In that situations most people half assed understood it, or one gave a quick summary. Myself I was only involved in such a situation twice I think. But my friends tell me the same stories.
I do a lot of Aikido, visiting seminars in south France, Switzerland, Lichtenstein etc. where Italians show up often. As soon as you get into a talk with them the first minutes they only talk Italian until they grudgingly accept that you don't speak the language. Very fascinating "syndrome".
A friend of mine does Aikido, too. He is from Catalonia, Catalan is a rough mixture between French, "Spanish" and Occitan. On an Aikido seminar they where sitting outside of the Bread&Breakfast drinking some wine and having a barbecue. My friend plays Guitar, so they had some music.
Suddenly an Italian from a hotel across the street showed up. He sat by them, started to talk to them, later sung with them, took over the show completely. Was great fun. But the point is: he constantly only spoke Italian. And while the languages all come from latin, modern Italian and Catalan are quite different languages.
My friend said it was one of the most funny experiences.
I mean: I would be to shy to approach a party of singing people, which I don't know, in a foreign country and just sit down and start singing, in my own language, mind you.
Glad that you agree somewhat:D Sometimes I have the impression people don't really try to understand/comprehend what I write... as I'm not a native english speaker...
That is no wonder. Larry Wall is an American. He is not able to correlate the sounds he hears to what he thinks how a Kana is actually pronounced. If he was a self taught Finn, German or Italian he had no trouble at all to understand it.
And, Larry Wall is a linguist. He claims many decisions in PERL, at least till PERL 4, are based on linguistic 'principles' unfortunately plenty of people don't grasp his thinking.
Just listen to an Italian opera, they only have 5 clear vovels. A, e, I, o, u. And in jap. they are pronounced like in Italian, not like in American English.
The u in luck does not sound like an u but more like a bastard mixture between an a and an u (considering Latin/German/Italian/Finnish/Japanese sound of an u) pretty close to an a for me. All the examples you gave tend into the same direction.
There are also millions of people who show the establishment how to teach languages so that the students learn it quickly. The internet is full with 'learn any language fluently in three month'. The Thai script is very very remotely inspired by Sanscrit.
At the time it was 'invented' it was a kind of hobby of princes or kings to invent new scripts. I find Thai funny, e.g. every letter has a proper name. They don't need a radio alphabet to spell out a word with single letters. The inventor took care of it already.
Why you believe that the Latin alphabet is easier for an outsider to learn than e.g. Sanskrit or Khmer or Arabic for you, is beyond me. There are a few complicated alphabets, but if a 5 year old child of a camel herder, can learn the Arabic script in about a year, it says quite a lot about you that you believe you or any other adult westerner is less capable than a 5 year child.
if there's a similar benefit associated with being conversant in multiple programming languages. Of course it is.
However as most languages evolve into multiple paradigm languages (object oriented + functional + generic) and have higher level concepts in the libraries, this is less needed in our days (considering you are fluent in Java/Scala or C++).
Around 1995 I was on a talk in Frankfurt, Germany, by Bjarne Stroustoup. His final words were something like: "However everyone of us should learn more programming languages. And natural languages, of course!"
Thailand is neither a member of the francophonie, nor was it ever colonized/occupied by European conquerors. That is one reason why the Thai consider themselves so special.
While most Thai learn English, many speak several local languages and understand or even speak Mandarin.
If you remove the Italian, you are right. I have been in talks at a table where everyone spoke English except the Italian... he only spoke Italian. If an Italian approaches you outside his country you can bet he first addresses you in Italian:)
I have sympathyâ with the Greeks in that regard. The worst ofc are the English speaking barbarians, not being able to pronounce a single Greek god correctly... pretty sad. On the other hand they also can not pronounce most Germanic/Nordic gods correctly.
We where specifically told that it would NOT be the United States of Europe but a trade union. Who told you that and why did you believe it? Of course we are transforming slowly into united states of Europe. However greatly different than the USA.
I don't want what we have now or where it's going. I do. Most 'anti EU' stuff is just propaganda by idiots.
