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Foreign Language Discussion - Raion - 02-26-2020

For those of you who speak "foreign languages" (for the purpose of this discussion, other than English and your mother tongue, which you can also talk about while qualifying it) let's talk a bit about them. 

I'll start. My mother thankfully did teach me both Spanish and Portuguese when I was 2 to 4-ish, but after I no longer lived with her, I basically was blasted with all-english all the time. I'm Iberico on her side, as people of Spain and Portugal would often say, to differentiate from Latin America. I now am learning them off and on as an adult, though I did speak pretty basic Spanish in high school and used it when I traveled to Guatemala and northern Mexico. 

In high school I switched into Chinese, which was an online class. I was one of the best students in there. I still speak chinese. Here's a nice sample:

我的汉语名字是孟兆狼。八年，我会说汉语。二〇〇九和二〇一六我去了中国。我游览了北京，香港，西安，上海，无锡，南京，和宁波。中国太有趣了！

Translation: My Chinese name is Meng Zhao Lang (context note, family name is Meng, Zhao Lang is the given name). For 8 years I have spoken Chinese. In 2009 and 2016 I visited China. I toured Beijing, Hong Kong, Xi'an, Shanghai, Wuxi, Nanjing, and Ningbo. China is just too interesting!

It's a very strict language in terms of how it's ordered. There's absolutely no flexibility in word order in most cases. There's no conjugation, inflection or declensions. 

I also now speak Japanese to a degree. My listening comprehension is probably the best, and I would probably sit at about N4-N3 ish. I can speak it, but I usually do so slowly and constantly apologize for my poor behavior. Unlike Chinese, Japanese is much much harder in terms of reading due to every character having 3-6 alternative readings. You have little context clues if any, so it's just rote memorization and trial/error. It also has conjugations, limited tense, and many varying levels of politeness, unlike Chinese.

Let's hear it.

RE: Foreign Language Discussion - soviet - 05-01-2020

Man you now Chinese, i could get insane before learning a language so complex, and also Japanese and Spanish .
You must be gifted for languages.

I ended up learning English when i was a boy like 11 or 12 years old, like computers and computers manuals where in this language.

There was not English curses in public school and i have a bunch of basic programming books for the Atari 800XL the first computer owned, so i took a English - Spanish dictionary and each time i found an unknown English word on the basic books searched it on the dictionary and word by word learned the language as probably be noticed i don't do verbs and times correctly.

Later to understand the talk language not only reading. Started watching all movies in English and no subtitles this forced me to understand.

The only thing to this days that give me problems to understand some words is watching Monty python flying circus.

I like English, words are shorter there no "tildes" and there's little nonsense in it. Great for technical things.
To this day i watch all news and movies and read all books and webpages only in English if possible.

RE: Foreign Language Discussion - Raion - 05-19-2022

Reviving an old thread because I love this topic.

I took some time and I've been learning more Latin and Indonesian as well as brushing up on my Chinese. Indonesian is really something, nice and simple. Too bad I can't visit Indonesia because my religion is illegal there. But Bahasa Malay is mutually intelligible so I'm not at a whole loss (my religion is legal in Malaysia).

Japanese is also being brushed up on.

As for why I find Chinese easy, it's quite simple:

The hardest part about it is understanding tonal changes and it doesn't take long to get your brain into the right prosody if you really work on it. It so happens with standard Han Chinese there's 4 tones and none of them sound alike. Also it's quite possible to understand somebody who's not speaking with the correct tone, it just sounds funny/off, like they're not stressing a vowel correctly in English or Spanish.

Chinese writing is not difficult either. You quickly break it down and notice patterns and while my handwriting with Chinese is terrible that's pretty much the case for all languages. You only need to understand about 5,000 characters to read most common newspapers and understand most commonly written books and most of those have constituent parts of them that give away how to say them or their meanings.

I would highly recommend that everybody consider learning Chinese although considering my relationship with the Chinese has changed, I'd say learn traditional Chinese, not simplified, and if you can try to learn things from the more proper standpoint.

With regards to all of the simple things about Chinese, it's a fixed the word order which is vaguely similar to English. There's no verb conjugations or gender to worry about, in fact in spoken you have no way to indicate a pronoun, the third person pronouns are:

tā - 他/她

The first one refers to men the second means woman. The word technically means "another" as in me/you/another.

