This could be mechanical things like the order of adjectives, or more complex/personal things on your journey of learning another language.
I want to start learning Norwegian again and I remembered learning a lot about citrus fruits as I went on Wikipedia adjacent trips.
there’s one cool language feature that English doesn’t have and it’s really annoying - a way to answer questions posed in the negative.
if someone asks something like “don’t you want to come with me?”, whether you answer “yes” or “no”, it’s going to confuse them. you normally have to repeat the sentence, “yes, I want to come with you” or “no, I don’t want to come with you”.
in my native language (Assyrian), you can say “dach” which would mean the “yes, I want to come with you”. I think in German they say “doch”, in Norwegian it’s “jo”?
I’m an absolute beginner, but Finnish is interesting for two reasons.
First, noun cases. it is like conjugation of verbs in the Romance languages, but applied to nouns too. So there are no prepositions, you just modify the word endings instead. E.g. house is talo and in the house is talossa.
Second, vowel harmony. There are three vowel groups separated by mouth placement. Back vowels are a/o/u, middle vowels are i/e, front vowels are ä/ö/y. I’m not clear on the complete rules but simple words must have harmony, meaning the front and back vowels can’t be mixed together, and middle vowels are neutral and can go either way. From the earlier example, the vowels in talo are in the back of the mouth, but for sisäänkäynti (entrance) they are all front/middle. I’ve heard Japanese is similar.
That’s kinda like how in Spanish vowels can be either weak or strong, with a/e/o being strong and i/u being weak. When a word contains consecutive strong vowels, they’re pronounced as separate syllables, such as leal pronounced LEH-al. This is known as “hiato” which there might be word for in English of which I’m unaware. But consecutive weak vowels, or a combination of a weak vowel and a strong vowel, are pronounced as a single syllable. For example, violín is pronounced veeuh-LEEN. That combination is known as “diptongo.” There’s an exception though, if a word’s stress is on a weak vowel it becomes a strong vowel, like in río which becomes REE-uh.
I like the distinction between the two “to be” forms in Spanish (ser/estar) and how it modifies the meaning of the verb. Eg. ser listo != estar listo.
It’s also nice seeing languages with a mostly free word order, that rely on grammar instead, like Greek, even though that probably makes them harder to learn.
I still find it funny that the Swedish word for vegetable is “grönsak”, which literally translates to “green thing”.
I like how Chinese has a pronoun for we/us including the person you’re speaking to (咱们 zanmen/zamen) in addition to the plural pronoun 我们 women that could be either.
