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Topic: Languages Thread: I like words.  (Read 21506 times)

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Languages Thread: I like words.
What languages do you speak/want to speak and why? Because I'm a horrible gross language nerd.

I've got a decent grasp of Icelandic at the moment and have recently commenced attempting to learn Finnish. A few years back, I hit absolute rock bottom (again) and decided I was going to stop attempting to do anything useful with my life and learn Old Norse instead. So I did. Whoopee! And...that's kind of what I've been doing since. Making the jump to the modern spoken language of Icelandic is hard, especially when it's a bit difficult to find native speakers, but I'm doing alright and plan to study Icelandic as a second language at Háskóli Íslands when I can gather the funds/emotional stability. My accent is not a train wreck, my grammar is only moderately questionable, and my vocabulary is...okay, pretty weak, but whatever. I've got the important stuff in there. Icelandic is not so difficult. A bit tricky without a teacher, but definitely doable. It's got a fair amount in common with English, Germanic language and all. And I can, in fact, pronounce Eyjafjallajökull. There's a lot of overlap with Faroese, at least in its written form, so I might jet over to the Faroes a couple summers if I ever manage to get myself to Iceland. But Finnish is a whole different animal. Why did I ever think it was a good idea to step out of the safety of the Indo-European language tree? :(

Finnish grammar is like Chinese grammar plus a shitton of inflection. Alternatively, it's like German, if German did not give a flying beautiful fuck about word order and was twice as complicated. It is a uniquely gorgeous and earthy language, but learning it feels like sinking slowly into a bog. Every time I find a cognate loaned into the language (kulta, rengas, kuningas, prosentti) I weep with relief. One day I'll get past "En puhu suomea. Puhutteko ruotsia? Hitaasti, ole hyvä.". And maybe one day I'll get used to saying questions like vaguely speculative statements. But Finnish people I've interacted with through the internet seem much less...pissy about foreigners using their language than the Icelanders do. I guess "that was vaguely intelligible" is quite good for people learning Finnish, whereas Icelanders will anecdotally respond to a question with a grammar correction. And then answer in English. And then kick you in the shins.

Anyway, POST ABOUT WORDS WITH YOUR WORDS. Or tell me about your traumatizing second-language courses in school.

montrith

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Languages Thread: I like words. #1
As for Finnish, any effort you make to speak the language will be applauded by the Finns, who are used to nobody giving a fuck. It's a bitch and a half even to natives, especially since "good" Finnish is basically so artificial nobody actually uses it in real life.

I personally have been trying to brush up on my German and Japanese. It's getting really hard to find work on my field unless you have at least two major European languages, and anything Asian is always a plus. I should probably start up on my Chinese again, just in case.
Baldr

cyclopeantrash

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Languages Thread: I like words. #2
I am half assedly teaching myself Arabic and Russian. Still am not outside of basic pronunciation yet. I am really bad at that motivation thing. And because I am terrible at prioritizing, I'm probably going to put Korean on my plate some time in the near future.

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Languages Thread: I like words. #3
I speak English and Hebrew.

I studied a bit of Spanish and Arabic in school; I had a year and a half of Arabic, and half a year of Spanish. I know Spanish much much better than I do Arabic even though it's supposedly easy for Hebrew speakers to learn Arabic (the grammar is slightly less complex in Hebrew, and some verb and noun roots are either the same, or similar). I can pronounce most of the letters in Arabic correctly though, go me!

I want to pick either of those and improve them to a point I can more or less understand the language in writing.

I could learn Hungarian, because due to my grandma coming from Slovakia Upper Hungary, if I learn the language I can apply for citizenship.

As opposed to fantasy, I'm currently learning Israeli Sign Language due to my work situation. (It's pretty unintuitive, and quite damn useless outside of Israel, I'd rather learn American Sign Language)

Adept

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Languages Thread: I like words. #4
I have a BA in German and Applied Linguistics, and am studying Second Language Acquisition for my MA (the study of how adults acquire non-native languages). I can speak some elementary Spanish, but have been neglecting it somewhat.

Assuming my linguistics studies don't wholly consume me, it would be nice to get my Spanish up to a level where I could reasonably live in a Spanish-speaking country with it, and if we're really going for the high roller table, throwing a non-indo-european language into the mix (Korean or Japanese, I am thinking) would be nice.

Isfahan

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Languages Thread: I like words. #5
I have a BA in German and Applied Linguistics, and am studying Second Language Acquisition for my MA (the study of how adults acquire non-native languages).
Adept, January 12, 2014, 11:27:36 am

I'd be interested to hear the most successful methods for teaching languages to people who are out of those early learn-languages-easily years.

