun and more learning takes place!

But maybe I am somewhat brainwashed when it comes to this har har.

hee hee

Conjucation of prepositions.. for me it's not too bad because I was so young when I started learning it, there are more difficult things.

You just learn it as a list (i think the lists are on wikipedia) and then every phrase you learn you learn it in the me form

so

Tá bronn orm

There is sorrow on me

Tá bronn ort

There is sorrow on you

etc etc on him on her there's a different word each time, and we just learn them of in lists and you count up for the one you need.

Tá Gaeilge agam.

I have Irish

Tá Gaeilge agat

You have Irish

Tá Gaeilge aige

He has Irish

Tá Gaeilge aici

She has Irish

Tá Gaeilge againn

We have Irish

Tá Gaeilge agaibh

Yee have Irish

Tá Gaeilge acu

They have Irish


(you might have guessed by now that Tá is part of the verb to be)

And any sentence you have learned has Agam in it in the "I" form you just count down along on your list till you find the right prepositional pronoun, and eventually, like everything, it's second nature. The hard thing about it is the same as the hard thing about learning prepositions in any language, and that's simply that you don't know is something supposed to be on you at you over you or in you etc. And you just have to learn that.


Don't worry about this girl, live and learn. There are many many beautiful Czech girls to choose from!


I am Irish, and I am living here teaching English. (Does it show? )