I have actually taught Chinese in the past when I was broke as hell and I found it really fun to teach the language.

RE: Foreign Language Discussion - Shiunbird - 05-19-2022

Impressive.

I usually have the time, but my job is so exhausting on the brain that I can't focus much in the evening. However, when I was a bit younger...

English - school offered lessons once a week but, with 30 teenagers in the same room, not much progress happened there. But, you know, computers and games... =)
Russian - after doing some big project about Russia in school, back in 1999 or 2000, I ended up falling in love with the Russian culture and learned quite well (passed the state exam for B2 level). I am conversational, but nowhere as good as to enjoy good literature and don't have much time to dive deeper. I like how it sounds and it's just amazing for me how prolific Russian cultural production is. I guess the struggles of a country improve the quality of their books. =)
Slovak - I am also conversational and getting better. I can get by in the Czech Republic with it and it's easier for me. My mother-in-law is a very good teacher and she is teaching me. I am surrounded by it most of the day, so it's quite easy to get absorbed. Slovaks are also way more patient before falling back to English than Czechs are. I had tried a lot to learn Czech, but after 2 seconds of struggle at a shop, the seller would already switch to English never helping me learn. I also like more how it sounds compared to Czech - way softer.
Spanish - I used to be very good, as I had to learn at school and the vocabulary is very close to my native Portuguese. I can read perfectly well but conversation got rusty. I prefer the accent in Latin America (besides Argentinean accent, I guess) compared to the Iberian and I have the same feeling when it comes to Portuguese - I like way more how it sounds in Brazil.

I tend to prefer softer languages.

RE: Foreign Language Discussion - Raion - 05-19-2022

I have actually done some study into those languages or languages related to those so I can comment on each of them:

English: fun fact I'm not a huge fan of the language even though I speak it pretty much natively. I've always had problems pronouncing th sounds and it's not because of a lisp or anything but because I wasn't exposed to it a lot as a child and I ended up fronting it as an /f/ or /v/ost of the time. Even still as an adult it can be a little bit difficult if I'm speaking too quickly to enunciate it properly. My biggest issues with English are spelling inconsistency as I was dyslexic as a child, and the fact that English prosody can change between dialects and that we have about a dozen vowels represented by only five letters.

Learning English natively has been both a blessing and a curse for me. On one hand I do have a little bit of an advantage when it comes to computer science topics compared to people of other languages due to the proliferation of keywords that are derived from English. On the other hand on the world stage I am rarely taken seriously because it's immediately apparent that I was raised in the United States and thus I am considered an ignorant stupid person who doesn't speak multiple languages. Also the fact that I am "white" yet of Southern European heritage puts me in a tough position within the country. To illustrate, I often times have a lot of kinship with people from the Philippines and parts of Latin America due to our shared cultural similarities, but I'm also considered an outsider by most of them. On the other hand a lot of people in the United States immediately notice that my mother's side of the family is incredibly loud and friendly but also direct and brusque at times. It's not very common at least in my part of the US to act that way.

Russian: I can vaguely read Cyrillic due to my passing interest in Russian weaponry and my knowledge of Greek alphabet which helps. Unfortunately for me I don't really care for Russian cuisine or culture which puts me at odds with a lot of people from that country. Yeah I'm not a huge fan of orthodoxy, and I don't directly relate to people from that part of the world that easily. But Russian people in general I find to be pretty awesome and one of our customers at my workplace is from the 1960s Soviet Union and he has a lot of cool things to talk about whenever he comes by. He's gifted me a lot of cool Soviet memorabilia over the years which is fun to think about.

Slovak/Czech: these sound vaguely similar to polish to me whenever I've heard them. I can't speak Polish but I have exposure to Croatian because of my past girlfriend and obviously have some exposure to Ukrainian which is similar in some respects. I definitely want to visit Czechia one day, I can't exactly say I know much about Slovakia though other than it's poorer and less developed than the Czech Republic (if this is a stereotype my apologies)

Spanish: I can muscle my way through a Spanish conversation decently enough but I'm not fluent in it. I'm not very good with some of the verb forms like subjunctive. I tend to use European vocabulary but with a Latin American accent because that's how my family talks, I can't pronounce th sounds well as I've said before so I can't really master an Iberian Spanish accent.

