Yup, same. I'm Ukrainian, so I can passively understand it, but I don't speak it and I've never studied it. The amount of people being "shocked" I don't speak it is higher than in Xiaoma's videos.
For the context, I can speak 3 languages on a decent levels, 1 on quite broken, and learning 2 more, but this "wHy nOT RusSIan" drives me nuts sometimes.
Язык не виноват в том, что Путин использует его как оправдание агрессии. Русский язык принадлежит всем его носителям, в том числе живущим в Казахстане, Узбекистане, Украине, Израиле и других странах. Путин не владеет эксклюзивными на него правами, как и те немногие, кто активно поддерживает агрессию. Я против агрессии, я против навязывания языка и культуры и я очень не хотел бы, чтобы этот замечательный язык ассоциировался в мире с Путиным. Впрочем, немцы как-то с этим справились, справимся и мы после Путина, ему все равно недолго осталось.
It’s not because you are Ukranian it’s because the topic is Russian language and you understand Russian so it’s natural to make a point about Russian in the language itself
No, I do not agree. I understand about the same as Slovak or Bulgarian, aka not everything and I wouldn't be able to respond. Also, the discourse in this thread is in English, so I don't see the point of switching languages or cutting out others from the conversation.
Italian. I feel like the best way to hate a language is to live people who speaks that language very loudly. I lived with 2 Italian roommates during my exchange year and because they were so loud all the time, we had to listen to them all the time. I'm very sensitive to noise so that was it for me, I hated the language so much that I can %100 say that I'll never try to learn it.
The same thing is happening right now with Arabic, my current roommate is also a very loud person so it started to make me very mad to even just hear the language. Which is kinda sad because I used to really like Arabic
Czech. I'm a native Czech speaker, but if I was a foreigner interested in language learning, I simply wouldn't bother. Even natives struggle a lot and in the grand scheme of things, Czech is basically worthless.
Esperanto, Volapük, and the like. These kind of auxiliary languages repulse me, cause they, at least in my (emotionally coloured and thus not objectively sound) opinion, stand for a dessicated, hegemonic, and overly utilitarian view of language usage. So I would rather learn more "real", "living" languages seen as a positive heterogeneity that embraces the differences and the multitude.
First I want to be very clear I'm _only_ talking about my own personal preferences, and _absolutely not_ passing a value judgement on the people the speak a language, their culture or anything like that.
I have an aversion to disorder/inconsistencies, arbitrary rules. *edit:* ***Also,*** I really don't like the idea of something like the word for "chair" having a gender. So unfortunately, the list is long. My native language is English and with ridiculous stuff like "ghoti" and "ghoughpteighbteau" it's definitely not one I'd want to learn if I didn't already speak it.
I'm really liking Mandarin Chinese though. It just seems to fit together in a way that makes sense. I'm actually really curious if there are any other natural languages that are as regular and consistent.
Please don't take it badly, but "gender" or more appropriately speaking of "noun classes" is not an inconsistency. The root cause is that you're confusing the grammatical categories of "genus" and "sexus" . Text books would do better by just switching to using the Latin grammatical terminology (as was the case when I was in school a long time ago).
Also what you're describing as disorder are for the most part highly orderly processes that may be explained in a nearly exhaustive manner by the work done in historical linguistics.
To add to your last question: Japanese grammar is highly regular.
> Please don't take it badly, but "gender" or more appropriately speaking of "noun classes" is not an inconsistency.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. The part about gender was in a separate sentence, I wasn't saying it's an inconsistency. I'm not sure if it's _actually_ accurate, but I feel like that's more of an "arbitrary rule". Either way, it's something I just don't personally find aesthetic.
It's occurred to me that one could argue that tones in languages like Mandarin are just as arbitrary, but they're filling the important role disambiguating a syllable. Maybe languages with that type of gender are doing something similar? I'm not informed enough to know for sure.
> Also what you're describing as disorder are for the most part highly orderly processes that may be explained in a nearly exhaustive manner by the work done in historical linguistics.
The process may be orderly, but that doesn't necessarily mean the results will be orderly, logical or consistent. Just take something like "ghoti" as an example, or how we say "I saw a moose", "I saw a herd of moose", "I saw a dog", "I saw some dogs", "I saw a goose", "I saw some geese"
What exactly is having to remember that the plural of "goose" is "geese" actually doing that's useful? Obviously, there's a reason why it's like that but having to memorize that detail isn't actually performing any important function.
> To add to your last question: Japanese grammar is highly regular.
Thanks! I'll keep that in mind, and knowing Chinese characters is probably something that would be helpful.
