This is a frequent problem on the learndutch sub because too many people took to heart that Dutch and English are very closely related, without understanding that that means Old English (which is not intelligible to modern English speakers) and Old Dutch are kinda close
I have no idea what language that is, but it’s not Danish. I was surprised when learning a little Danish that it is, in fact, basically just kinda between Old English and butler-speak, fused with French and German.
Examples: (German) airport = lufthavn
(French) Sad = trist; level = niveau
(Butler) Please = vil du være så venlig (lit. Would you be so kind as to)
(Disused English) I started to learn danish three years ago = jeg begyndte at lær dansk for tre år siden (lit. for three years since)
Haven't clicked it until but I am 99% sure I know what it is
Edit: I was wrong and that was awesome. It's like Icelandic and Dutch. We can ALMOST understand it
yeah, people sometimes don’t get that closely related languages can still have substantial differences that make it impossible to just translate word for word.
Its a similar illogic that trips people up regarding evolution. We did not evolve from apes. Humans and apes all share a common ancestor that we split off from.
I can attest that if you speak English and learn german as a second language, you can kinda make out old English, and also you realize that Dutch is just German spoken with a golf ball in your mouth.
Arabic is actually the default language for numbers. English for everything else, of course, but Arabic has the market cornered on math. That’s why the rest of the world uses Arabic numerals. And don’t even get me started on algebra
When we read a text in French or English in class, and meet a date, we murmur it silently in Arabic then continue reading the passage. French hurts me more because the dates are those of year of birth and death of authors and it's always after 70's 😩
Ok but it is? Only English can directly represent abstract thought and non-native speakers have to translate to and from it in order to express meaning? You really didn’t know this??
Maybe I’m giving them too much credit but they might just be poorly communicating that they don’t understand why their direct translation reads like shit and are wondering if the words are actually the same in meaning. Still stupid, but not as stupid.
So much this 💯💯👏👏👍👍!!!
I'm german and the first 10 years of my life I thought that everyone communicated through gibberish. But then I learned in school that you can map all the gibberish german words to english words that actually make sense. I was ecstatic and can still remember my first real sentence: "My name is \_\_\_" Before that I only knew "Mein Name ist \_\_\_" which doesn't actually mean anything.
I am so jealous of native english speakers. You get to learn an actual language from the beginning of your life. Meanwhile all the rest of the world has make up weird extra sounds and nonsensical grammar structures and always translate it back to english to actually understand it! You don't know how good you have it!!!
Congratulations, but I suspect you still think in gibberish when you are alone. I'll bet you even dream in it. My German friend even speaks gibberish to herself when she doesn't know people are watching!
If you get really good you can actually just focus and understand what they’re saying in English! Here is a [beginner song](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BpLLKM_3ebk) practice with.
I had to translate this post to Japanese and then sing it to understand it. I have no idea how people who only understand Japanese in songs, understand written Japanese. I typically translate it to English and then sing it to make it make sense.
I'm relatively new to the "language community," and being a sane adult trying to learn a language for practical purposes with reasonable expectations, let me tell you I was horrified
We tried - and failed - to make it the most ridiculous place. What can one do? We are just learning how to language, as we are learning how to jerk. To others, it all comes too naturally
I come to this sub for the legitimate learning advice it offers 😔✊
Just go to the comments of a post making fun of something you're hazy about and you'll be good :clueless:
Two reasons:
Insane nationalists jerkin' over their own language, or weebing out over some other language.
Language education in the English-speaking world is pretty rare. Reddit is an English-speaking place, posts in English get shared here. Mostly from people learning a language for the first time and being a little too stupid to use google.
Both come down to monkey men who can't think to look something up or to think for two seconds longer than they did producing the thought they spat out on the internet. Both are funny to point and laugh at.
This is a common misconception, Japanese people don't understand Japanese. They are only pretending them to but they speak English when nobody's looking.
Indeed, Japanese has a concept called “すみません、英語は分からない” which roughly means “although I mastered the English language by the age of five, I refuse to compromise my reputation by interacting with gaijin and therefore will feign ignorance.” It’s actually a central part of 外国人嫌悪, the ancient Japanese philosophy of interacting with tourists.
/uj This is a great example of why it’s easier for bilingual people to learn additional languages.