I can't understand Argentinian or Chilean accents at all. They sound like if Catalan, a language I hate, had a baby with Spanish and then that baby adopted a ton of slang terms and loan words from native languages of South America. Easiest accents for me to understand are Salvadoran, Venezuelan and Cuban. When my grandfather on my mother's side was alive he spoke Spanish with a half Cubano, half Castellano accent. The hardest part with Cubano Spanish is the fast tempo with which most of them speak. Más despacio is an indispensable phrase.

Português: one of the biggest frustrations with learning my family's mother tongue is that the majority of study material I found is for BR PT. I finally broke down and decided to learn BR variant and hopefully I can eventually get down the European variant from studying in other materials. I think that it's a lot easier than Spanish in many ways such as the fact that it has less irregular verbs and that it reminds me much more of Latin. Some of the orthography for Brazilian Portuguese is a little on the annoying side. I also find that Brazilian Portuguese sounds really really strange to my ears. Am I alone there that European and Brazilian Portuguese have significant differences in the way they are pronounced?

From here after I learn Malay and Latin better I'm going to continue to brush up on my Chinese and Japanese while also looking at potential other languages to learn. Some potential targets for me have been Hindi, tajik persian, Maltese Arabic, cebuano, and Vietnamese

RE: Foreign Language Discussion - vishnu - 05-19-2022

Because I majored in physics, my institute of higher learning required that I take at least one year of foreign language, they recommended either Russian or German, so us physics nerds could read research papers in one of those languages. I took Hindi, because my world beater plan at the time was to be a physics teacher in India, and climb and ski in the Himalaya. Though they only required one scholastic year of instruction, I took Hindi for two. It's not that tough of a language once you get used to their backwards syntax. For example in English, the phrase "what is your name?" is structured "you of (interrogative, which is pronounced "kya," every question in Hindi has to have it) name is?" So it's like "you of name what is?" A direct transliteration sounds like "Op ka nam kya heh?"

RE: Foreign Language Discussion - Raion - 05-19-2022

Hindi is on my list, when I was Buddhist I considered learning Sanskrit but my passion for learning extinct languages pretty much begins and ends with Chinese and Latin. Chinese has some really neat extinct branches and Latin in and of itself is pretty difficult

RE: Foreign Language Discussion - Shiunbird - 05-20-2022

Slovakia is indeed poorer than Czech Republic, but both countries offer infinitely higher quality of life than anywhere in Brazil.
Even though they were both part of Czechoslovakia and the languages are very close, Czechs were under the Austrians and Slovaks were under the Hungarians during the Habsburg period.

The currently Czech lands were the industrial heart of the empire, whereas Slovakia was more agricultural. The Czechs were actually very famous for the high quality industry up to the 60s, when the lag caused by communism started becoming too evident and the industry lack of resources killed its ability to innovate. The years under Czechoslovakia were not sufficient to cover the gap.

Honestly, I don't see any practical difference in quality of life (besides disposable income) between Prague, Kosice (city I go often to in Slovakia) and a city like Vienna. You can see in architecture and urban design that they were indeed once part of the same country. They are all clean cities, with high quality public amenities, very walkable, full of parks and green areas, excellent public transportation and active cultural life covering everything from classical music to Avantgarde.

I'd rather live in Prague, where I live now, than London or Paris. Yes, I earn way less, but I hardly ever need to commute more than 20 minutes and things are way cheaper. I can afford eating out often and beer is fantastic and cheap. There's no point in earning gazzilions if you don't have time to use the money.

@Raion: Portuguese spelling is a political mess. The last reform would have caused actually way more changes to Portuguese spelling than Brazilian spelling. However, in order to please the Portuguese, Brazilians accepted a few changes.
One of the changes I hate, and refuse to adhere to, is dropping the ü. For example, lingüiça (sausage) sounds like leen-gwee-sah, whereas linguiça sounds like leen-gee-sa. My girlfriend is learning Portuguese and hates that often she doesn't know how to say a word because we dropped the ü and also some accents.
For example, Europeia (European) used to be spelled Européia. Brazilians dropped it to match Portugal, but now the stress syllable is not obvious anymore. The Portuguese also have an attachment to double syllabus without phonetic value (in most dialects), such as acção for ação (action) and I think they have to drop it after the last reform.