Spanish has 50 verb tenses? How should that be possible? It is a simplified version of Latin. That means 3 primary tenses. Plus the 'completed' form of it and then the subjunctive. And if you speak any other European languge, that will have a similar amount of tenses.
You are quite right. I once learned Japanese, forgot everything except what I need for my martial arts and: except all the Chinese characters. I forgot Hiragana and Katakana, but not many on the Kanji. I occasionally by accident learn new Chinese(Japanese) Pictograms (actually they are mostly not pictograms, but ideograms and logograms). So I was researching about the Lua programming language, stumbled over a language called 'bright'. It is more C like and used by a company called http://mcci.com/ I actually was searching for some other Lua variation... I don't remember what made me make that circle but I ended up with the Chinese Ideogram for 'bright'. Which is the combination of the two pictograms for moon and sun, combining them into one ideogram.
The funny thing is, when I watch movies on youtube (Chinese fantasy/martial arts etc.) I automatically pick up all the Chinese glyphs, they instantly form words in my mind.
I guess if I would actually learn 800 more glyphs, I could read stuff probably ten times faster... however I focus on Thai right now.
Mandarin is since decades the only official language. Obviously China still has its hundreds of local languages. Some would call Mandarin high Chinese. I don't agree with your idea that the tone would change from region to region, in Mandarin. Mandarin and Cantonese are actually quite different, probably only 50% common words, and Cantonese has one tone more, or was it even two?
In a way it's like asking "What's the simplest computer language?". Actually not.
I go into the cinema now. School english: I'm going into the cinema now. I go into the cinema tomorrow. School english: I will be going into the cinema tomorrow. We go into the cinema tomorrow. School english: We are going into the cinema tomorrow,
Not sure if my school english examples are fully correct. Anyway, I badly translate now Chinese into english:
I go cinema tomorrow I go cinema tomorrow we go cinema
No 'going', no 'are' no 'will'. Chinese is a 'baby' language. Most asian languages are in one sense or the other, baby languages.
The main reason that people have problems with tonal languages is that they feel silly to try to reproduce the tones. In other words when you are suposed to make a high tone, you semiconsciously make a middle high tone. When you are supposed to make a rising tone, you make a high tone.
To learn in a professional school they usualy have band machines which overemphasize the tones of the language, that makes it essier to hear them. But actually, in an intensive course, e.g. 3 month in the country, or even simply watching youtube videos will change that quickly.
The real trick however is to approach it like an actor on stage. That is true for every language, but I learned that only after I was already 40, so to late for my english:) Actor on stage means: like in a song, you do your best to mimic how a native person in that 'role' would talk. If you try to learn british english you take a book like 'Pride and Prejudice' and try to speak loe one of the protagonists in the movies. You don't simply try to 'just say the words' as you can, you try to imitate the sound, the tones etc. the emotions.
The same in dancing or martial arts. Bad dancers and slow learners suffer from the subconscious believe that they look like a poser (bragging), if they do it properly. So they do it awkwardly.
You can not learn to handle a sword without pretending to be a Knight or Samurai, and posing (in the sense of posing in front of a camera) in the way how a Samurai or Knight would move.
If Chinese had a simple western or similar to Korean writing system, it definitely would be one of the simplest languages on the planet. You only need to learn the vocabulary... no real grammar... thats it (yes I simplify).
It is still not true. Polish meeting Spanish in Paris will likely speak English and not French, because one of both wont speek French, one of both wont speak Polish, and one of both wont speak Spanish. Same for any other combination of countriees and meeting points. Or do you really think there are more than a hand full non finish people in eurpoe that actually speak finish? Or do you think otherwise, there more than a few thousand Finns that don't speak english? Or do you think finnland will scratch engllish now from the school curriculum? Or any other EU country will?
Countries like Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania are to small that any other country will put their languages into the school curriculum (that was exagerated). And no one in europe is so dumb to remove English from it. And we most certainly don't select one or two languages as european lingua franca. The rest of the world is mainly explored with English and Spanish, so both will stay in the curriculum.
