Comment on Why do Americans always presume that everyone speaks English
Dasus@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoOne random thought I had about this the other day was that I feel sort of bad for the British, Irish, Americans and Australians. Well, the monolingual ones.
Anytime they go abroad, it’s like “oh they didn’t even bother to learn the language”, but then when we who didn’t grow up on English do, we’ve already learned at least English, so not knowing the local language is somehow more understandable. Or perhaps people don’t feel that way, but it’s just a thought I had. Like it feels less polite when a native English speaker just addresses someone in English in a foreign country, but if a non-English speaker asks “do you speak English” with broken English, it’s much more… sympathetic.
I’m just babling nevermind me.
I do agree with you though and can’t really understand people in my country who still say they can’t speak English. I mean, people who still use the internet and consume media that’s in English. I don’t get it. Language acquisition gets worse sure, but it’s never gone away from me at least. I watch one season of some show in a language I don’t understand and I already start picking up the very basics. Nothing I could use, surely, but like my brain is clearly structuring and trying to make sense of the language, so with enough exposition to a language…
I watch one season of some show in a language I don’t understand
I wish my brain worked that way; I’d be watching Finnish television and movies all day, every day.
I watch a fair number of shows in Swedish or Norwegian, and I’ve never picked up anything from what they’re saying. I always have to have subtitles.
I have to admit that this doesn’t work nearly as well when I’m watching anything Asian. I mean I’ve got a tiny tiny tiny understanding of the things Japanese people put at the end of words and I can now hear those a little after watching the samurai show that came out what was it. Absolutely amazing.
Uh… “Shōgun”, yeah.
Anyway, it works much better for PIE-languages, and obviously the easiest ones are Nordic/Germanic, seeing as they’re coursing languages to English and I know Swedish.
I think having a native non-PIE language really helped, as once I learned English properly (and had some Swedish) the others just started making sense more or less. Eastern European languages are harder, but I haven’t watched any shows in Polish yet…
Finnish must be a fucking nightmare, seeing how many grammatical cases we have and those are applied to all words in a sentence basically. So just modifying the verb will mean that you probably have to conjugate every other word differently.
Like one simple example “I want a car” “haluan auton” but do you want your car (you not thee, so plural second person) would be “haluatteko autonne” but if you want to say “would you like to have your car” it’s “haluaisitteko autonne”, and in the singular second person it’s “haluatko auton”, but also in informal Finnish you can sometimes drop the conjugations and indeed using them might seem too formal, and also you’d use some sort of dialect so in reality second person singular informal would be “haluaks auton”, but you can also put in the word for you “sinä”, (which informally is mostly “sä”) and its the same thing “haluaks sä auton”, but if you change it to “haluaks sun auton” it becomes “do you want your car”.
Whops rant. I’ve had a glög. My point being Finnish must be crazy hard to learn. I’d need to learn an Asian language to get into that whole market of languages better.
I’ve always been into languages though, and didn’t even need to be taught to read, as I picked it up myself from newspapers, as I was annoyed my older brother had a skill I did not.
When I watched the latest season of Babylon Berlin, I dreamt in German for a few times. And I do not speak it enough to have a conversation. Enough to order in a restaurant, sure, but not enough to chat like in my dreams.
I understand the chorus from that song, and some of the Lyrics. I just wish I was in a position to go live abroad for a few years, I’d like to see how fast I become fluent in some of these European languages I’m somewhat primed for. Plus they legalised weed in Germany, so that’s another good reason as well.
Finnish must be a fucking nightmare
It is. I’m Estonian, it’s the closest related language to Finnish, and I’ve found nearly any other language easier to pick up on than Finnish.
Apparently on average, it’s easier for Estonians to Understand Finnish than it is for Finns to understand Estonian.
One of those asymmetric mutual intelligibility things. Interesting video, that.
It’s been years since I had glög; I should make that again since it’s starting to get chilly.
Unfortunately, part of living in the US is that most people aren’t exposed to other languages to any significant degree. If you are a native American English speaker, and grow up in a large city, you might hear enough Spanish to learn it, but that’s about it. I learned Spanish in school, but there was no opportunity to practice until I moved to a large city close to the Mexican border.
From what I gather from culture, I’d say Spanish is like a tiny bit more prevalent in the US than Swedish is in Finland. And this varies city to city, of course. I live in a city which used to be capitol while we were under Swedish rule: Turku / Åbo. I think the city actually having two such different names is a bit of a giveaway. The Finnish names derives from “marketplace”, whereas the Swedish means “a dwelling by the river”.
I don’t much use Swedish either. I had to use it for customer service some, but even that was years ago so my vocabulary is pretty shit. A lot of the Western Finnish coastal cities are bilingual and have a somewhat significant Swedish speaking population, but it’s honestly rare to even hear Swedish being spoken on the street. A few cities are mainly Swedish speaking people though, but not Turku. And from that side, Spanish is less prevalent in the States, as I can’t think of entire cities which basically have Spanish as their main language, just cities with very large populations of Spanish speakers. Also, a huge difference is that in the States, Mexicans and people from even further South are often seen as socioeconomically lower generally, whereas we have a saying “Svenska talande bättre folk”, meaning roughly “better people speak Swedish”.
But yeah, all the media I watch is in a language I wasn’t born with, so I’m always learning. Even with English, can always learn. Just reminded me of this sketch. German wants to watch a foreign films.
I love shows which have multiple languages. Like mainly English, but then there’s significant bits with simple-ish conversations in other languages. It’s like you get to have a bit of language practice in the middle of enjoying a show/movie.
I’ve gone a bit overboard with the glög in the past few weeks, lol. Tasted too good, and I’m sort of doing science here. I’ve been trying exclusion diets and finally figured out something that’s bothered me my entire life, and now I genuinely don’t even get a hangover despite drinking quite heavily. Very weird. If drinking was this easy when I was a kid, I’d have definitely abused alcohol. I could never drink two days in a row as a kid, just couldn’t do it and didn’t understand how others could.
Here:
I got these glasses, uh… mugs? which are like from my grandma (she’s still alive though but moved to a home so we emptied most of the house). Real silver, I think, because of how it feels and how it’s darkened. I tried polishing the other one with some toothpaste the other day, seemed to work, but didn’t really make it shiny shiny. Just took a lot of the oxidation off.
There’s so many delicious glögs on Alko (the central shop for anything above 8% in Finland, monopolised govt owned alcohol shops, “offies” basically.) Raspberry, bilberry, one which is brandy and mulled wine. All delicious. Add a bit of rum and were off. Cheers!
I feel like I’d struggle learning Hindi like that
Given enough time and some sort of foundation to build on, like an understanding of a related language, I’m sure you could do it.
It’s weird how most people just give up on language acquisition after acquiring one.
But not when theyre kids. As kids, you honestly are just a sponges for any languages you hear.
After 27 or so it’s probably harder (neural plasticity seems to slowly down at 27, some sort of cause or correlation with culture idk, but it happens), but definitely still doable.
I have no idea how long it would take me, but when watching shows, I always have subs, so even if I don’t know any of the language, you start picking up words. First it’s just the proper nouns which you can pick up, names of places and people, then it’s the words relating to those nouns, and soon it’s common verbs and then you can basically form two word sentences (want beer, am hungry, go away, etc) and then it’s just more and more exposure to the language and you’ll get it eventually.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The Irish are increasingly bilingual it’s just that they’re learning their own language, not anyone else’s
Dasus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I know, and I’m sorry for not putting up a further disclaimer, but the English have destroyed so many cultures and languages that listing them all would’ve just taken up too much space.
Gabh mo leiscéal, I have the utmost respect for the Irish.