Languages and you...

[SckizoBoy]

It's recently occurred to me that I can read Japanese... I can speak Japanese... but I can't speak written Japanese...

I've been slowly re-learning Chinese (in its various forms) and building on my old foundations of what I learned when I was a wee babi, and now find myself in a very weird situation.

For situations when I'm reading Japanese, few though they are (mostly raw manga, what I'm reading now, hence the topic of discussion), I'll read hiragana and katakana (what of it I remember) as they are supposed to be spoken in Japanese, along with what kanji (whose reading I know specific to context, easy stuff like [中]/chuu/naka (Eng. middle/within)) I remember, but with the rest, I'll say it in the manner of either Mandarin ([中]/zhong1] to continue to the example) or Cantonese ([中]/zung1) hanzi. I'll understand most of it, but good lord, when I'm vocalising it it sounds ever so weird.

This then gives rise to not only ridiculous situations when the same character can be read in multiple ways in each language ([行] respectively i(ku)/kou, xing/hang, haang/hong (English - to walk/shop or firm, respective to ordered pronunciation), but when words are said in pretty much exactly the same way in all three ([散歩] sanpo/san2bu4/saan3bou6 (English - stroll))... -_-

I'm not sure how well this can be done with other language groups (maybe Romance, because the pronunciation conventions of French/Italian/Spanish, while similar, are still very distinct but have strongly overlapping lexicography and share a lot of cognates... I remember being randomly given an Italian text in school which I sort of understood, but read it out using entirely French pronunciations).

Put it another way: with the languages that you speak (however fluently or not), how much do you overlap their use? And does this give you a headache or make you laugh?

Like, there's a Shanghai based German Youtuber (yes, shock horror), who is fluent in English, his audience is mostly Chinese (yay, VPN's), but he visits his folks in Germany a lot, so he flips among the three languages a lot and often catches himself speaking the wrong language in certain situations.

 

[Palindromemordnilap_v1legacy]

I seem to have no luck with modern languages. I am provably useless at French and floundered a bit when dipping my toes into German and Spanish. Its never the words that trip me, I can remember vocabulary, but the rules and grammar never seem to stay in my head long. Its why I've had better luck with Latin and Classical Greek, because they haven't had a couple thousand years of changes to make them insane and labyrinthine

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I'm bilingual in Spanish and English. Can wing it in a bunch of other Romance languages (if yours is one then you basically get 4x1 proficiency) but I'm nowhere near as good.

 

[SckizoBoy]

I seem to have no luck with modern languages. I am provably useless at French and floundered a bit when dipping my toes into German and Spanish. Its never the words that trip me, I can remember vocabulary, but the rules and grammar never seem to stay in my head long. Its why I've had better luck with Latin and Classical Greek, because they haven't had a couple thousand years of changes to make them insane and labyrinthine

Really? You struggle with German but not Latin? Grammatically, they're both solidly rule bound. I know enough German that my problem is the other way around (good grammar, bad vocab, lack of practise and immersion in the past few years notwithstanding). If anything, Latin is even more grammatically complex than any modern Romance or Germanic language (with the possible exception of Portuguese?), or are you referring to exceptions to rules?

I'm bilingual in Spanish and English. Can wing it in a bunch of other Romance languages (if yours is one then you basically get 4x1 proficiency) but I'm nowhere near as good.

I was going to ask if you meant the 4th was Romanian (given its similarities with French/Italian), but then wrote Portuguese above, so you could get to 5-for-1 at a stretch...(!) That said, regional differences can be troublesome...

Which variety of Spanish, out of interest (broadly): Latin American or European?

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I seem to have no luck with modern languages. I am provably useless at French and floundered a bit when dipping my toes into German and Spanish. Its never the words that trip me, I can remember vocabulary, but the rules and grammar never seem to stay in my head long. Its why I've had better luck with Latin and Classical Greek, because they haven't had a couple thousand years of changes to make them insane and labyrinthine

Really? You struggle with German but not Latin? Grammatically, they're both solidly rule bound. I know enough German that my problem is the other way around (good grammar, bad vocab, lack of practise and immersion in the past few years notwithstanding). If anything, Latin is even more grammatically complex than any modern Romance or Germanic language (with the possible exception of Portuguese?), or are you referring to exceptions to rules?

I'm bilingual in Spanish and English. Can wing it in a bunch of other Romance languages (if yours is one then you basically get 4x1 proficiency) but I'm nowhere near as good.