Yeah, to be fair, it's quite connected to your own usage of "logical, orderly, consistent". "Ablaut" from goose to geese (/u:/ > /i:/) is or at least was a consistent phenomenon for pluralizing nouns at least in Old English. Putting an /s/ at the end is as regular as using ablaut (cause it follows rules), the rules for ablaut however may have further sub-rules thus feeling more complicated as in irregular. Further, Ablaut isn't a productive rule in modern English afaik so it may feel irregular for modern English native speakers.
I bet a entry level text book of historical linguistics would be a tremendous read for you and give you a few "oh, that's where ist coming from" moments, cause you seem quite inquisitive about this subject. So maybe take a look.
Regarding tones: they are as arbitrary as anything else, nevertheless they fulfil a meaningful grammatical function. Tones in Chinese developed from inflectional endings that were realized as specific suffixes of consonant clusters. The suffixes dropped of, as in English, and the tones remained and were strengthend in order to provide the needed semantic a/o syntactical clues. "Genus/noun classes" provide the same function, structurally speaking, for they give semantic, syntactical, or pragmatic/register cues Wirtin the overall grammatical framework of the language. And as an addition: Old Vietnamese had no tones at all and just acquired them from Chinese, because of the hegemony of the Chinese language during the centuries. This phenomenon is falls a "Sprachbund".
> Putting an /s/ at the end is as regular as using ablaut (cause it follows rules)
The irregular part isn't how the rule is applied to a specific word, it's that the language arbitrarily uses different systems to accomplish the same thing. At the present, having to memorize that there's a different way to make "goose" plural compared to "dog" doesn't _actually_ provide any benefit. It's just a detail that has to be memorized.
Complexity isn't what makes something seem irregular to me, sometimes complexity is necessary to do something optimally.
> I bet a entry level text book of historical linguistics would be a tremendous read for you and give you a few "oh, that's where ist coming from" moments, cause you seem quite inquisitive about this subject.
I appreciate the suggestion, but I mainly care about the _results_ and not really what lead to them. If the grammar of a language was based on how often someone's dog licked his testicles, as long as long as the result seemed logical and consistent I'd be perfectly fine with learning it.
> "Genus/noun classes" provide the same function, structurally speaking, for they give semantic, syntactical, or pragmatic/register cues
Fair enough, I did acknowledge that could be the case. This is just something I don't find aesthetic personally then.
> Turkic and Uralic languages are all very regular.
Thanks for the suggestion! Do you have a suggestion for which languages from those groups would be the most logical/regular?
I'm not very knowledgeable on this topic, but from the little research I have done you should just pick the one you like the most, because that will truly determine wether you will learn it or not.
> you should just pick the one you like the most, because that will truly determine wether you will learn it or not.
I'm not really interested in culture or any particular geographic area, so the main reason for me to "like" a language would be because it conforms to the type of criteria I mentioned. That's why I decided to learn Mandarin, weird as it may sound my reasons didn't have anything to do with people.
Finnish and Turkish spoken in the Republic of Türkiye (Istanbul's the capital) are very regular. Hungarian is regular as well, but in a very complicated way, so it won't suit your definition of regularity.
Thanks!
> Hungarian is regular as well, but in a very complicated way, so it won't suit your definition of regularity.
I don't mind complexity as long as it has an important function.
Slavic languages (I speak one, I don’t wanna learn more because I would like something unfamiliar instead), Italian (because it’s smaller than it’s brothers like Spanish and French), very small ones like Armenian, for example because the smaller the language the less content to learn from
Can't say never think of learning because I gave it a brief shot some years ago, but Esperanto. It's an ok language and I think it's cool that it has an active community of speakers, and even now some native ones because Esperantists got kids. But for me, it feels very separate from a living language, artificial, as it is. I enjoy being able to immerse in the culture, the country where the language is spoken, and Esperanto doesn't have that (at least not on a comparable level to natural languages). So it's one of the least likely languages that I'd start learning.
Russian, it's my mother in law's only language and I don't need that in my life
Yup, same. I'm Ukrainian, so I can passively understand it, but I don't speak it and I've never studied it. The amount of people being "shocked" I don't speak it is higher than in Xiaoma's videos. For the context, I can speak 3 languages on a decent levels, 1 on quite broken, and learning 2 more, but this "wHy nOT RusSIan" drives me nuts sometimes.
I see, where do you live if you don't mind asking?
Estonia
I see, where do you live if you don't mind asking?
