No amount of exceptions and quirks will prevent you from learning any language as long as you have lots and lots of exposure. After your reach a certain base level you just keep improving as you use the language, and even the exceptions start to feel natural.
English is the only language other than my mother tongue I have achieved this level with. I’d like to think at least in writing it’s indistinguishable from a native speaker. Theoretically tho German should be easier for me as I’m Dutch. But my German never reached the same level because of the difference in exposure
My native language is a Slavic one but I can’t fucking learn Polish because the language is just too fucking funny to me.
It’s like how English speakers think Dutch is funny but turned up to 11.
The Slavic languages are interesting but I don’t know a lot about them. It must be amusing to be aware of the various levels of mutual intelligibility. Do you know any jokes Eastern Europeans make about this among themselves?
The one reason that Polish is so funny to me is the amount of homophones between it and my native language with vastly different meanings.
One of the funniest being:
Szukać - To look for (Polish)
Šukať - To fuck (Slovak, improper/slang)
Both pronounced the same way.
For me personally, German is really easy as I have been born German. Have you tried that as well?
I’m German, born and raised, but in Saarland. One time when visiting a friend in Berlin, I was at a bar and got a compliment on how good my German is even tho I’m obviously a foreigner.
That is damn funny. I don’t think we have the same thing in the UK as while we have many accents, they are so unique they sound nothing like any foreigner. I guess German accents can sound similar to foreigners speaking German?
I live 30km from the French border, I had 10 years worth of French classes at school. I always hated it, but I did an extra-curriculum to acquire a diploma because a classmate and friend of mine didn’t want to do it alone. My French is in a weird spot: I cannot form a proper sentence, but I understand listening exercises and written text well. I recently started to go through some French lessons on Duolingo and I’m already struggling with the sentences it expects me to form in unit 8…
It’s probably because you had a lot of exposure but insufficient engagement. I should probably have mentioned this in my original comment. You kind of developed a one way mastery of the language. Exposure will get you there after you get to a certain level but to get there you need lots of practice
I’m also Dutch and honestly I think part of it is the amount of subtitled English tv I watched when I was young. I tried the same with German struggled finding things to watch.
If you look at Germany or France they often dub over stuff while we subtitle everything.
It’s completely unwatchable with voice dubs isn’t it? I don’t get how anyone puts up with it
I’ve had family tell me The Emperor’s New Groove is actually great with Dutch dubs but the title in Dutch just translates to “Emperor Cuzco”. No one is gonna convince me most jokes don’t get lost in translation when the first time it happens is in the title!
I use tho instead of though as a native, although I think I might only actually do it at the end of sentences, tho. I’m not actually sure I use though during a sentence
I was raised bilingual, and spent most of my life in the UK
What I think is interesting about the word flea market is that it’s a calque in pretty much all languages.
The Swedish word is “loppis”, which is a cutesy colloquial term for “loppmarknad.” Loppa, meaning flea, and marknad meaning market.
Flohmarkt in German also means lit. “flea market.”
Marche aux puces is French, where “puce” means flea, I think this might be the origin of the term.
Japanese has the casual term フリマ (fleama), short for フリーマーケット, which is just the English term “flea market”, there’s also the term 蚤の市, just meaning “market of fleas.”
I believe Portuguese calls it a “thieves’ market”, but Spanish, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Dutch, and Mandarin all use their own native words for “flea market”; mercado de pulgas, mercato delle pulci, Блошиный рынок, Bit Pazarı, Vlooienmarkt, 跳蚤市场.
For all of the concepts and such that are identical across cultures, few things have universal names. Typically they enter the language as loanwords as well (e.g. karaoke, from Japanese ‘空オケ’, hollow orchestra), so the term “flea market” stands out to me. I’m sure there are lots of other similar things I’m not aware of though.
Edit: It’s worth mentioning that other than Swedish (native), English, and Japanese, I don’t speak any of the other languages. I’ve asked a Russian-American friend about the Russian term, and a friend in Taiwan about the Mandarin term. Otherwise I’ve checked dictionaries and the like. Don’t take my word as fact, I’m not a linguist. It was just a pattern I found interesting, because the term itself is so particular. Any and all corrections are more than welcome.
I’m also delighted by the discussion this has sparked! 💖
That reminds me of the word ‘Frank,’ which was used by the Byzantines to essentially mean ‘all those non-Roman barbarians to the west of us’ and which, after the Crusades, spread as a word across Asia meaning ‘Europeans.’