English, being a phonetic language, means that all words are comprised of the same 26 characters. Even if you come across a completely new word, you can determine pronunciation fairly easily, No idea whst you mean with 'phonetic'. However your idea that you can determine pronounciation from the writing is completely wrong, even idiotic. a) idea, pronounces the first i as ey as the word 'I' b) idiotic, pronounces the first i es ee like in the word see
For a non english, learning the english writing of the words is as hell as learning Thai writing. 26 letters are not enough to write english. But at the time the writing was established, people where to dumb to invent new letters (or keep the few they invented) .
You are 'complaining' about asian languages often being tonal. However likewise the non english natives bitch about, were, where, we're etc. I guess there are people here/hear that have better examples. People... should be spelled peeple. Because that is how the pronounciation sounds to me.
Regarding latin letters, english has the most complicated spelling/pronounciation in the world. Even Tagalog is joke easy, because the use a, e, i, o, u like any other european language, except english and partly frensh.
Why you write e.g. 'look' instead of 'luk' is beyond me... oh, the spelling for 'luk' is to close to 'luck'? But 'luck' should actually be spelled 'lack' and 'lack' should be spelled 'laeck' or with a german or norwegian like a-umlaut.
In other words: english is an easy to learn language, grammar wise and vocabulary wise, for an european! Because most european languages share a part of the vocabulary and have similar grammars.
However the writing system with the purely fitting (oh, did I write purely wrong, well it is not red underlined) 26 letters is anything close to 'phonetic'... learn Japanese, or Italian, or German: those write _exactly_ es you speak it. With a few exceptions or rules in german, e.g when to insert an 'h'. Ah, and Finnish comes to mind.
Slashdot Mirror
In that situations most people half assed understood it, or one gave a quick summary.
Myself I was only involved in such a situation twice I think. But my friends tell me the same stories.
I do a lot of Aikido, visiting seminars in south France, Switzerland, Lichtenstein etc. where Italians show up often. As soon as you get into a talk with them the first minutes they only talk Italian until they grudgingly accept that you don't speak the language. Very fascinating "syndrome".
A friend of mine does Aikido, too. He is from Catalonia, Catalan is a rough mixture between French, "Spanish" and Occitan. On an Aikido seminar they where sitting outside of the Bread&Breakfast drinking some wine and having a barbecue. My friend plays Guitar, so they had some music.
Suddenly an Italian from a hotel across the street showed up. He sat by them, started to talk to them, later sung with them, took over the show completely. Was great fun. But the point is: he constantly only spoke Italian. And while the languages all come from latin, modern Italian and Catalan are quite different languages.
My friend said it was one of the most funny experiences.
I mean: I would be to shy to approach a party of singing people, which I don't know, in a foreign country and just sit down and start singing, in my own language, mind you.
Glad that you agree somewhat :D ... as I'm not a native english speaker ...
Sometimes I have the impression people don't really try to understand/comprehend what I write
That is no wonder.
Larry Wall is an American.
He is not able to correlate the sounds he hears to what he thinks how a Kana is actually pronounced.
If he was a self taught Finn, German or Italian he had no trouble at all to understand it.
And, Larry Wall is a linguist. He claims many decisions in PERL, at least till PERL 4, are based on linguistic 'principles' unfortunately plenty of people don't grasp his thinking.
Just listen to an Italian opera, they only have 5 clear vovels. A, e, I, o, u. And in jap. they are pronounced like in Italian, not like in American English.
Well, in German you say 'into'.
I try to remember your suggestion!
The u in luck does not sound like an u but more like a bastard mixture between an a and an u (considering Latin/German/Italian/Finnish/Japanese sound of an u) pretty close to an a for me.
All the examples you gave tend into the same direction.
There are also millions of people who show the establishment how to teach languages so that the students learn it quickly.
The internet is full with 'learn any language fluently in three month'.
The Thai script is very very remotely inspired by Sanscrit.
At the time it was 'invented' it was a kind of hobby of princes or kings to invent new scripts.
I find Thai funny, e.g. every letter has a proper name. They don't need a radio alphabet to spell out a word with single letters. The inventor took care of it already.
