Random Discussion

But why did the jews decide to go to Israel? Couldn't they guess how it would end?

Ilias,

I'm just going to calmly and kindly say once, please leave my country out of your arguments because I have no strength in me to put up with comments like this tonight. I miss home and comments like this just make me angry. 

So please, I beg you from the bottom of my heart with Buddha, God, G-d, Allah and all religious figures as my witnesses. For once. Please don't. 

Guys I've got so much to tell you that I don't even know where to start

First, I'm sorry for being completely inactive during the week, I pay a visit to the forums every evening but I don't do anything except visiting the boards that interest me and like a few posts, but I catch up now that it's the week-end

The classes I follow are absolutely amazing, like it's exactly what I wished for and yeah I feel really great and comforted in the way I've decided to follow since quite a long time now (I wanna become a literary translator).

So, my class is called LEA, which means Langues Étrangères Appliquées (Advanced Foreign Languages)
It works by semesters and I can switch classes every six months, which I find awesome, I don't know if you're used to that but in France we follow more or less the same classes for approximatively 7 years haha.

My main languages are English, ofc, and Swedish.
I AM SO GLAD I CAN FINALLT LEARN SWEDISH OMG I FEEL LIKE I GOT INTO A MELODIFESTIVALEN EPISODE
No, really, I am truly satisfied, you know I afraid I fantasized too much about the country, the language and everything, but no it really is what I expected and it seems quite easy to learn for me so perfect !

My teacher is Swedish (from Lund, in the south) and she is awesome.
I have two English teachers for now (well, three, but the third is French so we don't care and besides he speaks with a Romanian accent it is really weird), one of them is Australian and this is like the most awesome thing that ever happened to me. Like I was not interested in Australia but I started to watch "Please like me" which is now my favourite show and I fell in love with the Australian accent and it is so cool that I have that teacher now, and she's young and she wants us to call her by her first name !!
My other teacher in American and comes from Cleveland.

I chose a third language also, and I picked Russian. I already learned the Cyrillic alphabet (and I found it quite simple, I don't know if it really is or if I got some sort of gift with languages ) and I practised on ELLO videos...
This is a mandatory option and I picked Russian for the first semester but once I'll get the basis I'll probably switch and take Polish, or Romanian, or Croatian, or Danish or idk there are so many languages teached here !!


In other news, the other cool thing is that like 40% of the students in my class are from other countries. Like I'm with two of my friends from high school and we already made friends with a girl from Ireland, a girl from Latvia, a girl from Albania and a girl from Algeria ! There are also students from Greece, Moldova, Indonesia, China, Bulgaria, and quite a lot of Russians who speak RUSSIAN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CLASSES I SOMETIMES FEEL LIKE I'M IN A MAFIA MOVIE

Yeah, the life in Strasbourg is going well, the apartment is great, my roommate which also happens to be my best friend is always with me so I never feel alone. It's only just the beginning of my student life, of my real life, like the one where I decide what I'll do and not my parents, which is at once scary and exciting and yeah... I've not always been the kind of guy that adapts fast to new situations but this time... I feel great, like really


I apologize for that huge post in first place...
I just really want to share that with you guys because I feel like you made me want to study foreign languages even more that I already wanted and yeah, those forums are really important to me even though I'm not the most active member on here... and when I cross a foreign student I immediately think that I already know people from all over Europe and even further sometimes and i don't know, I feel that it really is a valuable thing.
Thanks for being a part of my life anyway

Tias gary  

In light of you both mentioning a language based comment, I have to share this which saddens me ...


"

"At the age of 10, Hong Kong student Miranda Lam can hold a conversation and write in both English and Mandarin Chinese. But ask her to speak to her grandmother and she shakes her head. “I don't know what she says sometimes,” she says.
Her grandmother speaks Cantonese, Hong Kong's official language. But Miranda's parents — both Cantonese speakers themselves — have chosen to limit the time they speak it at home. Instead, they talk to Miranda mainly in English and Mandarin, to improve her chances of attending a better school.

To linguists, Miranda's struggle to speak her mother tongue is a worrying indication of how Cantonese may be under threat in Hong Kong from the spread of Mandarin, the official language of mainland China. “It is difficult to calculate the timing but in the medium- to long-term, Cantonese is an endangered language” in Hong Kong, said Stephen Matthews, an associate professor in linguistics at the University of Hong Kong."

More than 160 primary schools are currently using Mandarin in Chinese language lessons after a government policy encouraging a switch from Cantonese was introduced in 2003.

The move has angered some and earlier this month a group staged a demonstration outside clothing chain Giordano after it began using the simplified Chinese characters used in mainland China, rather than the traditional characters understood by Cantonese speakers and Mandarin speakers in Taiwan. "