Thank you for sharing! I had not heard of this before. I particularly enjoyed this bit
Farang khi nok (Thai: ฝรั่งขี้นก, lit. ‘bird-droppings Farang’), also used in Lao, is slang commonly used as an insult to a person of white race, equivalent to white trash, as khi means feces and nok means bird, referring to the white color of bird-droppings
That’s so colourful. I love it.
It also made me think of the fictional race in Star Trek, the Ferengi. At least according to Wikipedia that is precisely the origin of their name!
Japanese fleama though appears to be a loan word and not a calque like the rest.
This is true, I don’t know which word came first. I’d wager a guess that 蚤の市 predates フリーマーケット, but it’s really just a stab in the dark on the basis that English loanwords feel more modern, and it feels unlikely that a calque would be created after a loanword has been widely adopted.
I assume that 蚤の市 is a loan word and フリーマーケット a calque. But I don’t speak any Japanese.
thieves market
I’ve definitely been to a few flea markets where I thought all this stuff was stolen.
Is tori ever used like plaza, like the Swedish word “torg?” The way I read tori in my head makes it sound almost homophonous with torg, hence why I ask.
A number of Slavic, Baltic, Norse, (and also Finnic languages like Finnish and Estonian) use some form of this word for market. It originated in Proto-slavic and passed through Old Norse into descendant languages.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/търгъ#Old_East_Slavic
The most interesting thing is that the root appears to have borrowed into Finnish twice, once probably from Slavic (as turku) and once from Old Norse (as tori).
Are you referring to Brazil Portuguese and Portugal Portuguese?
(I’m just randomly curious. And while I’m asking,)
In which country is it Mercado de Pulgas? Do you know if the other one uses Mercado de WhateverThievesisinthatPortuguese?
I started talking to a dude from Brazil a couple of months ago, and was blown away just by how different Brazilian Portuguese is from Portuguese, even just phonetically. I should’ve probably mentioned that I really only speak English, Swedish, and Japanese, so any other examples are ones that I’ve dug up in lexicons and the like, so there may be terms that are direct translations but not actually used colloquially.
I can totally see different words being used between Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal-Portuguese.
Unimportant extra: it’s not a calque in British English, because we don’t use it (to the best of my knowledge). Like a potluck, we have the concept but not a word for it, and we don’t use the American phrases either
We have a car boot sale, but that’s literal
There’s probably regional exceptions
Perhaps the Giant London Flea Market will start a trend: https://www.queenelizabetholympicpark.co.uk/whats-on/giant-london-flea-market
“Hippopotamus” is another one. It derives from the Greek words hippos (horse) and potamos (river) and this concept of river horse is present in many different languages:
- German: Flusspferd (lit. river horse)
- Dutch: Rivierpaard (lit. river horse)
- Finnish: Virtahepo (lit. stream horse)
- Danish: Flodhest (lit. flood horse)
- Chinese: 河马 (lit. river horse)
- Arabic: فرس النهر (lit. river horse)
- French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese use variations of hippopotamus.
Tiny variations exist as well:
- Hungarian: Víziló (lit. water horse)
- Afrikaans: Seekoei (lit. sea cow)
English is not a language.
English is 6 drunk raccoons driving an M1 Abrams through a Wendy’s drivethru.
Hey that’s the raccoon whisperer but Soldier from TF2. I’ve never seen that, that’s great.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
𝕯𝖎𝖊𝖘𝖊 𝕶𝖔𝖒𝖒𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖆𝖗𝖘𝖊𝖐𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓 𝖎𝖘𝖙 𝖓𝖚𝖓 𝕰𝖎𝖌𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖚𝖒 𝖉𝖊𝖗 𝕭𝖚𝖓𝖉𝖊𝖘𝖗𝖊𝖕𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖎𝖐 𝕯𝖊𝖚𝖙𝖘𝖈𝖍𝖑𝖆𝖓𝖉
Your language is weird and fucked up in its own ways, but something like 1.5 billion people know English and most of them as a second language.
Und ich musste Google Translate verwenden, um Ihnen das auf Deutsch zu sagen, aber Sie müssen es wahrscheinlich nicht tun, um auf Englisch zu antworten.
Basically every language is weird and fucked up in its own ways.
I’m a native Arabic speaker, and I have to tell you this: the number system is pretty confusing, everything is gendered, and there’s like 100 different words just to describe lions. Also, Arabic poetry always rhymes.
English is a germanic language. Is loanword an actual calque, and not an “evolved” version of a root word?