I was going to ask if you meant the 4th was Romanian (given its similarities with French/Italian), but then wrote Portuguese above, so you could get to 5-for-1 at a stretch...(!) That said, regional differences can be troublesome...

Which variety of Spanish, out of interest (broadly): Latin American or European?

Latin American, I'm Argentine.
I never really count Romanian as Romance, it sounds so alien from Spanish/Italian/Portuguese/French.

 

[Fiz_The_Toaster]

I used to be super fluent in German, but it kinda slowly went away from me.

I am trying to gain back the language since I generally enjoyed it, and it is popping back up in grad studies since a lot of theoretical works use German. Damn son, do they love their uber German super words that are heckin' long.

I do plan on trying to learn Italian since, again, it pops up in theoretical works to where I kinda understand what they are talking about, and I already know some since I can read music.

 

[SckizoBoy]

Latin American, I'm Argentine.
I never really count Romanian as Romance, it sounds so alien from Spanish/Italian/Portuguese/French.

Fair enough.

I think it's because of the sound, since their inflections/intonations are Slavic sounding, but their lexicography is Romance which makes Romanian a bit of a black sheep language in Europe... along with Finnish and Basque...

I used to be super fluent in German, but it kinda slowly went away from me.

I am trying to gain back the language since I generally enjoyed it, and it is popping back up in grad studies since a lot of theoretical works use German. Damn son, do they love their uber German super words that are heckin' long.

I do plan on trying to learn Italian since, again, it pops up in theoretical works to where I kinda understand what they are talking about, and I already know some since I can read music.

'Theoretical works'? As in physics? ... or music?

I always had a bit of a disconnect when it came to Italian based terminology in music since I was taught the terms as they are supposed to be pronounced, but when it came to full script, it seemed to throw a curveball at me and I deferred to French conventions almost out of instinct (lack of formal Italian lessons notwithstanding, though Italian friends have schooled me extensively in not buggering up their language).

 

[Wintermute_v1legacy]

I only speak Portuguese and English. Portuguese grammar was never really my strong suit, but I always had a very simple approach where things just made sense to me, and pretty much 99% of the time I'm right, so it never bothered me. English grammar, on the other hand... yeah I don't know anything. English classes in school were a complete joke, if I learned anything it's thanks to early 2000s online MMO forums and art communities, where I would just read what people were saying and try to make sense of it. Pirated videogames and movies also played a huge part . Movies in particular because I'd try to translate them by ear and make my own subtitles because that was the kind of entertainment that I could afford back then. It's part of the reason why I watched movies like the first Fast and Furious and Minority Report dozens of times.

Anyway, being a native Portuguese speaker, I think you can read something in Spanish, Italian or French just fine, and it probably wouldn't take too long to fine tune some of the pronunciation. You can even understand most of what you're reading, if it's nothing too complex, specially if it's in Spanish or Italian, imo.

I also tried to learn German on my own about 5 years ago and after a while I noticed the way they structure their sentences is different, but if I just re-structured sentences in portuguese, they'd still make sense in Portuguese (even if they sounded a little weird), and that would make the learning process much easier for me, but this different structure also made them sound like very shitty poetry. Then health and family issues got in the way, priorities changed and this side project died a premature death.

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

Languages aren't exactly my forte. I never really got the hang of French in school, and although things got much better when I switched to German my school days are so far behind me that I've forgotten most of my German too. A friend has been teaching me a bit of Italian (when she can work up the patience required), but the less said about my abortive attempt at Chinese the better.

But it's OK because I'm English and we just get to speak slowly and loudly until the locals learn the Queen's.

 

[Fiz_The_Toaster]

I used to be super fluent in German, but it kinda slowly went away from me.

I am trying to gain back the language since I generally enjoyed it, and it is popping back up in grad studies since a lot of theoretical works use German. Damn son, do they love their uber German super words that are heckin' long.

I do plan on trying to learn Italian since, again, it pops up in theoretical works to where I kinda understand what they are talking about, and I already know some since I can read music.

'Theoretical works'? As in physics? ... or music?

I always had a bit of a disconnect when it came to Italian based terminology in music since I was taught the terms as they are supposed to be pronounced, but when it came to full script, it seemed to throw a curveball at me and I deferred to French conventions almost out of instinct (lack of formal Italian lessons notwithstanding, though Italian friends have schooled me extensively in not buggering up their language).