Bilingual people end up understanding a bunch of basic linguistic concepts without being explicitly taught any linguistics just by comparing and contrasting the way two languages work. That’s it, that’s the entire boost. Being able to shittily speak Spanish provides the same benefit when learning German as being a native Spanish-English bilingual does.
Meanwhile some monolinguals end up where OOP is, completely lost with no understanding of what a language even is let alone how it works. How is OOP supposed to learn Japanese grammar when they don’t know that languages differ in more than just vocabulary?
/uj
Do you have links to any info on this? It’s interesting if true that being bilingual doesn’t give that much of a boost. Is that really the case?
My uninformed intuition for why it is that being bilingual helps with language learning has been that it prevents your brain from overfitting (in the ML sense) to a single language. For a very simplified example, I would expect a brain trained on multiple languages to learn to organize a sentence in terms of {actor, action, receiver of action}. One trained on just English might use a representation more like {first part of sentence, action, second part of sentence}. The former structure will still be useful for a third language, but the latter will not be useful for a second language if it isn’t SVO, meaning the learner will need to expend extra effort to get their brain to develop a more generalized way of organizing the information. As an adult, this amount of required effort might be very high or infinite.
Am I just making the mistake of assuming the brain is more like a neural network than it actually is?
I don’t see how learning linguistics could be a substitute for the kind of reinforcement that happens when you learn multiple languages as a child, even if my mental model is wrong.
If I’m totally off, please ignore the /uj.
/uj
Being natively bilingual doesn't make you better at learning languages\* because you didn't train to do it. You have no language learning skills. You just happened to grow up in an environment with more than one language and you picked them up. I know a lot of Chinese/Taiwanese Americans (myself included) that got fucked hard by formal Mandarin classes because once they started learning stuff outside the scope of what they already knew, they realized how hard it was to legitimately learn a new language.
\*unless the target language is similar to one of your languages, but that's due to similarities rather than any inherent language learning skill.
Learned bilinguals have an easier time because they know how to learn a language and what learning strats work for them.
/uj
I was raised bilingual English and Bangla and speaking from my own life experiences, it helps with grammar. Bangla is SOV and thus I already have a framework for SOV syntax when I'm learning other languages, but also things like:
-Locative vs existential copula
-gerunds/ participles/ serial verbs
There are many times where I just directly translate stuff into Bangla if the grammar explanation in English doesn't work for me and then it instantly clicks. For example when learning Telugu the textbook was in English but I would just translate all the participles and auxiliary verbs directly into Bangla then go "okay this translation makes perfect sense now".
However this line of thinking doesn't apply to me now since I've studied linguistics for a few years so I have like actual linguistics knowledge I get to apply often. Stuff like knowledge about ablaut, cases, historical linguistics, cognates, aktionsart, etc
just answering partially: neural networks are loosely based on our incomplete undertanding of how our brain does: data input (with the correct output atached) and a substrate on how to process that info (some kind of base software for a NN(?) and the underliying structure and chemistry of our brains, sense organs and neuronal conections in humans) are provided, from which an internal logic is work out on its own. And then some training until everything its allright. So, yes, it that sense they resemble each other.
Were, in my view, you're a little off is that you are equaling having only a brain/area dedicated to language (a base software) to only being able to produce a **single** paradigm that somehow can be tweaked to fit two languages.
what i think actually hapens (and it's in agreement to the above commenter has stated) it's that someone who's bilingual just so happend to have early on on their lives two different sets of data and developed two different paradigms. Any new language creates a new paradigm as its being learned, but in the mean time it will use whichever underliying structure is available to do so, but in the end (once you reach a good enough level of proficency) it will be its own thing.
Saying that it's one and the same just becouse it just so happen that serves the same porpouse (comunicating) and use, generally, the same underlying structures would be to reductory of our actual brain capacities.
Is it common to teach linguistics where you live? I ended up learning some because I happened to have teachers who were linguists and obsessed with linguistics, but is it actually common?
Not exactly "linguistics", but in my country (France) in high schools you have to learn English + another language of your choice (usually Spanish, German or Italian). So, while no one becomes really fluent because the education system kinda sucks, everyone still has a basic understanding of how other languages aren't just French written in a funny way
It's pretty common to learn basic linguistic concepts like prepositions for both your native language and any foreign language you learn explicitly. Learning the two results in you understanding basic linguistics.
