Ask questions or just talk about different languages. Since BrainKing is an international game site supporting many languages, this board can be kind of useful.
Fencer: Thank you. Do you (or anyone?) know of a decent czech to english, english to czech translator website? I've tried a couple different ones, and they never are very helpful.
Pedro Martínez: True. For some languages, they seem to work better though. I can usually get a decent idea of what someone is saying from them. For some reason with Czech though, I tend to not have much luck.
rod03801: Well, I can imagine that if you have a text translated from, say, Spanish into Portuguese, you might get some quite meaningful results, in which the target text corresponds to a large extent to the source text.
You say you can get a decent idea of what is being said. Well, how do you know? The text provided by the translator might make some sense to you, but if you don't know the language, you can never tell if what you think is being said really matches what is actually being said. Let me give you an example. A Czech sentence "Dáme to dohromady?" generally means "Wanna date me?" However, Google Translator translates it as "Put it together?" Now there you can see that the machine-translated text does not precisely mean what the original Czech sentence does. :)
If you want to understand a foreign language, you have to start learning it.
Pedro Martínez: Good point. I have used it with languages that I have a little bit of a knowledge of. (Spanish, French), and those are probably the times when it has been good enough to get a general idea.
Czech seems like it would be a pretty difficult language to learn. (From an English perspective anyways). I could be totally off on that of course, but it's the impression I have.