Comment on Learning a new language is easy!

colourlessidea@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• ornery_chemist@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I think the biggest difficulty when starting out is that you don’t know common endings and syllable structure, and so it can be hard to parse where the morphological boundaries lie. It’s much easier once you understand those, though you will still find instances where two components are combined in an unintuitive (for the learner) way, particularly if the translation maps to a (apparently) indivisible root in the learner’s language.

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• Aqarius@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  That’s like saying you can read a sentence written in rot13. Technically yes, you can decipher it, but it’s not as easy. The spaces are used for a reason. Same with punctuation.

  You know that trick where people can mostly recognise words with scrambled letters, as long as the first and last are right? Long, unknown words scramble that, and force you to parse them “manually”, and even then, in your own example, you can easily misread (and then have to go back and correct yourself) cANYou…, canYOUREad…, …ceEVENTho…, …venTHOUGHT-HEREar…, …ghTHE-REARen…,

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  • colourlessidea@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Yes that’s a good example too! (I don’t know of any language where that’s a possibility but I agree it’s similar)

    The spaces are used for a reason

    That’s the thing though - my hypothesis is that it’s based on what one is familiar with. There are languages/scripts where spaces don’t indicate word boundaries (e.g. Chinese), or that are rather agglutinative (e.g. Finnish), or somewhere in between (like German), or on the opposite end of the spectrum you have Hindi/Devanagari where a space and an overline marks a word. Totally understandable that it feels perhaps rot13-ish due to unfamiliarity but I would be surprised if native users of those languages share that sentiment.

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• JayObey711@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I think it’s funny that the capitalization of nouns in German is allegedly for readability, but at the same time we can cram the new testament into four words.

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  • Zabjam@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Keep in mind that the memes you see are extreme examples. The vast majority of compound words consists of 2 or 3 words. Like Ofenreiniger (oven cleaner) or Werkzeugkoffer (tool box). Werkzeug being a compound word itself, made from “Werk” & “Zeug” meaning craft or work & gadget. These extremely long words tend to describe very specific, often niche items and are just rarely used in common language. Most people would call the thing in the picture more generalised “Feuerwehrauto”. Sufficient to describe it for most people, but not as precise as the long compound. It is basically a question how much details you want or need to communicate.

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    • JayObey711@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Weeell I mean we use abbreviation for the really bad ones. BAföG being my usual example. And I work with international students so with some I see how they learn German from the beginning. My favourite moments are when they discover words like Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbesscheinigung (wich we abbreviate with AU or just Krankenschein), Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung (or just Tempolimit) or the aforementioned Berufsausbildungsförderungsgeld (or just BAföG). I feel like there are quite a few really long words in everyday life. You just have to look out for them.

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