Ésta es una lista de palabras puertorriqueñas que yo uso y que he escuchado a otros usar. Intento incluir palabras que sean exclusivas de Puerto…
Linguistics
Classical Greek Lesson 3- Verbs: Present Active Indicative
Properties Greek verbs have seven properties: person, number, voice, mood, tense, aspect, and time. Greek verbs have one of three persons: first (the subject is…
Classical Greek Lesson 2- Accents
Accent Marks Ancient Greek was spoken with variations in pitch. During the 3rd Century B.C., Aristophanes of Byzantium developed a series of accent marks to…
Classical Greek Lesson 1- Alphabet
Notes These notes correspond to an upcoming course I am preparing in Classical Greek. This course will follow Anne Groton’s From Alpha to Omega: A…
Free Resources to Improve your Portuguese
Today, I want to talk about some of the free resources that I use to practice Portuguese. These resources are freely available to the general public and they have provided me with much needed help when I was starting to learn the language. I wrote a post some time ago on this same topic, but in Portuguese. In the future, I’ll try writing a Spanish version as well.
The first resource is Duolingo. If you are currently learning a foreign language, then you might have heard of this free website and phone app. Duolingo provides verbal and written practice in the form of short problems. Each lesson is divided by topic or by grammatical component. Your progress is monitored, and you are also given the option
of working on your weakest areas, based on your progress. Read more
Handspeak: An online ASL resource
Back in August I started learning American Sign Language in order to have more fluent conversations with one of my co-workers. Having someone to talk with five days a week really helps out when learning a new language, and in the same way, having a native signer to practice with helps with learning ASL. At the moment I know basic words and phrases, I can joke around a bit, and I’m fast enough with finger-spelling that spelling a new word does not interrupt the flow of the conversation (thought it may slow it down a bit).
In my day during my free time, whenever there’s something I would like to talk about to my co-worker, I first check out HandSpeak.com, an online ASL dictionary with resources for people who want to learn ASL. Read more
Chinese Skill- First Impression Review
During my quest to learn a new language, I came across Duolingo. The nifty app+website does a great job of introducing learners t o a new language through practice and repetition. Though it is clear that Duo is not a comprehensive single source for learning a language, the amount of material it provides, as well as the quick and easy-to-browse interface make it a powerful tool in one’s language practice arsenal. That being said, I was a bit disappointed that there was no Chinese course yet, since I wanted to have a nice phone app that would allow me to practice my Chinese on-the-go. EDIT: Since first writing this post in my previous blog, Duolingo has come out with a Chinese course, which I haven’t tried yet. Read more
Ancient Greek #7: Nouns- Introduction
As with verbs, Greek nouns consist of a stem and an inflection that denotes the gender, number, and case of the noun. There are five…
Ancient Greek #6: Negative Adverbs
In Greek, there are two forms of the negative adverb “not”: one for indicative verbs (e.g. He is not teaching.) and one for imperative verbs (e.g. Do not teach.)…
Ancient Greek #5: Verbs- Present Active Imperative
Present Active Imperative verbs give commands. These commands have an imperfective aspect. In other words, they command for an action to happen continuously or repeatedly. In…