playing sitting down

[Trash]

I was watching the Incubus dvd the other day and during the acoustic part I noticed that Mike Einziger had the guitar on his left knee at a kind of steep angle, and from what I've seen it's more common to rest it on your right and almost parallel to the floor. Is this just a matter of preference or is there a specific reason to play that way?

[smfulla]

the way you are refering to is the way a classical guitarist plays. Usuaolly with a foot stool

[eische]

yes, I'm playing that classical style, so I place my right foot on a stool and the guitar on that higher leg with the bottom being in an 45 degree angle to my leg, so the first fret is in hight of my ear....
that way of playing is the common one for classical guiatrist, as you may watch David Chevy, Pepe Romiro and others and as I was approved by many others playing in that genre.......It's making it easier to move the grip-hand freely across the grip-board (you know very quick changes from fret 1-3 to say frets 7-9 - in german that is called changing »lagen«(layers????), don't know what it is called in english).
The electric-fraction is doing it with the guitar on the other leg, because else they get trouble with their cables and stuff.

[sbguitman]

in case eische wanted to know-->in english, the "lagen" are called "positions"

[eische]

oh thanks sbguitman, I forever learning (especially when it comes to guitar-related-vocabulary):)

[The Fury]

Hey eische, and anyone else whose first language is not English, dont worry about not knowing exactly what words to use. I have to say I'm very impressed by everyone who speaks English (obviously, not if it's your fist language, lol) and I wish I could speak German or French with such ease. I have thought this for a long time and just thought I'd let you know I'm very jealous :)

[slaughteredsoul]

Fury,I'm jealous too..lol
German is a language i always wanted to learn but it's hard! I studied french for 14 years but i still suck..i'm better at speaking french than playing the guitar though:D My first language is Arabic,but it's english that i'm better at.
just sharing! :)

[The Fury]

Arabic???
Forgive my ignorance, but I thought you were American.

Yeah, I tried to learn French at school, but never got very far with it. Probably because everyone in the class just wanted to mess around and take the piss out of the teachers. Idiots:mad:

[fizz]

god yea talk bout it, im in 6thform - college equivelent and its still like that, youd think people grow up but no..

[eische]

hey fury and slaughteredsoul: speaking german with ease - let me laugh about that.
I guess noone,who hasn't the luck of having it as a mothertongue does that, same goes with french. Both are extremely hard languages to learn - I mean, I know I would completely suck at german, if I had to learn it as a foreign language - all this bloody grammar.
English is far easier. I suppose that is why so many people speak it and why it is discussed to be a general language for the whole world.

Don't feel annoyed or something (I know many poeple will, because the think more complicated=more valuable), any living language fulfills the need of communication and therefor is of the same value, but just remember: english has about 30 unregular verbs, german about 300......

[smfulla]

try japanese!!!!!
hehehe all those bloody hiragana katakana and kanji
I've taken it for 3 years, and just decided to drop the class this year. There are 3 different types of symbols to learn. First is hiragana. that comprises of about 15 - 20 symbols I think. Then there are the versions of the symbols with 2 dots beside them which makes it about 30-40 symbols to learn. Then there is katakana. Now that has exactly the same amount of symbols, just different. And they also have the 2 dots as well. So with just that done, there's around 60-70 symbols to learn. Then also, with in those to forms of symbols, with the H's there are circles beside them to turn them into p's so that makes it about 80 symbols so far. Then there is Kanji. Taken from the chinese symbols, there are thousands of them. The avearge japanese person only learns about 1-2 thousand of them.
Then there is the grammar side of it. Which is simple at first. There are nouns, verbs, adverbs, particle that join an action and a verb together. Particles that join a noun and a noun together. Particles for different types of things. Particles for different types of actions. Then you find out there are multiple ways of doing things that in the end mean the same thing but have a different meaning that another thing that worked originally well. This is why I dropped japanese. This is why my friends dropped japanese. I pity the people taking japanese again this year at my school. And any other.

[eische]

whooooo, yepp sounds dramatically hard and reminds me of my russian-classes (this aspect-thingy I never really understood)
I didn't want to say that german is the hardest language to learn ever, but hard enough for not being depressed or even jealous for not speaking it fluently or with »an ease«.

(hey this is the first time in my cyberfret-times that I sort of »meet« someone at the same time around *lol*)

[slaughteredsoul]

Eische :i have to disagree with you about the french thing,it's a very easy language to learn when you put your mind to it(yes even the *grammar*:) )..i say throw me a few months in france and i'll speak it like a native..:D ..really!

[eische]

hmmm, well different people, different talents - I know I would suck at french - not because of the grammer, that is pretty much the same as spanish, as I remember and I learned that quite quickly (had latin at school), but I never know how to pronounce french words correctly

[gck]

German is hard to learn because it has a lot grammatical things that have no equivalent in the English language. Also, at least 50% percent of the verbs are "irregular", so you would have to learn them each by each.

