I studied French for six semesters. I kept failing.
Joke’s on you. I can do both those accents.
I am the world’s shittiest polyglot. I lost a lot of my native language, turkish. I can get by. I speak english, but my accent is getting worse. I studied german in school for 5 years and forgot most of it. I live in the river plate, so the shitty amount of intermediate spanish I can speak has one of the worst accents for spanish, just behind tied first of caribbean and chilean. I can READ cyrillic, but not understand it, except few words whichever language has in common with languages I know. I can recognize some chinese glyphs, and understand some words.
I have no idea about any grammar words except the obvious ones (verb, noun) and get as much use of IPAs as I do IPAs (the pronunciation guide/the beer)
I have seen the vowel chart a billion times and still don’t understand it.
Don’t forget that you can also understand beginner level Azerbaijani and Gagauz but not speak either of them.
mən çox eyi Azərbaycanca konuşorum. /s
I probably speak better portugese than azerbaijani. / Eu problamenche falo melor portugues que azerbaijani.
Most people who take a language in school don’t keep at it. We’re just doing it because it’s required, and to pass the class. I took French in high school. The only person I’ve ever met who spoke French fluently was my teacher. I really should have taken Spanish, but I wanted to be “different”.
In Europe, also, because of the open borders, and being packed so close together, people encounter foreign languages far more frequently. It makes sense they’d all want to, and benefit from, knowing multiple languages. And, they’d have more opportunities to practice. Not many Japanese speak a second language, compared to Europeans, for instance.
I got out of the language requirement in college by taking computer science courses, which counted as “language” only because programming languages are called what they are. It is just the dumbest fucking shit. If they were called “paradigms” or “code instruction sets” or something like that (which would be just as or more accurate than “languages”) it never would have occurred to anyone to let us computer nerds – who are already not exactly well-rounded in general – to get out of learning a real fucking language.
That’s like taking greek class as math credit because of the symbols lmao.
My school taught Indonesian. It was a very popular complaint among students that we should be learning a more ubiquitous language like French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, or Spanish.
The only thing I know in Indonesian is ular besar (big snake)
ular besar (big snake)
😉
Bahasa Indonesia is known for being relatively easy to learn, so perhaps you got lucky. At least it’s more interesting than, say, French.
Well, around 300 people speaks Indonesian. Soo, if looking at raw speaker count, Indonesian can be categorized as ubiquitous.
Ah, ma petit chou… Voulez-vous couchez avec mois ce soir?
Pourquoi le crocodile a-t-il tué le macaron avec la pièce de vingt-cinq cents plaquée nickel?
US high schools will graduate students with missing elective credits. They won’t allow a falling grade from that rite of passage. Administrators have the power to change a grade in spite of a teacher’s documentation
I had a co-worker who took a few semesters of Spanish in high school, she got all As, and then went on a class trip to Mexico. At first, she couldn’t understand a thing, but she said as she listened and tried, “something snapped” and suddenly she got it.
I took Spanish from age 12-22 and German from 18-23 and 29-31.
I speak both those languages, though my Spanish is rusty, because I moved to Germany and don’t have much contact with Spanish speakers.
How’s your Turkish?
Abi, I got the reference
I never took it in school, and I don’t have much contact with it now either. I’m picking up some Arabic now though.
Yritän oppia suomen, mutta unohdin harjoitella kuukausin ajan
(If I made a mistake tell me)
Where you randomly pressing buttons?
j/k but Finnish does feel like that
I took english in school, and I speak it all the time :3
Good job. English is a very hard language that barely uses logic.
Have you tried French?
English is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn.
All languages have their difficulties. English pronunciation and spelling is a mess but grammar is easy for example. My native language has 3 genders and 4 cases for example and there are languages with more.
7 cases in the standard version of my language, 8 in the dialect I speak :3
You didn’t mention genders so I guess you have none which leads me to Uralic or Turkic languages maybe?
Oh if we’re doing a guessing game then…
3 genders technically, though the 3rd one (neuter) is super rare, so it’s basically 2 in practice :3
That makes it harder. 7 is the limit of Balto-Slavic languages but I know that one Baltic language used to have more, loaned from Estonian or something, but lost them over time. So my guess is your local dialect preserved one? Otherwise I have no clue. I think modern Indo Aryan languages have less, Semitic languages have 2 genders and I don’t know how many cases. I could rule out some more to show off but not much.
Lithuanian! Im not sure if they were loaned from estonian :3 we used to have 10 (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, illative, allative, adessive, and vocative) allative is basically dead outside of a few words like velniop, adessive is just dead (only really seen in old writings) but illative is the interesting one: it’s not used in standard lithuanian outside of some set phrases (kairėn, dešinėn, and in our anthem vardan), but it’s still used in dzūkija and east aukštaitija, so… Yeah that’s some lore :3
I wish for spelling reform, but that’ll never happen.