In Europe, it's way easier to find European Portuguese books for foreigners than Brazilian Portuguese books. Out of Europe, I've noticed that the opposite is true. I can help you find some good European Portuguese grammars and learning guides if you like. I actually had one, an ex-girlfriend kept it, she was learning and couldn't find a Brazilian version.

The differences in European and Brazilian pronunciations are similar in scope to the differences between British and American English. Interestingly, the changes also affect Iberian and Latin American Spanish.

When I moved to Europe, I had some difficulties to understand Portuguese from some regions in Portugal. I had two Portuguese neighbours in Moscow. One of them couldn't understand the other very well, so I know it was not my fault. =))) African Portuguese was an alien language to me. However, after a few months, I'm happy hearing all kinds of Portuguese and I find both European and Brazilian Portuguese quite charming. I prefer how Brazilian sounds in music, but I tend to like conversational European Portuguese better. After more than a decade in Europe, my accent has shifted a bit. My friends and family notice the difference.

In general, other Portuguese speakers tend to understand us very well. Brazilian movies and soap operas are common everywhere, whereas we hardly ever have anything from other Portuguese countries in our media.

@vishnu: This is a fascinating topic. It's quite interesting to see how a language reflects the way people think.
I often joke with my German friends when they thank me for something, I answer "Du bist willkommen", and they always laugh.
Also, for example, in Brazil when you say "Caro amigo" (dear friend), it would translate literally as "expensive friend".
Czechs, Slovaks and Russians (perhaps all Slavic languages) say the same, if you translate literally. The word for "expensive/costly" is used to describe both prices and appreciation for a valuable friendship.

Czechs flex the vocative. You can scream in anger "where's my beer, kurva", and you are not offending anyone. But if you say "kurvo", then you are directing your speech at the person serving you in a personal way.

A feature of Portuguese and other Latin languages that I miss a lot is nuance between temporary and permanent "to be".
For example...
You can say that "O Brasil é quente" - with the verb "ser", meaning that it's always hot in Brazil.
But you can say "O Brasil está quente. - estar, like "it's hot in this moment".

This allows us to go further with
"Você é doente" - telling someone that the person has usually a very sick attitude towards things
instead of
"Você está doente", like a doctor would say that a person caught a flu or something.

RE: Foreign Language Discussion - Raion - 06-10-2022

I've been practicing Chinese and Japanese for over a month straight at least 30 mins each a day, and learning Latin, Modern Greek, Malay, and Brazilian Portuguese (keeping in mind I already can speak a decent chunk of European Portuguese, though my accent is very Latin American) and I can safely start ranking them on difficulty for me, not for others.

Chinese is by far the easiest, because I'm used to it, but also because of its sound inventory, syntax and grammar.

I'd rank Japanese and Greek roughly equal, with Greek having insane historical spelling and sound shifts that have broken the spelling (Japanese has three writing systems, so this is even) plus a lot of sounds and cases that are tough (but consistent). Japanese has conjugations, and kanji.

Malay is a bit harder, but this is down to me being less familiar with it. It's still easier than most Romance languages.

Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation is tough for me. I can't pronounce the R sound properly, so I just do a European r. It also has some vocab I'm not familiar with.

Latin is hands down the hardest, but also a lot of fun and rewarding. I find it has improved my competency on Romanian and Dalmatian in some ways though I absolutely cannot speak those.

Germanic languages are still mostly off the table. Question for the Dutch speakers here, can you understand most of Afrikaans? I always have considered that if I was gonna speak another Germanic language.

If I learn a Semitic, it's gonna be Maltese Arabic. I can't be bothered to learn a script I'd be illiterate in and unable to write likely. I'm aware that it would limit my language capability.
Beyond that, I wanna learn Wu Chinese. It'll be somewhat easy after I work up the nerve.

RE: Foreign Language Discussion - vishnu - 06-11-2022

Raion, if you become a wizard at any of those languages there'll be a nice couple of jobs waiting for you at the State Department! 😁