Languages! Are! Weird!

Played alot of emulated games in English since I was in gradeschool and later through watching english subs on anime and manga.

Also, keep in mind that on a written forum like this one, nonnative speakers have more time to formulate their sentences and it's not as spontaneous as in-person, spoken communication.

This is certainly the case with me and German. On most written forums, barring the odd ending or gender mistake, nobody's the wiser as to my nonnative speaker status. When speaking, ich sprechen Deutsch wie italienisch Fußballtrainer.

"Ich habe fertig."

Of course, written communication can mask a lot, but then I find it can also help avoid mistakes like the dreaded "would of" and the likes of it.

You sure fooled me the first time I've read some of your german in the german translation thread.

edited 24th Mar '14 12:57:52 PM by BaconManiac5000

We used to have the word "Aeroplane" in german as can be heard here but "Flugzeug"(lit. Flight-stuff) fully replaced it.

With "Schmetterling" (lit. smash-ling) the train of though goes: Butterfly => Butter is made by smashing it => Smash-ling.

Pen would be "Füller", a "Kugelschreiber"(lit. Spherewriter) is a ballpoint pen and usally is abbreviated as "Kulli".

Science is "Wissenschaft" (lit. 'makes knowledge ") and "Naturwissenschaft" is nature science.

edited 24th Mar '14 1:25:29 PM by Kiefen

By the way, "kulli" is Finnish for "dick".

My that would've been an awkward conversation in the office...

You ballpoint pen, you.

Yay, I now know another Finnish word besides "Perkele".

I know. That's why I don't use it, unless I'm pissed off or I want to use it as an example of words I know from other languages.

edited 24th Mar '14 2:40:56 PM by Quag15

And it's also a rude one!

I had a Pakistani friend who learned his English by watching lots and lots of Hollywood movies. The thing was, he heard lots of swear words, but didn't understand the differing levels of severity. So he'd throw out "fuck" as often as "damn", etc. Apparently. He was out of that by the time I met him.

So would watching shows in Spanish or something help me to learn the language?

I have a book that teaches me German words. I memorized "Kraftfahrzeugsinnenausstattungsneugeruchsgenuss"... Which means "new car smell". But the literal translation is funny. For example, there's a German word which means "feigning surprise at a surprise party", which literally translates to "Surprise-party-surprise-hypocrisy".

@Physical; All my Spanish teachers suggested that and the few college courses I took involved watching soap operas made as instructional videos. It's probably not that helpful for a brand new beginner to just start watching Spanish language TV, since I never had any idea what was going on, but yeah. Expose yourself to the language regularly via TV and start picking out the words you know and you can learn to figure out context.

I cannot for the love of God spell answer without thinking in my mind an-swer.

Also, is it normal for romance languages other than French to have the to in their infinitives at the end of the word (i.e English: to choose = French: choisir, ir being like to)?

edited 25th Mar '14 12:17:08 AM by jupiterrocks24

I know that English infinitives used to end in -en.

to sit = siten/sitten

to buy = byen/buyyen

to speak = speken/speaken

to lie (down) = lyyn/lien? to lie (falsehood) = lien/lien?

I wrote the old forms and what they'd obviously be now.

In Finland we get loads of TV programmes from around the world (mostly the UK and the US, though) and they're always subtitled. Same with movies, except for children's movies, which are often dubbed.

I highly recommend watching foreign stuff with subtitles if you want to learn the language. You won't even notice that you're learning but if a word or expression is repeated in a show or movie you'll probably be able to use it after you've watched the show/film with subtitles, even if you didn't even know that you noticed that the same translation always corresponded to the same phrase in the audio.

Some people claim that subtitles make it impossible to focus on the actual programme/film, but I think it's just a matter of getting used to subtitles - which shouldn't take more than one movie or so. (Or maybe it does take longer - when I was a kid some of the cartoons I used to watch were subtitled and while I don't remember ever having a problem with it it's of course possible that it did in fact take me hours to get used to it, but I've just forgotten.)

Same situation as Best Of, here. I watched American sitcoms and British dramas with English-speaking actors and Norwegian subtitles since I was small child, so learning English basically started at the same time I learned how to read the subtitles. Also, listening to English dialogue really helps to figure out word placement and other such conventions. Thinking about it, I spent approximately one-two hours every day watching American series (Fresh Prince, Step By Step, Full House, Mac Gyver, Friends and a lot of other stuff), which is probably more regular studying than I ever did for school.

I'd also like to add (this has nothing to do with speaking English and pronounciation and stuff, but everything to do with vocabulary, sentence structuring and the like), gaming really forced me to learn a lot of English very fast. Only children's games or licensed games for movies were translated to Norwegian, so learning English went from being a side-effect from entertainment to being a pre-requisite for entertainment. The Pokemon-games I played since fourth or fifth grade of elementary school were all in English, no translation available except for what was in the game handbook or through the anime. Together with helpful visuals and consulting the translation, learning English pretty much happened automatically. By sixth grade, I was playing text-heavy games like Baldurs Gate, Golden Sun and Runescape like it was the most natural thing in the world.

edited 25th Mar '14 8:09:55 AM by Lemurian

Apparently scythe got it's awkward spelling because it was wrongly tho't to be related to Latin scissor.

All in favor of going back to the more correct sithe?

Huh. My brother tells me that island and debt were originally iland and det but we added the silent letters to make them look French, which they aren't.

Kind of, Debt come from Old French Dete which come from Latin Debita. It came into English as Det but the unbelonging B was added to make it look more Latin.

Island come from Old English Iġland a compound of Ieġ and Land. Effectively meaning 'Waterland'. It is in no way related to Latin Insula but was tho't to be during the trend of Latinization. Hence the unneeded and unwanted S.

edited 30th Mar '14 7:51:05 AM by blackcoldren

Why is the mouth a feminine word in Spanish(la boca) but masculine in German? (Der Mund)

Two reasons. First, the gender of nouns can and does change over time. Second, the two words in question are not related so it can't be assumed they shared a gender in the first place.

I can't find a whole lot of history on Boca but Mouth is thought to have been a masculine noun since Proto-Germanic. It has also maintained it's gender over the vast majority of The Germanic Languages, with exceptions being languages with Common Gender.

Latin Mentum is thought to be a cognate to the Germanic words and it's gender has become Neuter over time.

edited 30th Mar '14 9:29:49 PM by blackcoldren

See here, for a start.