For instance; I'm not entirely sure I placed that semicolon properly.
You didn't. A semicolon requires an independant clause be on both sides of it; you can think of it as a subsitute period. You also may not use it along with coordinating conjunctions; however, using it with however is proper usage.
See, I was always under the impression that a semicolon was functional like a colon except at a place where it would be appropriate not to break for a new sentence.
Ex:
My thoughts on Super Metroid are as follows: It rules.
Super Metroid is one of my favourite games; it rules.
I guess it just shows how complicated this language is. I was reading before kindergarden and have been writing for as long as I remember, but I'm 25 and still haven't figured out semicolons. :p
What you wrote is actually proper usage. But the rules you wrote, not to much. A semicolon replaces a period where it would not be appropriate to break for a new sentence.
You can also use a semi-colon as a second level list seperator. Example:
Each group owned a share. And each group divided the share as they saw fit, so the car was actually owned by several groups of people: Earl, Larry, and Fred; John, Greg, and Benny T.; Sammy and Ed; and George, Bob, and Judas.
This usage is rather rare though.
I think there's a few other cases too. I just can't remember them off of the top of my head. I'dve looked them up, but I'm lazy. :X
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
I believe I read somewhere spoken Danish is supposed to be the most difficult language to learn, since there are so many different ways in which to pronounce the vowels, and it depends on context rather than the meaning of the word. Plus Danish is spoken at the back of the throat as opposed to, say, spanish, which is migh more highly elevated.
"We observe the behaviour of simple folk, and derive pleasure from their defects."
-Aristotle - Book of Humour
I have never really understood the need for the semicolon punctuation mark. Can anyone give any good example of a sentence where substituting a semicolon with a period changes the sentence in any way?
In Finnish the semicolon is practically inexistent in the written language. Only in technical text (which eg. has lists of words etc) it might sometimes be used, but basically never to form sentences. (Of course that doesn't stop people from using it in written Finnish. However, AFAIK it's not part of the "official" guidelines of written Finnish, nor in any way necessary.)
Maximus, I'd suggest finding a few people you can talk to often (on IRC preferably, as we're all on there for the most part and communication is much easier that way) that can help you with your endeavours.
FODA wrote:
Truncanted, in Brazil most people canNOT make correct sentences. 90% because they're uneducated, and 9.9% because they don't care.
AEHuAHEUhuae se eh burro mano!!11 :D
Warp wrote:
an anyone give any good example of a sentence where substituting a semicolon with a period changes the sentence in any way?
Semicolons are usually used to join two sentences that "share" a relationship. For example: I'm bad at history and english; I like foreign languages.
I know Cantonese fairly well... at least, it's enough to hold a conversation anyhow. I don't think Chinese is actually that hard since its incredibly specific and context-wise, so you could just ramble off nouns and a verb or two and they'll probably understand. As for Japanese, it's not terribly hard if you try not to relate it to a germanic language. Double particles and particle usage (and grammar) is the death of me, but I can understand it alright if someone could conjugate it properly.
I think by far, the languages which requires feminine/masculine noun and verb form conjugates are the most difficult IF there has been no prior training/education. For me, I've learned English, Chinese, and Japanese (portuguese not so much) and they all don't have gender forms. =/
well anyway gl hf dd ds ka
Joined: 3/13/2004
Posts: 1118
Location: Kansai, JAPAN
I have never understood the perception that Japanese is an especially hard language to learn. I know the Japanese themselves are at least accomplices in maintaining this idea, because when you talk to Japanese people they act shocked by even the simplest understanding of their native language. Of all the languages I've studied, it's been the easiest and the most interesting. Of course, those two qualities are not unrelated.
Pros - no articles, nouns have no gender, no plurals, verb conjugation doesn't vary by subject (i.e. no am/are/is distinction), flexible sentence structure
Cons - kanji is complex, counters require lots of memorization, politeness levels are hard to master, LOTS of homophones.
The hardest thing about japanese for me is figuring out where words finish when someone is speaking; the syllables all come out in some kind of free flow, and I have to stand around thinking for a while before it comes to me. It does help that particles mark certain parts, but what if what you thought was a particle is still in the word? :)
Aside from this minor japanese knowledge, I studied French for a fair amount of time and Spanish for a tiny amount, and my native language is English. I have to say that gender distinction is really one of the easier parts of the french language; it's just a tiny tidbit extra to remember when you're memorising your nouns. The only ones which bother me are the ones you always see as l', so your memory is never jogged as to its gender.