Yeah same. 6 cases, 3 genders and also dual form because why not.
Chinese, Arabic, and Russian speakers laugh at me when I say this.
Why? There’s plenty of strange things in English, inconsistent grammar rules, weird pronunciations, and pointless words for simple ideas.
Like there’s umpteen words to describe different kinds of meat, pork, beef, veal, mutton. In Chinese you can get away with saying just the animal + meat, 猪肉, 牛肉, 小牛肉, 羊肉 (pig meat, cow meat, young cow meat, goat meat).
English has stupid rules around pluralisation. There’s been arguments that the origin of the word should dictate how it’s pluralised, and other arguments that a “true English” pluralisation rule should apply, but then incorrect usage slips into common vernacular and suddenly it’s perfectly okay to pluralise a Greek word with a Latin plural suffix. Then you end up with the plural of octopus being octopodes, octopuses, and octopi!
The long and the short of it is that all languages have weird-ass quirks in them that don’t necessarily make any sense but feel natural to their native speakers. It’s a prime example of how intuitiveness isn’t actually real a thing.
You can get away with lots of things in English too! Just curious, do you speak another (than english) second language ?
I speak Japanese, and can still read German and understand most of it. German’s the secondary language I studied.
I’m a native Swedish speaker so technically English is my second language, and the others came after.
It really is illogical lol :3 I tried teaching my parents before and trying to explain why all 3 Es in mercedes or all 3 Cs in pacific ocean make different sounds like “they just do”
Though my native language is quite hard for non-native speakers as well
mercedes
In English’s defence, it’s not an English word. It’s a German company named after a Spanish name. And at least to my ear, the Spanish and German pronunciations also have 3 different Es. One helpful Redditor also provided an IPA guide to the German pronunciation, agreeing with my ears:
mɛrˈtseːdɛs
The “e” in the middle is long and stressed.
Edit: I would also say, that most of the times it is even pronounced like this:
məˈtseːdɛs
But I can’t even begin to justify the letter c sounding like /s/, /k/, and /ʃ/.
For what it’s worth, all the ‘e’ in mercedes pronounced in swedish sound the same (first can sound ‘ä’ in some regions though).
For Spanish, at least, your ears deceive you. It’s /meɾˈsedes/ in the vast majority of the Spanish speaking world, and /meɾˈθedes/ for large parts of Spain. All 3 ‘e’ sounds are identical.
Spanish can be weird and nonsensical at times, but it’s mostly counterintuitive grammatical rules. Things like “antes de que” having to be followed by the subjunctive, even in the past tense when you’re speaking of an event you know for certain occurred as you’re saying. The relationship between phonology and orthography in English is just a mess that’s gone and contaminated this one.
I do wonder if there might be a difference between the phonemes and the realisation, the way there was in German according to the German commenter.
But also, even without that, stress undoubtedly changes the perception of the vowel (not nearly as much as in English, but certainly not nil), as does an r after a vowel.
məˈtseːdɛs
Don’t know about other Germans but for me, the last e is a schwa. So it’s more [mɛɐ̯ˈtseːdəs] I think but I’m not completely sure.
Well the c being s and k thing comes from latin I think :3 like v and u being the same letter… and I believe i also had a second sound? Plus there’s vowel shifts that happened after the writing was standardized and all that, and characters that no longer exist like Þ and ð
Either way it can be confusing when coming from a language with a fairly regular pronunciation ^^ (though of course we also have some quirks lol)
Me, an English teacher: nods somberly
doesn’t count
I did but I had after-school classes because I sucked at taekwondo and football, lol. So I learned French and ended up moving to France, eventually becoming a national, and also learned English and ended up marrying a Brit. 🤷
Went here too, but married a local ☺️! Gotta do that paperwork for the french nationality though, bureaucracy is wild here.
Congrats! 🎉 And yeah, I hate French bureaucracy, it’s France’s truest stereotype, lol.
Et bien vous savez quoi, on peut s’entraîner un peu. Pourquoi pas s’entraider? Je vous parle en français et vous me répondez en espagnol ?
Que linda idéa. Siempre estoy feliz cuando tengo la opportunidad de practicar los dos con alguien! ☺️
Ah merci. Ravi de vous parler en Français.
see I couldn’t respond to you verbally for that, but I am glad that my time learning french 15 years ago at least allows me to understand it when written out
although I did have to confirm entraider meant what it looked like it meant
¿Que?
Aaaaand that would be me
Countless hours of German and French and at best a few words remain
Time well spent?
I took German in high school and forgot it all immediately. A decade later I found myself in India studying Malayalam, the language of Kerala which is the southern-most state in the country. Very hard language to learn but as I was learning its formal grammar I was like, wait a minute this is very familiar. Turns out a German monk in the 19th Century visited Kerala and gave Malayalam its first formal grammar, which was basically just German’s grammar. So it wasn’t totally useless.
Hallo. Wie geht’s, mon ami?
