languages

Latest posts related to languages:

1. On learning german: Difficulties

   

   Im having a great time learning german so far. Its a beautiful language with a lot of nuances!

   Maybe its too soon too speak, ive been only learning it for ~9 months now but the actual difficulties im facing are different of what i was expecting

   Before diving into it i thought that maybe the declensions were too difficult. But thats not the case. You might not decline perfectly, but with very little practice you can decline good enough to be honest

   Or the huge long-ass words. But once you recognize the words inside, this is not really a problem. Even if you dont know the meaning of every word inside, you know more or less where to cut it

   Or the gender of the nouns. But once I learned the gender along the word, i dont seem to forget it again 95% of the times. Also, although there are no rules, you can develop a sense of what the gender of a noun is even without knowing the meaning. I guess it right most of the time by now!

   The actual difficult things i found are:

   • Words dont translate 1 to 1. In the case of english-spanish translations, words that dont translate 1-1 are the exception more than the rule. So far i learned 7 words that more or less translate to “but/however”, 18 words for “to get/receive”, 79 for “to miss” and 124 words for “to happen/to occur”. Im just learning them all in a frecuency of use fashion. I hope to be able to grasp the nuances of use in the future ;)

   • The fact that german is a very nuanced language. They use actual words to convey meaning that other languages might convey via entonation or not convey at all. Basically you are very likely to lose a lot of nuanced meaning when translating from german!

   • Many many words look the same! Its not just one or a handful, its many many of them that are very similar with a different meaning

   Id say at least half the words i learned so far are like this

   If you dont believe me, just check it out. I made a list of dificult german words

   And these are only words that i know already (more or less) and 95% of them belong to the top 1000 more frequently used words. Many many more are missing!

2. Listen to accents from around the world

   

   I discovered localingual with joy, just to find out is still in its infancy… but if you like languages, the promise of a great website is there!

   Right now, it suffers three major problems. Its hard to navigate, low sample size and the voting system instead of encouraging quality, encourages the oldest/jokes to be on top (unless they are very bad or too offensive, i guess). Texas have a spongebob joke right now

   Pros? If you enjoy languages, its great to hear real accents around the world

3. Spanish people making up english words

   Its funny how a collective of people can make up and agree upon the meaning of a foreign word or even fabricate a whole new word out of thin air

   I was talking with a friend about how she was getting braces and she called them brackets instead. I realized that brackets was the spanish word for braces!

   These are brackets in english –> [ ]

   Then I realized theres plenty of examples: zapping (channel surfing), being a crack (being someone exceptionally good at something), footing (jogging),… the list goes on and on

   Im sure they all have a distint origin and story behind them than over a period of time became ingrained in all us as a collective without noticing it

   Can you think of something similar happening in english or your mother tongue? Please, let me know, Im always curious about this kind of quirks of the language :)

4. Pinky Great tit but no pinky big tit

   Refering to how Green great dragons cant exist , a friend (thanks Vadim!) pointed out another great example of how an adjetive can be inseparable from his name sometimes when its part the name. The Great tit

   

5. Taking things at face value

   Yesterday I wrote about my new years resolution and used this expression in a negative sense

   That same evening I saw the same expresison in an article used in a positive light. As in things should be taken at face value. Without looking for hidden intentions

   I researched it and this expression was “coined” refering to actual coins and meaning “trust the face in the coin”, which represents its value

   While not completely wrong, I realized this expression had to do more with trust that I wanted to imply with look beyond. So I replaced it with theres more than meets the eye, which is more generic and conveys better what I meant to say

6. Words beauty: Sentinel

   noun

   a soldier or guard whose job is to stand and keep watch.

   verb

   station a soldier or guard by (a place) to keep watch.

7. Green great dragons cant exist

   Natives (and some non-natives after a while!) can tell if something sounds off, even if they cant explain why. One of those things is adjetive order. They follow some rules that even people using english for all their lives are able to explain because it just sounds natural to them

   This order is

   quantity/number - quality/opinion - size - age - shape - color - place of origin - material - purpose NOUN
   

   This is why there cant be any green great dragon, but only great green dragons

   There seems to be some exceptions to this, like big bad wolf, but in my opinion, bad is not an opinion of what you think of the wolf, but part of the name, as in big bad-wolf :)