Semicolons are usually used to join two sentences that "share" a relationship. For example: I'm bad at history and english; I like foreign languages.
That doesn't even sound good. I would say "I'm bad at history and English, but I like foreign languages." Using a semicolon there feels more like artificial.
it creates a short pause, to mark the difference between the two parts of the sentence ; the connexity is stronger with the comma.
it may be useful to add style, or even suspense, in a text ; it may present a conclusion to a story within the sentence.
(my style rulez !)
I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death - NAS
I like the semicolon; it brings some nice variety. I'm not sure about its proper use though; I use it the same way as in Finnish.
Usually I use it whenever I join two sentences, where the second sentence explains the first one, but a colon would be too formal and a period would disconnect the explanation from the lead-in.
Usually I use it whenever I join two sentences, where the second sentence explains the first one, but a colon would be too formal and a period would disconnect the explanation from the lead-in.
That is correct usage of the semicolon.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
The only purpose of semicolons is to display your command of the English language to all the inferior morons around you; it's why I use them all the time.
Mainly, they're used by high school English students who are trying to impress people. If you've ever read an essay by a student who took the AP English exam (in America), then you know what I'm talking about. The same rules apply to the word "microcosm." I've never seen that word in use outside of an English essay.
I use semicolons fairly often in IRC. However, it would have been corny to include one there, so I replaced it with the start of a new sentence and an adverb. :)
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
What? Is there any language without semicolon? In portuguese it works just like it does in english.
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
I use semicolons fairly often in IRC. However, it would have been corny to include one there, so I replaced it with the start of a new sentence and an adverb. :)
Interestingly, because of the inclusion of "however," the substitution of a period for a semicolon there is actually incorrect.
What? Is there any language without semicolon? In portuguese it works just like it does in english.
In all my years of doing Chinese, I've never seen or used a semicolon, so I doubt they exist in the language.
In Singapore, it's compulsary to do 2 languages in school (usually Chinese and English) and because of this there are often confusion in the way grammar works in both languages. Just take for example punctuation. In Chinese, the colon, is used as a lead in when starting a conversation
Eg. xoinx says:"hello" (Chinese)
xoinx says, "Hello." (English)
Also, in Chinese, there is a special punctuation to separate items when listen. This is in addition to the comma already present in Chinese which is used to segment sentences. This is another very common error when it comes to written Chinese.
Boco wrote:
Chinese completely isn't harder at all. There's no morphology, each character is read only one way, etc.
Not exactly true, in fact quite a number of characters in Mandarin (the official dialect of Chinese in China, Beijing) have up to 3 maybe even 4 pronunciations, though where I come from most people aren't quite particular about using the right pronunciation in the specific context.
I guess Chinese is not a very hard language to pick up as many have said, but in my opinion it is one of the most demanding languages at a more advanced level. The challenge comes in memorising characters. There are easily over 10000-20000 different characters, some commonly used, while others are quite obscure (kind of similar to old English). And while different characters may be similar sounding, they can either be used only in certain contexts or paired with a specific character.
With all that said, I still think its one of the most meaningful languages, especially with all the very figurative expressions. If any of you can find the time, I highly recommend learning it... afterall with China on the rise who knows if you might find some good business opportunities learning it LOL
MahaTmA> I believe I read somewhere spoken Danish is supposed to be the most difficult language to learn, ...
feitclub> I know the Japanese themselves are at least accomplices in maintaining this idea, because when you talk to Japanese people they act shocked by even the simplest understanding of their native language.
Truncated> Also, everyone seems to think that their own language is the hardest one to learn. :)
feitclub, I think you pretty much nailed what's hard and easy about Japanese. Those are all the same things I usually mention.
Lemme try Swedish for the benifit of Maximus.
Pros: No verb inflection by person (am is are), relatively straightforward spelling, no cases for nouns and only three for pronouns, rich verbalizing and adjectivizing possibilites.