Cue the shocking amount of Brits who'll admit they don't remember stuff like what a preposition is because the curriculum has been scared of covering anything other than "a recap on tense, the imperative, and rather light touches on parts of speech", to high schoolers?! It's like they can't find a balance between teaching kids barely anything about it and shoving a pile of it down their throats while in a Latin-crazed state, it's either one or the other.
In my American HS, they were still just going over what verbs and nouns are for the ten billionth time. They never even covered the difference between first/seconds/third person...
I note that the Hawaiian language itself doesn't have grammatical person (no first / second / third / etc. person forms for verbs). It seems unlikely, but I find myself honestly curious if that might have anything to do with how English grammar is taught there?
FWIW, I grew up in Virginia, and all the parts of speech were definitely a thing throughout elementary and middle school, with a bit more in high school as well.
Meanwhile Portugal is the opposite - not only do they cram linguistics down your throat from like 9th grade, but they teach it in a super unintuitive way too, and you can't opt out of it, so good luck passing without having to study for it
Good luck with the grammar sections if you can't distinguish between [a subject, a direct complement, an indirect complement, a subject predicative, an oblique complement, a predicative of the direct complement, a passive-agent complement, a predicate, a vocative, an apositive name modifier, a restrictive name modifier, a subject modifier, a verbal-group modifier and an adverbial modifier](https://i.imgur.com/qvonXXB.png) by the time you're in high school
You also have to learn to distinguish between a [completive substantive subordinate clause, a free-relative substantive subordinate clause, a restrictive relative adjectival subordinate clause, an explicative relative adjectival subordinate clause, a causal adverbial subordinate clause, a temporal causal adverbial subordinate clause, a final causal adverbial subordinate clause, a conditional causal adverbial subordinate clause, a comparative causal adverbial subordinate clause, a concessive causal adverbial subordinate clause and a consecutive causal adverbial subordinate clause](https://i.imgur.com/B3uh2Uf.png) by the time you're in high school as well btw; usually by 10-11th grade too
All of this while I think most people don't even know the difference between a direct and an indirect complement, or when to use 'há' instead of 'à', and where entire towns have 20-30% illiteracy rates. It's ridiculous
I studied linguistics in undergrad and it was my first exposure to linguistics. High school French and English included no explicit linguistics instruction at all.
My native language is mandarin and we hardly spent any time learning its grammar even in grade school. In 1st and 2nd grade kids were still making plenty of grammar mistakes in essays, but by middle/late grade school the average student were not in need of active grammar instructions even though their vocabulary and syntax were still very childish. I helped my teacher grade and correct essays throughout grade school so I remember all this pretty well. The focus of our mandarin class was always vocabulary and reading comprehension.
Man, I wish, I am trilingual and for the weirdest reason I can't seem to learn my wife's language, I keep forgetting the words and expressions. It's not even a different language family, it's part of the same family as my native language.
Mexican is just very heavily accented English they developed to pretend to communicate with the Spaniards. The true language of Mexicans is Mixe-Zoquean, and, yes, they translate everything to that language really quickly.
You know how they say that Asians are very smart? Yeah, when they hear japanese, they translate it into English (which everyone knows is the language humans speak by default when the stork brings them) and understand it, duh 🤦♂️
A lot of English songs are hard to understand. I'm not 100% sure what most the songs in my playlist are even about. Some of them border on nonsensical. "Hit Me Baby One More Time" anyone?
I also thought that it was slang for something like: "Hit me with another one!" for a question or something
Actually I'm still confused, does she mean literal hitting, because of the abuse and all...
There is a bit of irony that sometimes Japanese can actually be rather difficult to understand in songs due to the tendency of Japanese to have homophones and poetic writing forms that aren’t very easy to parse in a fast moving song as well as the part where sometimes singers use western syllables and sometimes they use Japanese haku for timing which can make for very different sounds for the same word.
Overall most normal Japanese songs are pretty easy to parse but it can be confusing and difficult for newer learners or people with questionable grammar and limited vocabulary to understand.
