General Language Thread

Redpilled has been used for some years, mostly by right-leaning parts of the net.

Well that’s the interesting thing − from what I’ve seen, "matrixé" is sometimes used to describe far-right indoctrination, which is kind of the opposite of how the alt-right coopted The Matrix in English-speaking countries.

"Bluepilled" might be a decent translation, though I don't know that it's actually in common usage.

Okay, so I will go on a trip to Europe in about two months, specifically France, Italy, and UK.Since I already know English (duh), with Italian and French apparently being 89% similar, I figured that I might as well as learn French.

After all, it's one of the top 5 languages I wanted to learn (the other ones being Japanese, Spanish, Germany, and Arabic), and this seems like a good opportunity as any.

I'm gonna buy a short textbook and travel vocabulary dictionary...but also I'm gonna watch some most popular French movies several time, first with English sub and then French.

Let's see how much French I can cram down my head in just two months.

Even with high lexical similarity, French sounds very different from the other Romance languages, so there's no guarantee you could get by with French in Italy (or the reverse).

I remember when I learned Spanish, the French came bubbling up.

French has very weird orthography and pronunciation rules, and I say this as somebody who speaks Irish.

I had French in high school. I only remember "Desolé, je ne parle pas le Francaise".

I wasn't a very good student, but in my defence, I had a lousy teacher.

Edited by Kayeka on Apr 22nd 2024 at 12:06:17 PM

Well, that just means you know what you're talking about Also, I completely agree that French spelling is really weird.

Heh, yeah, of course. Still, I think it's a very good starting point and certainly would make Italian (and Spanish) not sound like a total alien language to my Asian brain.

Also:

I figured that using French lyrics translations and even better, cover of my favorite English-language songs would certainly be beneficial.

A random thought came to me. Chinese is a tonal language right? Has anyone considered using accents and diacritics in Romanisation to indicate the specific tone?

Pinyin already does that, at least for Mandarin: ā á ǎ à a

Edited by megarockman on May 2nd 2024 at 10:52:25 AM

Yep! Outside of linguistic contexts, though, people usually omit the tone diacritics.

does that include writing scripts for voice acting? I can imagine Its Pronouned Tro Pay issues stemming from forgetting to indicate the right tone for the intended meaning.

...Why would it? That's not how Chinese works. Unless rare characters are used, fluent speakers already know how to read out any text before them.

How do they know that, if the same character is pronounced differently in different contexts?

A bunch of characters do have commonly used alternate pronunciations, but they're virtually always part of a longer word or phrase that indicates how it would be pronounced.

Example: 校 is most commonly pronounced xiào, meaning "school". You'd see this character as part of words like 学校 or 校园. However it has a second pronunciation, jiào, meaning "to proofread , to align". It is used in words like 校对 or 校准. So the context itself is what indicates the pronunciation.

Edited by Alycus on May 3rd 2024 at 9:08:07 AM

...It's part and parcel of learning the language? A fluent Mandarin speaker who's also decent enough with English to work with an English-language script shouldn't have too much trouble figuring out how to pronounce, say, the phrase 一心一意 "yī xīn yī yì", even if you remove the pinyin diacritics that distinguish the "yi"s; it's not too different from an English speaker knowing that each of the three "C"s in "Pacific Ocean" is pronounced differently from each other.

And yeah, alternate character pronunctiation is a pretty marginal issue in Chinese languages (or at least Mandarin). If that's what you're referring to, you might be thinking of Japanese, which does have a variety of pronunciations for pretty much every kanji (built on the on'yomi versus kun'yomi word origin).

Thanks