When you start a new language, you learn "The Rules" first, and wonder why your first language doesn't have such immutable "Rules."
Then when you get fluent, you realize there are just as many exceptions as your first language.
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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Or do Japanese: There are two main types; the one where you and everyone else neatly follows the immutable rules which you speak to superiors and to strangers by default, and the one where everyone blurts out whatever words in whatever order they come up in their brain, aka what's spoken between friends and to acquainted inferiors
I'm doing Japanese and I beleive you are referring to polite and impolite (or formal and informal) Japanese
That's correct, 敬語 perfectly follows the rules, but while there are rules for 普通体 (ある instead of あります), people mostly just talk in whatever way they want that does not follow any rules.
It's quite shocking to me as a Dutch person, we hardly have such a big difference between formal and informal Dutch
Learning a second language AND professionally teaching English to speakers of said language. English is not broken. English is actually much better than many alternatives. We don’t need to worry about noun gender. We don’t have to worry about tones. We have precise ways to indicate number and time. Formality levels are not baked into word construction. The pronunciation of words can generally be inferred from the spelling, despite learning this skill being a little complicated— but that complicated nature even has its usefulness.
We rag on English, but it is by far not the worse out there, not even close. It’s just contempt for the familiar.
The pronunciation of words can generally be inferred from the spelling
Definitely NOT. English is among the worst languages in that regard.
As a native German speaker, I really dislike the formality levels and hope someday everyone uses the informal level. In a big company it's really annoying to start with the formal level and then awkwardly switching to informal level when contacting someone for the first time.
English is the language that beats up other languages in dark alleys then rifles through their pockets for loose phrases and spare grammar.
Seriously, other languages at least adapt loanwords to their own grammar, orthography, and whatnot... English just grabs them as they are and runs away without looking back.
That's why you end up with the plural of radius being radii, or stuff like fiancé or façade (seriously, how are people who only speak English and have never seen a ç before in their lives supposed to know how to pronounce that‽)...
Of course it all comes from English being really three or four languages — (Anglo-)Saxon, Normand(/old French), and Norse — badly put together, so sprinkling bits of other languages on top didn't make much of a difference, when there were already about five different ways to pronounce, for instance, oo, and the whole vowel shift debacle didn't exactly help with this mess... but while other languages which may have had similar (if maybe less spectacular) growing pains eventually developed normative bodies, mostly from the eighteenth century onwards, that define and maintain a standard form of the language, English seems to have ignored all that and left grammar and orthography as a stylistic choice on the writers' part, and pronunciation as an exercise for the readers...
Yep I'm learning Japanese and hate how they spell "maccha" as "matcha" in English because the English one doesn't sound correct to me and annoys the fuck out of me
The one with the t has a subtle t sound to it while maccha sounds correct
Don't forget that there once was a time when smart people just added letters to words that don't do anything - like the b in debt, which was called det before. Or when America got rid of Britains U after O because newspapers charged per letter.
I don't know about "debt", I always pronounce a very subtle b when I say it and saying det just sounds like the "det" in "detrimental"
Learning German taught me how messed up non-English languages are. Having to memorize if every noun is either male, female, or neuter just so you can use the right form of "the" with it is crazy.
And then you also have different meanings depending on pronunciation, here some examples:
-
umfahren: to drive around something or to run over something
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Montage: the act of assembling or the plural of Monday
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übersetzen: to ferry across a river or to translate into another language
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umschreiben: to rewrite or to paraphrase
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durchschauen: to look through something or to understand
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unterstellen: to place something underneath or to imply or accuse someone of something
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unterhalten: to hold something underneath or to support or to converse with someone or to entertain
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wiederholen: to fetch something back or to repeat something
It isn't broken, it's just preserved
Languages with phonetic writing in the modern day likely achieved that through a language standardization process that included spelling reforms.
English's changes in spelling and grammar are mostly legitimized through influential works of the language, hence why you all gotta learn Shakespeare in highschool, you're being taught the history of how the language we speak today evolved.
There is no centralized academy of English grammar, and official dictionaries in English for the most part add words descriptively to reflect how the lexicon is changing in real time.
Put together this all means that the English language isn't remotely broken, it's just old, older than most modernly written languages by a couple of centuries actually.
Funniest part is if you study immigrant settlements in the Americas from all those countries that underwent standardizations, they're all about as "broken" as English looks too, because they're forms of those languages preserved from before standardization came to their homelands.
Japanese and Italian are especially funny since the standardization came into enforcement recently enough that native speakers from Japan and Italy will be bewildered by speakers from the Americas because the speakers from the Americas speak in a way that sounds like their grandparents or great grandparents if they recognize the dialect at all to begin with.
Languages with phonetic writing in the modern day likely achieved that through a language standardization process that included spelling reforms.
Not Arabic. It is pronounced as it is written. Except a handful of words that have a different transcription to make them easily distinguishable.
As someone who is learning Arabic right now this is the vaaaaastest oversimplification I have ever seen on that subject in particular.
For starters, dialects
We only refer to MSA when talking about Arabic. Most Arab speakers consider dialects side languages to Classical Arabic. They have never had a transcription throughoutout history. People started writing in their dialects only recently with the arrival of SMS and the internet.
I get that as a new comer to Arabic you probably have come across learning materials for dialects like Egyptian and levantine. But in reality you won't find uni courses for those dialects because academics don't consider them to be proper languages with clear grammar and an established vocabulary.
Actually I chose to learn dialect first because literally everyone who knows anything about the language cautions that native speakers will swear up and down that you should learn MSA and then be completely incomprehensible to you because of how little anyone actually uses it in the Arab world.
I've been working with my teacher for a year and a half now and she agrees that MSA is basically pointless unless you intend to start consuming arabic language news or listening to arabic language political speeches.
BTW this is from a professional cultural expert who's literal job is to prep government workers and businessfolks to be able to engage successfully with the Arabic world, something she's been doing for 20 years now, so I'm pretty sure she knows what she's talking about.
You do you. And you have to take into consideration what your goal is by learning Arabic.
Dialects are definitely easier to learn and more rewarding as it allows you to converse with people and test your advancements. But you won't be able to easily transition to another dialect. Because MSA is the glue that make the intelligible.
Learning MSA will take you triple the time. And I imagine your teacher is both proud of his dialect. But also doesn't want you to drop learning if you were to have chosen MSA