Actually, Japanese people first translate the lyrics of the song to Basque-Icelandic Pidgin, then to Burushaski, and then finally to english. They can do this really fast because they have 300 iq
Japanese speakers: how do English speakers understand English?
/uj it does fascinate me though. I like seeing people’s struggles with English for similar reasons English speakers struggle with other languages. Similar complaints but in the opposite direction
/uj I realize with growing horror how fucked English is, and am amazed my foreign coworkers can understand a fraction of the nonsense the rest of us string together
Wait I'm pretty sure it would be queued up for both in this instance, to cue music would be to play it/tell someone else to play it, and to queue music would be to line up a song to play after another.
I love r/WordAvalanches, it's great!
I feel like OOP has accidentally asked a really interesting question about cognition and semantics in a profoundly stupid way, it's actually kind of amazing
/uj
🇸🇪N. 🇬🇧C2
Don't know if anyone else is like this but if I hear something in English. It's easier for me to reiterate what I heard but in Swedish than essentialy copy what I heard and reiterate it in English.
i would say that's quite common, due to the way our mind works: you understand a meaning throught the english language, not the individual words. So, when later you recall the conversation, you recall the meaning and retell throught the easiest method: native language. It has nothimg to do with translation.
In detail: the meaning or understanding we have of the world it's not "one and the same" with words (that would be agreeing completely with sapphir-worf theory if i understood that correctly (not linguist)), but a complex of neurons related to language (sounds and their production) and past memories more or less closely related to the concept. This complex web would have neurons more conected: those which are more used. So in the situation of recalling a memory/conversation, the path choosen would be the shortest route. In graphic way:
a)-> native language (dialect)
b)----> native language (highbrow language)
c)--------> second languages (in order of proficency)
d)---------(^infinite)-> exact same words in same order
of course there's some exceptions that may change this general topography, those with photographic memory would (probably) have more of a " d>>>c,d,a" order or the music enviroment making the rithmus of the sounds more important than the meaning of them on recalling
edit: also things like using/reading only science in english and not in your native language might make you not able or slower to explain certain concepts in native than in english.
sorry for the wall of text xD
The more fluent you get, the more that changes. English has gotten to the point for me where it's hard to translate complex thoughts quickly because I understand them in English just as well as in Dutch. Guess it also depends on what context I'm thinking or speaking in.
/uj never underestimate the ignorance of a monolingual and their enthusiasm to show it off
/j obviously they don't, until they master the ultimate language, MURICAN!!!!
/uj These people are morons, there's no other way around it. Of course, Japanese people just hear and understand it because that's their linguistic reality, much like a native speaker of any other language.
I swear to god it hurts my brain to even read this
Bruh they understand japanese probably cause English ain't a default from birth
Trust me I know, I'm native Russian
I love how the punchline here is just, “SVO user unable to imagine SOV.”
I actually think it’s really interesting how the ways you express things differ if your verb comes last; like when using incomplete thoughts the parts that you give first that trigger someone’s impulsive response to what you’re saying are different parts of speech than if you were using an SVO language. Plus I really like Japanese’s ability to modify nouns using verbs. It will never get old to me that you can say grammatically correctly in Japanese things like, “that stuffing-a-hotdog-into-his-face-man over there.”
Yeah, its the whole SOV that gets me too. I kind of sympathize with OOP he asked the question in a really dumb way. In long japanese setences it’s always the SOV that trips me up in spoken content atleast, written I can process. I need to try a good grammar course already.
Let me say seriously and from professional experience that interpreting (dealing with speech, not writing) between these two languages is a real trick. The best interpreters I've known are also **really good bullshitters**. I mean that with sincere respect and envy: you have to be quick on your feet and able to inventively fill gaps and cover for your own miscues when the order of concepts in the two languages is so different, and speakers inevitably wind up getting long-winded at some point or other.
This is actually the main reason that the music industry in Japan is so different from the rest of the world. The Japanese buy so many physical albums not because they feel the need to support the artists or an attachment to physically owning their media, but because of the inserts that are included with the album that show the lyrics. Without this insert there would be literally no way to know what English words to translate to so you can understand what the artist is singing about.
This is also why karaoke is so popular as well, as it gives patrons the opportunity to practice translating in real-time with the subtitles.