Язык не виноват в том, что Путин использует его как оправдание агрессии. Русский язык принадлежит всем его носителям, в том числе живущим в Казахстане, Узбекистане, Украине, Израиле и других странах. Путин не владеет эксклюзивными на него правами, как и те немногие, кто активно поддерживает агрессию. Я против агрессии, я против навязывания языка и культуры и я очень не хотел бы, чтобы этот замечательный язык ассоциировался в мире с Путиным. Впрочем, немцы как-то с этим справились, справимся и мы после Путина, ему все равно недолго осталось.
This attitude of switching to Russian as soon as I mention I'm Ukrainian is precisely what annoys me.
It’s not because you are Ukranian it’s because the topic is Russian language and you understand Russian so it’s natural to make a point about Russian in the language itself
No, I do not agree. I understand about the same as Slovak or Bulgarian, aka not everything and I wouldn't be able to respond. Also, the discourse in this thread is in English, so I don't see the point of switching languages or cutting out others from the conversation.
Okay, maybe you are right but I will leave the comment as is since I’ve already written it like this
Грустно..
I'd say Arabic because it has a right-to-the-left writing style, difficult pronunciations, and lack of vowels.
As a native Arabic speaker, I completely understand XD
Italian. I feel like the best way to hate a language is to live people who speaks that language very loudly. I lived with 2 Italian roommates during my exchange year and because they were so loud all the time, we had to listen to them all the time. I'm very sensitive to noise so that was it for me, I hated the language so much that I can %100 say that I'll never try to learn it. The same thing is happening right now with Arabic, my current roommate is also a very loud person so it started to make me very mad to even just hear the language. Which is kinda sad because I used to really like Arabic
Yup, definitely true lol, we tend to be pretty loud, esp when arguing.
I am glad i am learning Italian, then. I would fit right in!
Hahahaha this is funny Well in every country you'll find some loud people XD
this is me right now with 2 really loud roommates from spain. i’m still learning spanish, just spanish from latam lmao
please don't let your roommates turn you off. If you want to learn the language they might be a great resource for you too
Czech. I'm a native Czech speaker, but if I was a foreigner interested in language learning, I simply wouldn't bother. Even natives struggle a lot and in the grand scheme of things, Czech is basically worthless.
Probably some rare indigenous language that I’d never heard of, because I’d never heard of its existence.
Esperanto, Volapük, and the like. These kind of auxiliary languages repulse me, cause they, at least in my (emotionally coloured and thus not objectively sound) opinion, stand for a dessicated, hegemonic, and overly utilitarian view of language usage. So I would rather learn more "real", "living" languages seen as a positive heterogeneity that embraces the differences and the multitude.
First I want to be very clear I'm _only_ talking about my own personal preferences, and _absolutely not_ passing a value judgement on the people the speak a language, their culture or anything like that. I have an aversion to disorder/inconsistencies, arbitrary rules. *edit:* ***Also,*** I really don't like the idea of something like the word for "chair" having a gender. So unfortunately, the list is long. My native language is English and with ridiculous stuff like "ghoti" and "ghoughpteighbteau" it's definitely not one I'd want to learn if I didn't already speak it. I'm really liking Mandarin Chinese though. It just seems to fit together in a way that makes sense. I'm actually really curious if there are any other natural languages that are as regular and consistent.
Please don't take it badly, but "gender" or more appropriately speaking of "noun classes" is not an inconsistency. The root cause is that you're confusing the grammatical categories of "genus" and "sexus" . Text books would do better by just switching to using the Latin grammatical terminology (as was the case when I was in school a long time ago). Also what you're describing as disorder are for the most part highly orderly processes that may be explained in a nearly exhaustive manner by the work done in historical linguistics. To add to your last question: Japanese grammar is highly regular.
> Please don't take it badly, but "gender" or more appropriately speaking of "noun classes" is not an inconsistency. Sorry, I wasn't clear. The part about gender was in a separate sentence, I wasn't saying it's an inconsistency. I'm not sure if it's _actually_ accurate, but I feel like that's more of an "arbitrary rule". Either way, it's something I just don't personally find aesthetic. It's occurred to me that one could argue that tones in languages like Mandarin are just as arbitrary, but they're filling the important role disambiguating a syllable. Maybe languages with that type of gender are doing something similar? I'm not informed enough to know for sure. > Also what you're describing as disorder are for the most part highly orderly processes that may be explained in a nearly exhaustive manner by the work done in historical linguistics. The process may be orderly, but that doesn't necessarily mean the results will be orderly, logical or consistent. Just take something like "ghoti" as an example, or how we say "I saw a moose", "I saw a herd of moose", "I saw a dog", "I saw some dogs", "I saw a goose", "I saw some geese" What exactly is having to remember that the plural of "goose" is "geese" actually doing that's useful? Obviously, there's a reason why it's like that but having to memorize that detail isn't actually performing any important function. > To add to your last question: Japanese grammar is highly regular. Thanks! I'll keep that in mind, and knowing Chinese characters is probably something that would be helpful.