TheCrawlingChaos

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Languages Thread: I like words. #6
I've ostensibly mastered English and can speak Spanish well enough to get by after 5+ years of it in high school, a summer in Paraguay and a lot of jobs with Spanish-speaking coworkers. There was also the brief period where I tried to learn Quenya but I try to forget that time as much as possible.

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Languages Thread: I like words. #7
As for Finnish, any effort you make to speak the language will be applauded by the Finns, who are used to nobody giving a fuck. It's a bitch and a half even to natives, especially since "good" Finnish is basically so artificial nobody actually uses it in real life. montrith, January 12, 2014, 05:43:11 am
I figure it'd probably be difficult to get into a situation where I couldn't communicate in English, but I'll have an ace up my sleeve. I've witnessed firsthand the "shouting in English because the native doesn't understand" thing when I went to Italy with my parents, and it was so horrifying that I think it scarred me a little. I find it hard to imagine visiting a country now without learning at least a handful of words. I've already got "joo" and "niinku", so that's like 40% of spoken Finnish right there. :D

And half the the items in this Finnish grammar have a note like "this verb-form is basically useless, but here it is anyway". What is the potential mood for? When you're writing poetry and you need an extra syllable, and not a whole lot otherwise.

cube abuser

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Languages Thread: I like words. #8
i'm canadian and took french up to grade 12. i really enjoyed it and did well in the courses but i'm awful at holding a conversation or understanding colloquial language... i can read academic journals perfectly well but not forum posts. i live in a predominantly anglo area and don't get many opportunities to speak the language in real life, so i've recently started going to a local french meetup. it's pretty nice, but also awkward because i'm the youngest person there by at least 5 years...

i picked up some german from being obsessed with industrial music when i was younger. my pronunciation and vocabulary is pretty good but i never paid much attention to the grammar. Rilke is nice.

i tried to learn finnish last year and gave up after a week. what a ridiculous language... i couldn't get the hang of the pronunciation or the grammar. for example, to say you have a car you'd say "minulla on auto" which would literally translate to something like "me-at is a car". then you learn that the spoken form of the language is completely different from the written form! i have immense respect for anyone who actually dedicates themselves to learning this language. i'm curious to know whether finns find english as weird as we find finnish.

fluffy

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Languages Thread: I like words. #9
I know tiny amounts of Finnish and Japanese, and less-tiny amounts of Spanish, French, and Italian. I can follow basic conversations but can't really speak any of them. At one time I was running a language blog but I lost interest in updating it pretty quickly and I suspect that it came across as being really idiotic anyway (but it's on a somewhat clever domain name that I don't want to give up even though I have no idea what else to do with it).

Goose Goose Honk At Me Now

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Languages Thread: I like words. #10
I can say "fuck" in Polish.

Locclo

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Languages Thread: I like words. #11
I speak English, and I can say random phrases in random other languages. If you ever need someone to count to ten in Spanish (and only Spanish), you can count on me.

A Whirring Bone-White Gleech

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Languages Thread: I like words. #12
Ich kann Deutsch, aber night gut.  Ich hat ein jahre im Gymnasium Deutsche gelernt.

I wish I knew German muuuuuuuuch better than I do.

A Finn, perfect English, also German, Chinese and Japanese!
montrith, January 12, 2014, 05:43:11 am
I envy, admire and despise you.
« Last Edit: January 13, 2014, 03:17:40 am by Fizzlebang the Wise »

montrith

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Languages Thread: I like words. #13
I've already got "joo" and "niinku", so that's like 40% of spoken Finnish right there. :D

All you need is "tota", "että" and "vittu" and you're fluent!

i'm curious to know whether finns find english as weird as we find finnish.

We pretty much start learning English at kindergarten, so we don't really think of it as that weird. As a linguist though, I can offer my personal opinion that English is a fucked up language.

EDIT:
I envy, admire and despise you.

Just keep reminding yourself that it's not as impressive as it sounds. Half of those I can barely use to complain about my luggage being lost.


« Last Edit: January 13, 2014, 03:20:17 am by montrith »

A Whirring Bone-White Gleech

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Languages Thread: I like words. #14
As a linguist though, I can offer my personal opinion that English is a fucked up language.
montrith, January 13, 2014, 03:17:42 am

It's a little like some Whole Languages lunatic put German in a blender, sprinkled in some French, blended it for a few seconds and still had chunks left.

And also the Whole Languages nutter was a sloppy drunk who couldn't get anything right, so there's more exceptions than rules.