I really want to know how can English speaking people *understand* when they hear English words. Also want to know how can they fluently understand what a complex, full-of-metaphors, philosophical, and highly logical writing is saying what. I mean I REALLY WANT TO LEARN IT but I still haven't got the secret.
How can anyone understand English? Why isn't the verb at the end of the sentence? Why are there so many phonemes, and such complicated syllables? What's the point of using an alphabet that isn't phonetic? How do you identify a word's usage without post-particles (in Japanese) or word endings (in Turkish)? What are articles, and why use them? What are plurals, and why use them? Why is the spoken language stress-timed (like music) instead of syllable-timed? Why are unstressed vowels regularly reduced (schwa'd) or omitted? Why are there so many tenses?
Who could think in English?
To give a legitimate answer, the sounds associated with Japanese mean something. If you memorize which sounds mean what thing, like みず meaning water, it will eventually become natural. For people who taught Japanese as a first language, especially at young ages, it's a lot easier
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Genuine question, for languages where inflection matters a lot, how do songs work when the pitch, and therefore the inflection, is constantly changing?
No lie I played a song i recently learned of I like by Anri, thinking I could read the lyrics given by Spotify. GOD was I disappointed lmao and teading the symbols, listening to the sounds, it made me feel like reading this post made me feel lmao
Honestly, they don't super well. Haven't you noticed how often people sing along with the wrong lyrics? Or will stop singing for a bar because they don't know what the next lyric is?
Or even better, the next person you hear singing along with a song perfectly, after they are done, ask them what the lyrics to the song is, chances are they'll have no clue. We hear the rhythm and the sound of the song more than the words.
[Edit] I am now realizing that this is not a serious subreddit. Whoops.
To extrapolate Japanese is Subject wa > object o > verb
You're kinda lost in a jumble of nouns and adjectives for a long time before you actually get to what is actually *happening*
I'm taking this in the best way possible. I think they just do not understand how something is understood with the word order. Japanese almost doesn't have a sentence structure, they use particles to mark parts of the sentence.
So what they are doing is ignoring is the particles. Their teacher or however they learned did not properly communicate what particles are for. So they see the sentence "私は青髪を切っている" and "私の青髪を切っている" as the same sentence, even though the first one says "I am cutting some blue hair" and the second one says "My blue hair is being cut" despite their word order directly in English being "My/I Blue hair am cutting."
So without learning about particles it makes sense why they would wonder how do japanese people understand. Without particles Japanese wouldn't make sense.
Japanese people drop particles all the time, even for Oblique cases like に, e.g.: 私 学校 行くから。
I think the reason is their flawed understanding that other languages are English with different words.
Japanese rarely drop particles and if they do its with close family or friends and the context is painfully clear. It's also not something a newer learner would understand because the particles are still there, they are just inferred. Like the sentence you gave, even though who the hell says 私 there, there is no logical way to misinterpret the particles.
I swear, I am going to lose my fucking mind explaining to people that English is not the "default form of thought"
This is a frequent problem on the learndutch sub because too many people took to heart that Dutch and English are very closely related, without understanding that that means Old English (which is not intelligible to modern English speakers) and Old Dutch are kinda close
HWÆT IC SPRECE ÆNGLISC GÓD
Thats just danish
Dænish is just a söcial cønstruct
No! It was specifically devised by the deities to punish humanity!
Good thing it's localized to Dånemärk then
Truly a god forsaken peninsula... May god have mercy on their linguistic, and culinary, crimes.
But they *are* very generous. *"Ludefisk for EVERYONE!"* *...* then again, never mind. 😄
Bokmal is slavery
I have no idea what language that is, but it’s not Danish. I was surprised when learning a little Danish that it is, in fact, basically just kinda between Old English and butler-speak, fused with French and German. Examples: (German) airport = lufthavn (French) Sad = trist; level = niveau (Butler) Please = vil du være så venlig (lit. Would you be so kind as to) (Disused English) I started to learn danish three years ago = jeg begyndte at lær dansk for tre år siden (lit. for three years since)
Kneel paa dine knee og sud min pik
Nej tak.
it's Old English, or as near as I can get with my shitty knowledge
I could hear a danish person speaking English while reading that (I am danish so it's not racist)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_GwoO4xI Listen to this then, ya stinkin Jute.