No, theoretical works for art and music, so basically Marxist writings like Ardorno, Heidegger and the gang that have talk about the arts. They have fancy words for things in either German or Italian, depending on who you're reading.

With Italian in music, it does kinda make sense since Italy was a power house for music and that's where a lot of cultural changes happen in the arts in general. So, seeing poco a poco, decrescendo, andante all over the place in sheet music makes some sort of sense.

 

[Palindromemordnilap_v1legacy]

I seem to have no luck with modern languages. I am provably useless at French and floundered a bit when dipping my toes into German and Spanish. Its never the words that trip me, I can remember vocabulary, but the rules and grammar never seem to stay in my head long. Its why I've had better luck with Latin and Classical Greek, because they haven't had a couple thousand years of changes to make them insane and labyrinthine

Really? You struggle with German but not Latin? Grammatically, they're both solidly rule bound. I know enough German that my problem is the other way around (good grammar, bad vocab, lack of practise and immersion in the past few years notwithstanding). If anything, Latin is even more grammatically complex than any modern Romance or Germanic language (with the possible exception of Portuguese?), or are you referring to exceptions to rules?

Way my secondary school worked, you had to do French but after a couple of years you could also pick another language from the selection of Spanish, German and Greek (Latin was its own separate thing.) Before you picked you got a taster of the three, and I wasn't that great at the two modern ones (though to be fair, this being me, I was always going to pick Greek)
Having worked with a few German colleagues over the last few years I have got the impression that I'd have an easier time with German than I ever did with French, I just don't have the inclination or really time to learn it at this point.

Though in part yes, its the exceptions. With Latin and Greek I tended to find that if they had a rule, words stuck to those rules. With modern languages? Not so much. A few thousand years of invading each other and intermingling have made them a bit more complicated, and French was a long list of "These rules describe how words change and they all go by these rules...apart from these words which are all really common and all have their own rules which rarely make sense." English is just as bad, true, but I've been learning that since birth. If it switched round and I was French trying to learn English I'm positive I'd have the same problem

 

[Xprimentyl]

English speaker born in North America here, but my dad is from Panama, so Spanish is his first language. He tried to teach me when I was very little, but he said I got confused, and being just himself, my grandmother and uncle here from Panama, it was difficult to immerse me in the language in any meaningful way, so he deferred to our ?Murican overlord?s native tongue. I did end up taking Spanish in high school and was really good at it, aced every class, and ended up taking college-level Spanish my senior year of high school; it was taught in Spanish from day one, so I was conversationally fluent (despite my dad?s insistence that I sounded like a gringo?) Then college happened: booze, girls, parties, booze with girls at parties, etc., and as I focused on my arts studies, the Spanish slowly ebbed away. Now, I understand a lot of it, but I wouldn?t call myself fluent by any stretch of the imagination, which is disappointing seeing as I moved to Texas back in 2010, and it?s all around me if I?d just buckle down and knock the rust off?

I know that doesn?t add much to the topic, but I did find this the other day and found it very interesting. We native speakers never think about much it since we use it every day to order fast food and talk about the fast food we just ate, but [American] English really is one of the harder languages to learn as a second language given all the slang, euphemisms and outright inconsistencies in the written language, i.e.: comb, bomb, and womb, three words nearly identical in print with different pronunciations and vastly different and unrelated meanings. So this video poses the question?

Spoiler: ?What if English were phonetically consistent??

? So when I hear people here complain about immigrants and their broken English, I have to remind them that broken as their English may be, that person still knows at least TWO languages, one of which is about as alien a tongue as can be, and your ignorant ass struggles with the ONE you know (the number of 20 to 30-somethings I still see struggling with ?you?re? and ?your? is astounding?)

 

[SckizoBoy]

ut the less said about my abortive attempt at Chinese the better.

Funnily enough, it's terrifically difficult to teach a Hong Kong native their own language using English as the medium of instruction (most will learn both simultaneously, but largely disconnected from each other from what I understand). When I started re-learning Cantonese, the tonal structure confused the hell out of me and it took a while for me to realise that it was what I was speaking. I can guarantee you that if you tried teaching 'tones' to my parents, they'd look you like a deer in headlights.

But it's OK because I'm English and we just get to speak slowly and loudly until the locals learn the Queen's.

