Chinese glorious history and cultural...

[kbdfr]

Go on guys, this thread is just fascinating.

As someone who's been dealing with languages all his life,
with French as mother tongue and German and English learnt at school,
I really enjoy the discussion

[y11971alex]

You need to be taught grammar to know how to teach grammar. Intuition is almost incommunicable.

Unless you study grammar in an academic way.

[Mr.Nobody]

That's great guidance.When you feel it's natural and intuitive, it's because you have been used to it, just like when we're typing on a keyboard, we were not born to know the keyboard, but we've been using it everyday for quite a long time, we get so used to its layout, it becomes intuitive to type the right key. In fact it takes 4 phases to form: 1.do it right 2.reapeat the process a certain amount of times 3.get used to it 4.it becomes natural or intuitive.

[micrex22]

You need to be taught grammar to know how to teach grammar. Intuition is almost incommunicable.

Unless you study grammar in an academic way.

Yep. I would never want to learn English as a second language if it wasn't already my native one.

Awhile ago I found this article highlighting some of the issues with both Japanese and English; I was curious which one was more difficult because they're really unlike most other languages and share a lot of similarities (although probably not often talked about). I thought it was a good read:
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/japanese-is-easy/

Here are some of my favourite highlights from the article:

Another weird consonant is the way R is pronounced in American English. In the vast majority of languages that have some kind of R sound, it’s either a trill or a quick tap against the alveolar ridge (that ridge behind your front teeth). This thing we do in American English where we bunch up the tongue in the middle of our mouth is basically designed to torture nearly everyone else on the planet.

This is something actually interesting because it does seem to be the case. Whenever I speak words in other languages, I instinctively switch to the 'alveolar' way. Such as in Russian with "привет", you wouldn't pronounce the R as you would in North American English.

Compared to other languages of the world this is an above-averagely large number of vowels, and English can be fairly described as having an “unusually rich and complex vowel system, and a great deal of variation in vowel pronunciation across dialects.”“Unusually rich and complex.” That’s a good thing if you’re talking about, say, cuisine, or literature. For learning a language it just means trouble.

pity the second language learner who has to learn that the e at the end of bite isn’t pronounced, but is stuck on so you know it’s a different vowel than the word bit.

That’s much less complicated than the variety of consonant sequences you have to wrap your tongue around in English, where you can begin a syllable with three consonants (strike), end it with four consonants (texts, which actually ends in the four sounds ksts), and of course there are various different two- and three- and four-consonant possibilities.

That's a good point actually, 'texts' is fairly abysmal to pronounce. It reminds me of the word 'clothes' in a way-- most native English speakers themselves pronounce it in a shorthand as 'close' and drop the ð.

Here's what I can gather with some of the unusual similarities of English and Japanese:

• Omission of noun gender (unlike virtually every other language; I got burned so hard with it in French because I'd never pay attention in class). If there are other languages that omit noun gender that I'm not aware of I'd love to know.
• Alphabet doesn't always represent pronunciation
• Random nonsensical exceptions (I think in Japanese they call that 'Rendoku', correct me if I'm wrong it's been awhile)

Fun stuff, I really should get back into languages at some point.

[gwyn]

If there are other languages that omit noun gender that I'm not aware of I'd love to know.

A map for you.



Finnish, Estonian, Sami, Hungarian, and Turkish are cyan, meaning no noun gender (or noun categorisation system, because as the map shows there are variations). The first four languages in that list are part of the Uralic language family. Only Turkish is not.

Grammatical gender has been found to be present in Proto-Indo-European by reconstruction, which would partly explain its ubiquity in many parts of the world. Turkic and Uralic languages aren't descended from Proto-Indo-European, neither is Basque (represented in green in the map).

Wikipedia has a list of languages by type of grammatical genders.

Linguistics is cool.

[Mr.Nobody]

Better spend some time learning some Chinese or at least ask people who speak Chinese before getting any Chinese character tatoo, otherwise you will end up spending more time removing the taboo and regretting.

This character means disaster or disastrous


Well eunuch...


Diabetes


Cheap slut


This character means Rooster hen or chicken, but when it is associated with female, it means whore.


Cowardly,turn yellow...


A disrespectful way to address a foreigner popular among people who speak Cantonese, people speak Mandarin don't use this word, they call foreigners “老外”, which carries a humorous tone not a disrespectful word.