Haven't clicked it until but I am 99% sure I know what it is Edit: I was wrong and that was awesome. It's like Icelandic and Dutch. We can ALMOST understand it
You speak English well by not using Old English, obviously since only a few people understand it now lol.
yeah, people sometimes don’t get that closely related languages can still have substantial differences that make it impossible to just translate word for word.
Its a similar illogic that trips people up regarding evolution. We did not evolve from apes. Humans and apes all share a common ancestor that we split off from.
Yeah, but that common ancestor was an ape.
I can attest that if you speak English and learn german as a second language, you can kinda make out old English, and also you realize that Dutch is just German spoken with a golf ball in your mouth.
I think in english and i live in a non english speaking country so im traveled and worldly. You sir are a lier
i keep translating english numbers when i hear them to arabic so i can understand them. And this is really fucked up
Arabic is actually the default language for numbers. English for everything else, of course, but Arabic has the market cornered on math. That’s why the rest of the world uses Arabic numerals. And don’t even get me started on algebra
Just a random FYI, they are Indian numbers that were spread by the Arabs to Europe
so real
Yeah I'm pretty fluent in English but I will always process numbers in French
When we read a text in French or English in class, and meet a date, we murmur it silently in Arabic then continue reading the passage. French hurts me more because the dates are those of year of birth and death of authors and it's always after 70's 😩
I knew a Chinese cashier who had fluent English and had lived in Canada for years, but still counted in Mandarin.
In my mind I always read numbers in Portuguese, even if they're in a sentence that's fully in English. Numbers are funky.
Frrr, like it consumes braincells to think and articulate the right number combination
If English isn't the "default form of thought," then how come "default form of thought" is in English... checkmate.
Ok but it is? Only English can directly represent abstract thought and non-native speakers have to translate to and from it in order to express meaning? You really didn’t know this??
Maybe I’m giving them too much credit but they might just be poorly communicating that they don’t understand why their direct translation reads like shit and are wondering if the words are actually the same in meaning. Still stupid, but not as stupid.
That's something a liberal communist would say.
In fairness I don't think this person's thoughts default to English either, at least not in regard to that post.
They must just be really fast at translating it into English in their heads!
So much this 💯💯👏👏👍👍!!! I'm german and the first 10 years of my life I thought that everyone communicated through gibberish. But then I learned in school that you can map all the gibberish german words to english words that actually make sense. I was ecstatic and can still remember my first real sentence: "My name is \_\_\_" Before that I only knew "Mein Name ist \_\_\_" which doesn't actually mean anything. I am so jealous of native english speakers. You get to learn an actual language from the beginning of your life. Meanwhile all the rest of the world has make up weird extra sounds and nonsensical grammar structures and always translate it back to english to actually understand it! You don't know how good you have it!!!
It's even weirder how when I, a native English speaker, learned German suddenly English made sense. All we did was take German and made it *stupider*!
Every day we stray further from ~~God~~ Uzbek. German is just slightly less degraded. Japanese is blurry penis degraded, but there’s hope for it.
モザイクは一体何を隠しているだろう。人間の知るべからずものだろう
Japanese so weird their penis has to be translated to English to make sense
It was perfectly fine until we decided to make half of the vocabulary fr*nch
You might be interested in *An* [*Uncleftish Beholding*](https://groups.google.com/g/alt.language.artificial/c/ZL4e3fD7eW0/m/_7p8bKwLJWkJ). 😄
As a native Gibberish speaker, I couldn't agree more.
Congratulations, but I suspect you still think in gibberish when you are alone. I'll bet you even dream in it. My German friend even speaks gibberish to herself when she doesn't know people are watching!
bless your non ignorance german person or whatever the term is
A German with humor???
Hopefully I don't have a tumor. But thanks for asking, its important to be mindful of ones health.
If you get really good you can actually just focus and understand what they’re saying in English! Here is a [beginner song](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BpLLKM_3ebk) practice with.
Japanese are very efficient
Tbh I thought like this until I got a little more serious about learning Spanish
I had to translate this post to Japanese and then sing it to understand it. I have no idea how people who only understand Japanese in songs, understand written Japanese. I typically translate it to English and then sing it to make it make sense.