Most people liked it. ...
It was Debian based if I recall correctly.
However the company falter at some point
Not like there's any real difference between the two...
Then I wonder: who is the bigger idiot, you or him?
Why you believe that the Latin alphabet is easier for an outsider to learn than e.g. Sanskrit or Khmer or Arabic for you, is beyond me.
There are a few complicated alphabets, but if a 5 year old child of a camel herder, can learn the Arabic script in about a year, it says quite a lot about you that you believe you or any other adult westerner is less capable than a 5 year child.
if there's a similar benefit associated with being conversant in multiple programming languages.
Of course it is.
However as most languages evolve into multiple paradigm languages (object oriented + functional + generic) and have higher level concepts in the libraries, this is less needed in our days (considering you are fluent in Java/Scala or C++).
Around 1995 I was on a talk in Frankfurt, Germany, by Bjarne Stroustoup.
His final words were something like:
"However everyone of us should learn more programming languages.
And natural languages, of course!"
Basically every 'arab' in France speaks French. What is your point?
Thailand is neither a member of the francophonie, nor was it ever colonized/occupied by European conquerors.
That is one reason why the Thai consider themselves so special.
While most Thai learn English, many speak several local languages and understand or even speak Mandarin.
If you remove the Italian, you are right. ... he only spoke Italian. :)
I have been in talks at a table where everyone spoke English except the Italian
If an Italian approaches you outside his country you can bet he first addresses you in Italian
Those people don't need to learn English, they already learned it in school, and likely French, too.
I have sympathyâ with the Greeks in that regard. ... pretty sad.
The worst ofc are the English speaking barbarians, not being able to pronounce a single Greek god correctly
On the other hand they also can not pronounce most Germanic/Nordic gods correctly.
We where specifically told that it would NOT be the United States of Europe but a trade union.
Who told you that and why did you believe it?
Of course we are transforming slowly into united states of Europe. However greatly different than the USA.
I don't want what we have now or where it's going.
I do. Most 'anti EU' stuff is just propaganda by idiots.
Spanish has 50 verb tenses? How should that be possible?
It is a simplified version of Latin. That means 3 primary tenses. Plus the 'completed' form of it and then the subjunctive.
And if you speak any other European languge, that will have a similar amount of tenses.
However Russians usually do not attempt to NATO conferences.
Vacation in the Philippines is actually extremely cheap.
SOS comes from Morse alphabet. ... ...
---
Because for its unique pattern. Later the term 'save our souls' was coined to make it easier for the kids to remember those three letters.
You are quite right. ...
I once learned Japanese, forgot everything except what I need for my martial arts and: except all the Chinese characters. I forgot Hiragana and Katakana, but not many on the Kanji.
I occasionally by accident learn new Chinese(Japanese) Pictograms (actually they are mostly not pictograms, but ideograms and logograms).
So I was researching about the Lua programming language, stumbled over a language called 'bright'. It is more C like and used by a company called http://mcci.com/
I actually was searching for some other Lua variation
I don't remember what made me make that circle but I ended up with the Chinese Ideogram for 'bright'. Which is the combination of the two pictograms for moon and sun, combining them into one ideogram.
The funny thing is, when I watch movies on youtube (Chinese fantasy/martial arts etc.) I automatically pick up all the Chinese glyphs, they instantly form words in my mind.
I guess if I would actually learn 800 more glyphs, I could read stuff probably ten times faster ... however I focus on Thai right now.
Mandarin is since decades the only official language. Obviously China still has its hundreds of local languages. Some would call Mandarin high Chinese. I don't agree with your idea that the tone would change from region to region, in Mandarin. Mandarin and Cantonese are actually quite different, probably only 50% common words, and Cantonese has one tone more, or was it even two?
In a way it's like asking "What's the simplest computer language?".
Actually not.
I go into the cinema now. School english: I'm going into the cinema now.
I go into the cinema tomorrow. School english: I will be going into the cinema tomorrow.
