That’s cool about “rare” in Dutch. It’s the same in Spanish. “Qué raro” means “How weird.” So that’s a false friend for English, but an accurate one between Spanish and Dutch!
Comment on Do non-English speakers learn to code in English, or in their native language?
Lemmert@reddthat.com 2 weeks agoFalse friends usually aren’t homonyms since the word comes from different languages.
To give an example: an English speaker might look at “rare auto” (Dutch) and might translate it to “rare car”. But “rare” means “weird” in Dutch. So rare is a false friend in this case
Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Lemmert@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
Damn that’s cool!
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
The Dutch word for “who” - wie - is the same as as the German word for “how”.
Nastiest false friend I know because it’s a very common use word in both.
Lemmert@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
The more you know! German as a Dutch speaker has always been a bit of a special language (I’m assuming the other way around as well).Like some words are similar (like gevonden/gefunden). Which makes sense, but then some German composite words sound funny. Because we do understand what a bahn (baan) and hof (also hof) mean. But we call a bahnhof a station.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
I first learned Dutch as a non-native speaker (I’m Portuguese and lived in The Netherlands for almost a decade) and only after that did I start learning German, and knowing Dutch is both helpful for it (due to things live verb order in the sentence and many, many words being very similar) but also problematic because of the false friends and also because whilst speaking one language words from the other often pop-up instead.
I’ve picked up Spanish because of speaking Portuguese as my native language, but unlike with that language pair were I always know for sure if a word is on one language or the other (probably because Portuguese is my native language), with the Dutch - German language pair that’s not at all the case and they seem to interfere with each other a lot in my mind.
Even though I learned Dutch first and to a much higher level, I don’t really get a feeling of strangeness with German probably because they’re both strange to me.
That said, I do get that strangeness with Spanish, were there are also some weird unexpected things vs Portuguese (like going along a sentence which is pretty much the same thing with a different accent but there’s a single word that’s totally different), though not in composite words since neither language has that.
Lemmert@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
Yeah the strangeness I do have with German as a native Dutch speaker. But that’d made sense since I’d obviously know when a word isn’t Dutch, like you’re alluding to.
Though I’m assuming it’s not to the same extent you have with Spanish and Portuguese, since that description fits more with what I have with Afrikaans.
But I only learned some basic German in high school for an hour per week so I definitely don’t have the same experience with it that you probaby do. Neither do I have any push to use or learn it, compared to French at least there wasn’t.
Still really cool to hear the perspective from someone like you!