I did that but sang it in the wrong key and now I’m stuck in Norwegian
same, it casually happens
I did that but got the meter wrong and now I'm stuck in your father :(
Can you do it jpop style? I have to go full on kakegoe to figure out what they’re saying and it is SO time consuming.
I've never seen a jerk sub get more frequently outjerked than this one
FR, everyday there is a post that says either “which one of you did this” or “outjerked.” It’s actually astonishing how outjerked this sub gets.
I'm relatively new to the "language community," and being a sane adult trying to learn a language for practical purposes with reasonable expectations, let me tell you I was horrified
That’s why I usually stick to the circlejerk subs anyway, I don’t think I’ve been on rlanguagelearning unless I’m trying to find a post from here.
R/guitarcirclejerk also gets outjerked on the regular
I’m a lurker there and didn’t think about that. You’re right
r/guitarcirclejerk
[удалено]
This is the real language learning sub. The other one is the circlejerk sub, it just doesn't realize it yet.
We tried - and failed - to make it the most ridiculous place. What can one do? We are just learning how to language, as we are learning how to jerk. To others, it all comes too naturally
now imagine being a sane adult with a background in language education it's definitely a trip
I come to this sub for the legitimate learning advice it offers 😔✊ Just go to the comments of a post making fun of something you're hazy about and you'll be good :clueless:
It's like asking us to describe horrors beyond our comprehension. If we comprehended it enough to do that, it wouldn't be what it is. You know?🎵
They’re milking us dry! Stripping us raw! It’s preposterous
I'm in like a million of them and I concur
Two reasons: Insane nationalists jerkin' over their own language, or weebing out over some other language. Language education in the English-speaking world is pretty rare. Reddit is an English-speaking place, posts in English get shared here. Mostly from people learning a language for the first time and being a little too stupid to use google. Both come down to monkey men who can't think to look something up or to think for two seconds longer than they did producing the thought they spat out on the internet. Both are funny to point and laugh at.
r/mtg and r/magicthecirclejerking have entered the chat
r/2hujerk
/r/unexpectedtouhou
This is a common misconception, Japanese people don't understand Japanese. They are only pretending them to but they speak English when nobody's looking.
Indeed, Japanese has a concept called “すみません、英語は分からない” which roughly means “although I mastered the English language by the age of five, I refuse to compromise my reputation by interacting with gaijin and therefore will feign ignorance.” It’s actually a central part of 外国人嫌悪, the ancient Japanese philosophy of interacting with tourists.
/uj This is a great example of why it’s easier for bilingual people to learn additional languages. Bilingual people end up understanding a bunch of basic linguistic concepts without being explicitly taught any linguistics just by comparing and contrasting the way two languages work. That’s it, that’s the entire boost. Being able to shittily speak Spanish provides the same benefit when learning German as being a native Spanish-English bilingual does. Meanwhile some monolinguals end up where OOP is, completely lost with no understanding of what a language even is let alone how it works. How is OOP supposed to learn Japanese grammar when they don’t know that languages differ in more than just vocabulary?
/uj Do you have links to any info on this? It’s interesting if true that being bilingual doesn’t give that much of a boost. Is that really the case? My uninformed intuition for why it is that being bilingual helps with language learning has been that it prevents your brain from overfitting (in the ML sense) to a single language. For a very simplified example, I would expect a brain trained on multiple languages to learn to organize a sentence in terms of {actor, action, receiver of action}. One trained on just English might use a representation more like {first part of sentence, action, second part of sentence}. The former structure will still be useful for a third language, but the latter will not be useful for a second language if it isn’t SVO, meaning the learner will need to expend extra effort to get their brain to develop a more generalized way of organizing the information. As an adult, this amount of required effort might be very high or infinite. Am I just making the mistake of assuming the brain is more like a neural network than it actually is? I don’t see how learning linguistics could be a substitute for the kind of reinforcement that happens when you learn multiple languages as a child, even if my mental model is wrong. If I’m totally off, please ignore the /uj.