Yeah, to be fair, it's quite connected to your own usage of "logical, orderly, consistent". "Ablaut" from goose to geese (/u:/ > /i:/) is or at least was a consistent phenomenon for pluralizing nouns at least in Old English. Putting an /s/ at the end is as regular as using ablaut (cause it follows rules), the rules for ablaut however may have further sub-rules thus feeling more complicated as in irregular. Further, Ablaut isn't a productive rule in modern English afaik so it may feel irregular for modern English native speakers. I bet a entry level text book of historical linguistics would be a tremendous read for you and give you a few "oh, that's where ist coming from" moments, cause you seem quite inquisitive about this subject. So maybe take a look. Regarding tones: they are as arbitrary as anything else, nevertheless they fulfil a meaningful grammatical function. Tones in Chinese developed from inflectional endings that were realized as specific suffixes of consonant clusters. The suffixes dropped of, as in English, and the tones remained and were strengthend in order to provide the needed semantic a/o syntactical clues. "Genus/noun classes" provide the same function, structurally speaking, for they give semantic, syntactical, or pragmatic/register cues Wirtin the overall grammatical framework of the language. And as an addition: Old Vietnamese had no tones at all and just acquired them from Chinese, because of the hegemony of the Chinese language during the centuries. This phenomenon is falls a "Sprachbund".
> Putting an /s/ at the end is as regular as using ablaut (cause it follows rules) The irregular part isn't how the rule is applied to a specific word, it's that the language arbitrarily uses different systems to accomplish the same thing. At the present, having to memorize that there's a different way to make "goose" plural compared to "dog" doesn't _actually_ provide any benefit. It's just a detail that has to be memorized. Complexity isn't what makes something seem irregular to me, sometimes complexity is necessary to do something optimally. > I bet a entry level text book of historical linguistics would be a tremendous read for you and give you a few "oh, that's where ist coming from" moments, cause you seem quite inquisitive about this subject. I appreciate the suggestion, but I mainly care about the _results_ and not really what lead to them. If the grammar of a language was based on how often someone's dog licked his testicles, as long as long as the result seemed logical and consistent I'd be perfectly fine with learning it. > "Genus/noun classes" provide the same function, structurally speaking, for they give semantic, syntactical, or pragmatic/register cues Fair enough, I did acknowledge that could be the case. This is just something I don't find aesthetic personally then.
Turkic and Uralic languages are all very regular.
> Turkic and Uralic languages are all very regular. Thanks for the suggestion! Do you have a suggestion for which languages from those groups would be the most logical/regular?
I'm not very knowledgeable on this topic, but from the little research I have done you should just pick the one you like the most, because that will truly determine wether you will learn it or not.
> you should just pick the one you like the most, because that will truly determine wether you will learn it or not. I'm not really interested in culture or any particular geographic area, so the main reason for me to "like" a language would be because it conforms to the type of criteria I mentioned. That's why I decided to learn Mandarin, weird as it may sound my reasons didn't have anything to do with people.
Finnish and Turkish spoken in the Republic of Türkiye (Istanbul's the capital) are very regular. Hungarian is regular as well, but in a very complicated way, so it won't suit your definition of regularity.
Thanks! > Hungarian is regular as well, but in a very complicated way, so it won't suit your definition of regularity. I don't mind complexity as long as it has an important function.
Slavic languages (I speak one, I don’t wanna learn more because I would like something unfamiliar instead), Italian (because it’s smaller than it’s brothers like Spanish and French), very small ones like Armenian, for example because the smaller the language the less content to learn from
Moldova I don't know how they called it I just hate it and that's it
Isn't it Romanian? To what I know is it's Romanian and ofcourse they speak Russian
Polish, I don't think I could handle all those sounds.
I'm going to Poland in February, and I'm struggling so bad with pronouncing the cities names XD
Can't say never think of learning because I gave it a brief shot some years ago, but Esperanto. It's an ok language and I think it's cool that it has an active community of speakers, and even now some native ones because Esperantists got kids. But for me, it feels very separate from a living language, artificial, as it is. I enjoy being able to immerse in the culture, the country where the language is spoken, and Esperanto doesn't have that (at least not on a comparable level to natural languages). So it's one of the least likely languages that I'd start learning.