Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Language Learning
I've always loved languages. I had aspirations when I was younger to become a polyglot. I had (according to the DLAB) a high aptitude for language learning.
Unfortunately, I have also always been a lazy student, and so initial enthusiasm always ran into the reality that learning languages, especially to anything approaching fluency, is hard. (Yes, I know a lot of you non-Americans grew up in multilingual environments and spoke two or three languages by the time you were in high school. Americans generally have to make a serious effort, outside of our sparse language offerings in high school, to acquire another language.)
Over many years, I have acquired bits and pieces of nearly a dozen languages, and true proficiency in none of them. I can read Cyrillic, Hangul, Arabic, Hiragana and Katakana and a few Kanji. I know enough Russian, German, Korean, and Japanese to express my ignorance.
Over the years, I have dabbled or studied in:
French: One semester in junior high school. I remember "Marie est une fille" and "je nais parle pas Francais."
German: In my opinion, the easiest language for English speakers to learn. With my rusty high school German, I retain the basic grammar and can still occasionally pick up phrases, and if I studied in earnest and built up my vocabulary, I think I could quickly reach at least conversational fluency.
Russian: Oh my god. Second hardest language I ever studied. I began studying Russian because my first girlfriend was Russian, and I took a few semesters in college. What are these cases? How do Russians even verb? And what am I supposed to do with my tongue? (My girlfriend endlessly made fun of my pronunciation, said I couldn't even pronounce her name in Russian correctly.) I am never, ever in a million years going to read War and Peace in the original Russian. (I am actually reading the Maude translation now.)
Irish: Too bad @FarNearEverywhere isn't around anymore to make fun of me. I took a semester of Irish Gaelic in college. Fucking incomprehensible. I remember zero grammar and maybe two words (including my username). They should never have used the English alphabet for written Irish; borrowing Chinese characters, or just refining ogham, would have made as much sense.
Esperanto: Yes, I also took a semester of Esperanto in college, for fun. One of the first conlangs, it was meant to be an easy-to-learn universal language, made simple with the absence of irregular verbs or complicated grammatical rules or any of the other things that make most languages difficult. It still has a fairly large global community of enthusiasts (though maybe now they are outnumbered by fluent speakers of Klingon or Dothraki), most of whom are still living the pre-USSR socialist dream. Fun fact: William Shatner starred in a 1966 horror film called Incubus, with dialog entirely in Esperanto. You can watch the whole movie (yes, including William Shatner speaking in Esperanto!) on YouTube.
Japanese: Took several semesters in college. Did terribly, but despite not practicing it since then, I can still read hiragana and katakana and remember a few kanji, and even manage some basic polite phrases. Although many people say Japanese is hard, I actually found it surprisingly - I would not say easy, but practical. There are no sounds in Japanese that do not exist in English, so it's not hard to pronounce, and I find the grammar to actually be pretty logical. The hardest part is the many different pronouns and inflections to indicate different politeness levels, and of course, fucking kanji. Chinese characters that the Japanese borrowed, much the same way Irish borrowed Latin characters, but to be literate in Japanese you need to know both the Japanese and the Chinese readings, and Japanese elementary school students are expected to know over a thousand. I remember maybe 20.
Korean: I never studied it very intensely, but I can still read Hangul (which is much easier than Japanese hiragana and katakana). The funny thing about Korean and Japanese is that linguists say they are completely unrelated languages. I suspect some cultural bias is at play here (Japanese and Koreans accuse each other of stealing pretty much everything from one another). It's true that Korean and Japanese share very little vocabulary (unlike, say, English and German or Spanish and French), but I found the grammar to be very similar.
Arabic: The language I have the most experience with. It's hard to pronounce, many sounds are difficult to distinguish for English speakers, the script is difficult and non-standardized, the grammar is complicated, and verbs have a billion different inflections. Also, you usually learn Modern Standard Arabic (or "Fusha") in class, which is basically media Arabic that zero native speakers actually use in conversation. Dialectal Arabic is broken into several different regional variants that are sometimes mutually unintelligible.
Of course I hadn't actually practiced any of them in many years, and language skills deteriorate rapidly without practice. So I occasionally looked at my shelves of books and told myself someday, I would brush up and get back into language learning. Realistically, though, it was never going to happen.
But recently I got on a language kick again. It started with DuoLingo ("Let's see how well I do with all those languages I studied back in the day") and now I am seriously cracking books again, watching YouTube videos, and even considering italki lessons.
I am concentrating on Arabic and Japanese. (Yes, for really serious language learning I'd stick with one; expert opinion is mixed on the effectiveness of studying multiple languages at once, but there's no question that it means dividing your time.) If I can stay motivated, I have decided to set a goal of someday achieving a CEFR level of C1 in Arabic. (Currently, I am, generously, at A2-B1.) I would like to do the same in Japanese, but right now I am actually doing a lot of Arabic practice and just dabbling in Japanese.
If I stick with it, I may post updates on my progress.
German is an amazing language. The closest thing to a simplied-Sanskrit using the English-alphabet.
I grew up fluent in English, Marathi and Hindi. Learned a decent bit of Sanskrit grammar, but was never able to sustain a conversation in it.
German was the one language I learned in adulthood, and my 2 distinct experiences with learning German have helped crystallize certain opinions on language learning.
There is no such thing as leisurely language learning. You need to be thrown into the deep end of the pool. Now, this might seem like surface level advocacy for immersion based learning, but there is more to it. I am going to squeeze every little bit of metaphor from that analogy. Similar to drowning, you need to feel that sense of hopelessness for it to work.
I studied Sanskrit for 3 years and never got close to stringing more than 2 sentences together. I got a 99/100 in my exams for it, but leisurely learning with zero desperation meant that learning it was more like storing facts / gotchas in my head, rather than any from-fundamentals understanding of the language.
I studied A2 German for 3 months after a shitty A1 class, and the new class had 1 rule. You could not speak any other language in the class. Not with the instructor or your fellow classmates. Any mistake meant an actual monetary fine. It sounded ridiculous.
How am I supposed to ask what I don't know in a language that I don't know. How am I supposed to understand explanations for simple German I don't understand in more simple German I don't understand. It was also humiliating, because everyone else had done the good A1 class and were far ahead of me on day 1. It was desperate and the first few days were brutal.
But the human brain is a miracle machine. A few weeks in, I could almost feel my brain rewiring. It stopped reaching for English as an intermediate crutch and started grounding my understanding of less-simple German in the simplest German words. I have never since learned anything as fast in my life. In 3 months I was more fluent in German, than my friends who had spent a year or two in Germany. They had greater immersion, but they weren't desperate. They were in the shallow end of the pool. Most importantly, in 3 months, my German was better than my Sanskrit had gotten over 3 years, and both are practically the same language !
It's been 10 years since, and I have completely forgotten all my German. But, I feel confident that just like swimming, it will come back to me with a little bit of desperation.
Sanskrit is fascinating because it's useful to convey topics related to metaphysics/philosophy of mind. So many concepts it would take 12 words to explain in English you can find terms in Sanskrit for.
In autumn of last year, I learned LOGO for a class I’m teaching, and it felt amazing. To quote my own metaphor, using C++ feels like conversing in raw logic, but using LOGO feels like dancing with logic itself.
You’ve got me wanting to learn Sanskrit, and Screye has me wanting to learn German, for the same reason.
Unfortunately I don't speak it myself even though I know dozens of words in it just by learning about Buddhism/Advaita Vedanta.
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