English and French have less grammatical rules and difficulties, so it's easy to learn them if your mothertongue is a language which has more grammatical rules than those two, because you can find an equivalent for everything in your own language.

But... there are even some people who have German as their mothertongue and make mistakes (and I'm not talking of some sort of "slang", I'm talking about plain grammtical mistakes). So I guess it's really hard :)

Biggest problem is the pronounciation: when you read a word, you will interpret its pronounciation in your own language automatically. Learning to pronounce everything correctly would mean to change something that has become "automatic" to you. It would be as odd as if someone told you to play with upstrokes only now, instead of alternate picking which you have become so used to (speaking in guitar terms). From time to time, you will make mistakes, no matter how much you practice.

[fizz]

nope.
german is more similar to english or so my tutor says.
french is more like spanish.
but whose to know....:confused:

[SixStringMadman]

Fron gck:

"German is hard to learn because it has a lot grammatical things that have no equivalent in the English language. "

I found German rather easy to learn, in comparison to say, French or Spanish.

SixStringMadman

[gck]

German was easy to learn???

Hmm... it may depend on your mothertongue: if it's Dutch for example, German would have been easy to learn (Dutch sounds like some sort of "mangled" German).

But do you really sound like a native speaker, and know all the grammatical rules and their various execeptions? Or is it just that you could follow/participate in a small conversation?
I think it's the latter. Personally, I would also say that I *can* speak French, i.e. I can read it, I can write it, I understand it when I hear it, but if you hear me, you would immediately notice that I'm not a native speaker because I'll make pronounciation mistakes.

[eische]

Originally posted by gck
German was easy to learn???

Hmm... it may depend on your mothertongue: if it's Dutch for example, German would have been easy to learn (Dutch sounds like some sort of "mangled" German).

should I add a little science here?????? - as a studied germanist I may help you, why it may (for some poeple) feel easier to learn german coming from english and why dutch seems to be »mangled« german.

It is all about language-families. First it is the great indo-european one, which holds for example all roman, germanic, nordic, slawic languages. Japanese - as we had it in this thread - is no indo-european language and therefor feels extremely strange.

These names above stand each for smaller families, like the roman languages hold french, spanish, italian and so forth.

Now we come to the germanic languages and her english and german as well as dutch join the same origin, which means the differences are »marginal«(from a historic point of view). If you go back to medieval times you will see these languages being still very close together (middellowgerman is very much the same as middeldutch, and it falls apart now just because we had a different dialect - middelhighgerman - as a standard in later times. Some nowaday-dialects are still merely the same as dutch) and you could still find a lot of words, which are the same in the languages, e.g. english-german:

knight - knecht
son - sohn
field - feld, but in the developing of the »living« languages there were some changes of meaning on some words, like the first example I gave above:

In medieval time the word at the basis of knight-knecht had the meaning of a riding, but not royal fighter in the office of a king. In English it makes its way upwards the social ladder and knight is used for a royal riding soldier of great honour. But in German it took it's way down: Knecht became the word first for a helper of a knight and afterwards for helpers on farms at the bottom of the social ladder.

So you find similar words, just pronounced differently. But the meaning could be tricky: Sometimes it's the same, sometimes wider or more narrow, sometimes it changed completely.

had enough of that, hope I didn't bored you......

cheers

[slaughteredsoul]

Not boring,interesting:)
I could almost say the same with French and Arabic,i have no historical info about the origin of both those languages but i do find many words that are the same,just pronounced differently.Of course arabic uses different symbols but when you read say:
Ananas-in french meaning pineapple,and if you read the Arabic word for pineapple,it's prounced exactly the same way(except you do pronounce the S at the end of the word)
Maybe that's why i find french not as impossible as german and failry easy.
the end.

[eische]

hmmm, but that's a different phenomenon, because it doesn't go that far back in time and french took over many foreign words from the arabic language (same with spanish: ojala (perhaps) goes back to oh allah (with god) for example) - e.g. your ananas-example. That is because of the mauretanic times of parts of the land back in the days.
On the other hand some arabic languages adepted some french words in times of imperialism, because France was one of the countries expanding in the arabic-speaking parts of northafrica......
But you have that foreign-language-adapting through all of the times, for example:
cup(engl.), kopf(germ.), coup(french, I guess), cabo(span.) all go back to the latin word caput for head and then changed their meaning with the times. Also most of the words in english that speak of political systems (government, nation, parlament etc.) are originally french. Coming in in times of William the Conqueror and the normanic period of Britian. Or the financial-words (bank, giro etc.) come from italian, because they were the first to export that sort of money-management around the rennaissance-period.

grab yourself a good ethymology-dictionary and a completly new world will open up.........

[Dann]

I'm pretty good at................you know............pig latin..........

aterle,

anksthe

annDe.........