Even Americans?! =P

 

[SckizoBoy]

I know that doesn?t add much to the topic, but I did find this the other day and found it very interesting. We native speakers never think about much it since we use it every day to order fast food and talk about the fast food we just ate, but [American] English really is one of the harder languages to learn as a second language given all the slang, euphemisms and outright inconsistencies in the written language, i.e.: comb, bomb, and womb, three words nearly identical in print with different pronunciations and vastly different and unrelated meanings. So this video poses the question?

The difficulty of learning English is one of those weird things... I've generally considered it relatively easy to pick up and learn, but genuinely difficult to master in whichever form (American/British/ZA/AUS etc.) owing to the diversity of Anglophonic slang and idioms, plus the fact that more than any other language, English has so many synonyms.

As far as consistency of phonology, though, I honest to god believe that the Sinitic languages (read: Chinese...) could do... something(?!) to improve its links between characters and pronunciations. My missus told me a joke the other day (doesn't translate well at all, but NVM) that if you can't pronounce a character, you move from left to right and try out every radical you see until you get it right (or not, as the case may be)!

Neat vid, BTW, though while not unique to English, it definitely is characterised more in English than any other language.

 

[cathou]

i speak French and English, french is my native language. i think i'm pretty fluent in English, but by that i understand it almost perfectly, i can read and write pretty easily in english, but by god i suck at speaking it. just before i talk in my head i can form any sentence and know how they should sound, but when i try to say those phrase, it's a mess. each time i go in the USA and that i must talk with the guard at the border they ask me to repeat 3 or 4 time because i sound giberrish.

one of my coworker back when i was working in retail told me once that almost every french canadian speaking english tend to pronounce an H when there's none and dont pronounce it where there should have one. (for the record, h is a completely silent letter in french) so the phrase : "the air flow in my hair" sound like "the hair flow in my air"

 

[Chewster]

I can speak, read and write English (duh), speak and read a bit of French from my days as an Anglo student in Ontario and I can read and speak a bit of Korean. Listening is tough though my writing is on point, I've been told. The characters are actually stupid easy to learn how to read and write but the grammar is a mindfuck.

 

[SckizoBoy]

I can speak, read and write English (duh), speak and read a bit of French from my days as an Anglo student in Ontario and I can read and speak a bit of Korean. Listening is tough though my writing is on point, I've been told. The characters are actually stupid easy to learn how to read and write but the grammar is a mindfuck.

I've heard a lot of lexical conventions are also really weird, like how people say 'our' instead of 'my' in most cases, levels of formality etc. Hangul is a marvelous writing system IMO, kinda makes me wish they'd replace hanzi with zhuyin in much the same way... :/

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

ut the less said about my abortive attempt at Chinese the better.

Funnily enough, it's terrifically difficult to teach a Hong Kong native their own language using English as the medium of instruction (most will learn both simultaneously, but largely disconnected from each other from what I understand). When I started re-learning Cantonese, the tonal structure confused the hell out of me and it took a while for me to realise that it was what I was speaking. I can guarantee you that if you tried teaching 'tones' to my parents, they'd look you like a deer in headlights.

See, it was the tones that got me. I would take my metaphorical eye off the sentence I was trying to speak for half a second and subconsciously switch back into using an English cadence structure, which would throw my pronunciation completely out.

But it's OK because I'm English and we just get to speak slowly and loudly until the locals learn the Queen's.

Even Americans?! =P

If they haven't got the hang of it by now they're never going to get it.

 

[Pseudonym]

I speak Dutch natively and English near-fluently. I can passively understand simple German if I read it slowly due to its similarities to the Dutch language and entertain vague hopes of speaking that at some point in the future. I did do Latin in school and will be picking that up in the coming months so maybe I can read simple Latin next year. I am usually fairly good at grammar but my vocabulary grows very slowly.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

I speak Dutch natively and English near-fluently. I can passively understand simple German if I read it slowly due to its similarities to the Dutch language and entertain vague hopes of speaking that at some point in the future.

Same, although I can also speak some German since I had two years of German classes in high school. Far from fluent tho, but good enough for most casual interactions. I can also understand and read Afrikaans, but since that's an off-shoot of Dutch, it's only to be expected. You probably can too.

Aside from those I can speak, read and write French. Understanding spoken French depends on how fast someone is talking. I'm not so proficient that I can do without translating inside my head, so I often can't keep up when native speakers start rattling. I also knows bits and pieces of Spanish.

And English of course. Probably the only foreign language I'm fluent enough in that I can 'think' in it, i.e. don't need mental translation.