Cons: Difficult pronunciation; about 18 vowel sounds and at least one completely unique consonant sound, big dialectal differences, and both pitch and stress accent. Only two articles, but they are irregular and have to be learned by heart.
English probally is the easiest overall to learn, because there is no masculine/femine or any thing that must be said in relavence to the conversation, you just know from the context of whats been said.
There is 48 vowel sounds, although there are some slight confusions over certain pronouncations e.g.
rough-through . Both of them are said in a entirely different way.
If you're learning to write in Chinese/Japanese then you have to be a highly visual person, becuase each symbol represents some kind of picture which then relates to some kind of word, but then it just completely confuses me when a different symbol is put before or after the recognised symbol, turning the meaning upside down. I still have to admit that even if I had some competence of being able to read Japanese/Chinese, I would still have to read it like some interpreter language, so I would never able to flash an eye at an ad and get whatever message its trying to convey.
It's true that English has lost masculine/feminine/neutral gender for nouns. But English is not a highly contextual language - it must always have a subject, for example - and this is in no way connected to how many grammatical genders a language has. Not having grammatical genders might make it somewhat easier to learn a language.
There are about 18 vowel sounds in English (which by the way is not 48) if you count the diphtongs, but it varies a bit with dialect.
The -ough example you posted refers more to the fact that English has very inconsistent ortography than that it has a lot of vowel sounds.
Each character in chinese/japanese writing does not represent a picture of the meaning it conveys (but this is indeed a common misconception). The absolute majority of characters contain a component hinting the meaning, and a component reflecting the pronunciation. It is very unusual to memorize characters visually, the overwhelming majority of people remember them by which components make up a character.
In short: no. Everything you said was wrong. :/ You get +1 originality point for thinking your native language is the easiest instead of the hardest. ;)
I guess I'm in a way obligated to sort of clear any doubts on Chinese... so here goes
Truncated wrote:
Each character in chinese/japanese writing does not represent a picture of the meaning it conveys (but this is indeed a common misconception).
Hmmm, this is a tricky one to answer. I guess AKA and Truncated are both right in a way. Well, to sort of clarify this, I would have to talk a bit about the invention of Chinese writing. Historians identified the earliest form of writings as "Oracle Bone Script", which were closer to representation of pictures. However, over the few thousand years of evolution, most of the characters have been simplified, so much so that the original pictures in them aren't as distinct as before. For example, the character for 'rain'.
Truncated wrote:
The absolute majority of characters contain a component hinting the meaning, and a component reflecting the pronunciation.
This is true about 50% of the time in Chinese. A Chinese character can usually be broken up into several parts, namely the side component and the main component. The main component of the character usually dictates how the word is going to be pronounced. With this, one can roughly guess how the word may sound. But for the other 50% of the time, the words with the same main component may be pronounced with much variation, sometimes pronunciation may differ by just a consonent, but occasionally, it may be totally unlike what one may expect it to sound like. Also, as mentioned earlier, there maybe multiple pronunciations for a single character, so it is not exactly safe to assume that there is always a component reflecting the pronunciation.
Truncated wrote:
It is very unusual to memorize characters visually, the overwhelming majority of people remember them by which components make up a character.
Characters are seldom taught to people visually, due to the fact the there are just too many characters to remember (unless you have a super photographic memory). The beauty of Chinese characters lies in the way they are made up of components (sort of like alphabets, but with more strokes). While the main component usually drops hints to the reader about the pronunciation and meaning of the word, the side component dictates the context the word is used in. The side components may be a "hand" component, which is usually the case for actions related to the arms, or maybe a "metal" component, used in characters related to tools and stuff like that. This makes words much easier to remember, since once you know which context the word is going to be used in, you can already guess half the word.
>This is true about 50% of the time in Chinese.
I have heard figures between 85% and 90%. (For example Breen and Wikipedia.) That's why I said that the absolute majority of characters are a combination of a meaning element and a pronunciation element.
For comparison, the purely pictographical characters represent somewhere between 1% and 4%.
>But for the other 50% of the time, the words with the same main component may be pronounced with much variation ...
This is because pronunciation drifts with time, at creation these characters probably accurately reflected pronunciation. It is also a good argument for why logographic writing systems are a bad idea. :) But perhaps that's an argument for another topic.