We go into the cinema tomorrow. School english: We are going into the cinema tomorrow,
Not sure if my school english examples are fully correct. Anyway, I badly translate now Chinese into english:
I go cinema
tomorrow I go cinema
tomorrow we go cinema
No 'going', no 'are' no 'will'. Chinese is a 'baby' language. Most asian languages are in one sense or the other, baby languages.
The main reason that people have problems with tonal languages is that they feel silly to try to reproduce the tones.
In other words when you are suposed to make a high tone, you semiconsciously make a middle high tone.
When you are supposed to make a rising tone, you make a high tone.
To learn in a professional school they usualy have band machines which overemphasize the tones of the language, that makes it essier to hear them. But actually, in an intensive course, e.g. 3 month in the country, or even simply watching youtube videos will change that quickly.
The real trick however is to approach it like an actor on stage. That is true for every language, but I learned that only after I was already 40, so to late for my english :) Actor on stage means: like in a song, you do your best to mimic how a native person in that 'role' would talk. If you try to learn british english you take a book like 'Pride and Prejudice' and try to speak loe one of the protagonists in the movies. You don't simply try to 'just say the words' as you can, you try to imitate the sound, the tones etc. the emotions.
The same in dancing or martial arts. Bad dancers and slow learners suffer from the subconscious believe that they look like a poser (bragging), if they do it properly. So they do it awkwardly.
You can not learn to handle a sword without pretending to be a Knight or Samurai, and posing (in the sense of posing in front of a camera) in the way how a Samurai or Knight would move.
If Chinese had a simple western or similar to Korean writing system, it definitely would be one of the simplest languages on the planet. You only need to learn the vocabulary ... no real grammar ... thats it (yes I simplify).
It is still not true.
Polish meeting Spanish in Paris will likely speak English and not French, because one of both wont speek French, one of both wont speak Polish, and one of both wont speak Spanish.
Same for any other combination of countriees and meeting points.
Or do you really think there are more than a hand full non finish people in eurpoe that actually speak finish? Or do you think otherwise, there more than a few thousand Finns that don't speak english? Or do you think finnland will scratch engllish now from the school curriculum? Or any other EU country will?
Countries like Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania are to small that any other country will put their languages into the school curriculum (that was exagerated). And no one in europe is so dumb to remove English from it. And we most certainly don't select one or two languages as european lingua franca. The rest of the world is mainly explored with English and Spanish, so both will stay in the curriculum.
English, being a phonetic language, means that all words are comprised of the same 26 characters. Even if you come across a completely new word, you can determine pronunciation fairly easily,
No idea whst you mean with 'phonetic'. However your idea that you can determine pronounciation from the writing is completely wrong, even idiotic.
a) idea, pronounces the first i as ey as the word 'I'
b) idiotic, pronounces the first i es ee like in the word see
For a non english, learning the english writing of the words is as hell as learning Thai writing.
26 letters are not enough to write english. But at the time the writing was established, people where to dumb to invent new letters (or keep the few they invented) .
You are 'complaining' about asian languages often being tonal. However likewise the non english natives bitch about, were, where, we're etc. I guess there are people here/hear that have better examples. People ... should be spelled peeple. Because that is how the pronounciation sounds to me.
Regarding latin letters, english has the most complicated spelling/pronounciation in the world. Even Tagalog is joke easy, because the use a, e, i, o, u like any other european language, except english and partly frensh.
Why you write e.g. 'look' instead of 'luk' is beyond me ... oh, the spelling for 'luk' is to close to 'luck'? But 'luck' should actually be spelled 'lack' and 'lack' should be spelled 'laeck' or with a german or norwegian like a-umlaut.
In other words: english is an easy to learn language, grammar wise and vocabulary wise, for an european! Because most european languages share a part of the vocabulary and have similar grammars.
However the writing system with the purely fitting (oh, did I write purely wrong, well it is not red underlined) 26 letters is anything close to 'phonetic' ... learn Japanese, or Italian, or German: those write _exactly_ es you speak it. With a few exceptions or rules in german, e.g when to insert an 'h'. Ah, and Finnish comes to mind.