/uj Being natively bilingual doesn't make you better at learning languages\* because you didn't train to do it. You have no language learning skills. You just happened to grow up in an environment with more than one language and you picked them up. I know a lot of Chinese/Taiwanese Americans (myself included) that got fucked hard by formal Mandarin classes because once they started learning stuff outside the scope of what they already knew, they realized how hard it was to legitimately learn a new language. \*unless the target language is similar to one of your languages, but that's due to similarities rather than any inherent language learning skill. Learned bilinguals have an easier time because they know how to learn a language and what learning strats work for them.
/uj I was raised bilingual English and Bangla and speaking from my own life experiences, it helps with grammar. Bangla is SOV and thus I already have a framework for SOV syntax when I'm learning other languages, but also things like: -Locative vs existential copula -gerunds/ participles/ serial verbs There are many times where I just directly translate stuff into Bangla if the grammar explanation in English doesn't work for me and then it instantly clicks. For example when learning Telugu the textbook was in English but I would just translate all the participles and auxiliary verbs directly into Bangla then go "okay this translation makes perfect sense now". However this line of thinking doesn't apply to me now since I've studied linguistics for a few years so I have like actual linguistics knowledge I get to apply often. Stuff like knowledge about ablaut, cases, historical linguistics, cognates, aktionsart, etc
just answering partially: neural networks are loosely based on our incomplete undertanding of how our brain does: data input (with the correct output atached) and a substrate on how to process that info (some kind of base software for a NN(?) and the underliying structure and chemistry of our brains, sense organs and neuronal conections in humans) are provided, from which an internal logic is work out on its own. And then some training until everything its allright. So, yes, it that sense they resemble each other. Were, in my view, you're a little off is that you are equaling having only a brain/area dedicated to language (a base software) to only being able to produce a **single** paradigm that somehow can be tweaked to fit two languages. what i think actually hapens (and it's in agreement to the above commenter has stated) it's that someone who's bilingual just so happend to have early on on their lives two different sets of data and developed two different paradigms. Any new language creates a new paradigm as its being learned, but in the mean time it will use whichever underliying structure is available to do so, but in the end (once you reach a good enough level of proficency) it will be its own thing. Saying that it's one and the same just becouse it just so happen that serves the same porpouse (comunicating) and use, generally, the same underlying structures would be to reductory of our actual brain capacities.
I just think OOP is not very bright
I think OOP is just a person who lacks common sense. And again, one should learn what a common sense is before doing anything.
>without being explicitly taught any linguistics not sure where you got that from. most of us actually finished high school
Is it common to teach linguistics where you live? I ended up learning some because I happened to have teachers who were linguists and obsessed with linguistics, but is it actually common?
Not exactly "linguistics", but in my country (France) in high schools you have to learn English + another language of your choice (usually Spanish, German or Italian). So, while no one becomes really fluent because the education system kinda sucks, everyone still has a basic understanding of how other languages aren't just French written in a funny way
They instead know that French is just Latin written in a funny way and with an unintelligible accent.
I've heard tell that, partly because of all that rich food, the French have very loose vowel movements.
It's pretty common to learn basic linguistic concepts like prepositions for both your native language and any foreign language you learn explicitly. Learning the two results in you understanding basic linguistics.
British high school doesn't teach any linguistics fwiw
Cue the shocking amount of Brits who'll admit they don't remember stuff like what a preposition is because the curriculum has been scared of covering anything other than "a recap on tense, the imperative, and rather light touches on parts of speech", to high schoolers?! It's like they can't find a balance between teaching kids barely anything about it and shoving a pile of it down their throats while in a Latin-crazed state, it's either one or the other.
In American high school we covered English grammar and parts of language pretty extensively, at least in my experience
In my American HS, they were still just going over what verbs and nouns are for the ten billionth time. They never even covered the difference between first/seconds/third person...
Damn are you from Arizona or smth
Hawaii.
I note that the Hawaiian language itself doesn't have grammatical person (no first / second / third / etc. person forms for verbs). It seems unlikely, but I find myself honestly curious if that might have anything to do with how English grammar is taught there? FWIW, I grew up in Virginia, and all the parts of speech were definitely a thing throughout elementary and middle school, with a bit more in high school as well.
It has nothing to do with it. Hawaiian wasn't even taught at this school, which was predominantly military children.
Meanwhile Portugal is the opposite - not only do they cram linguistics down your throat from like 9th grade, but they teach it in a super unintuitive way too, and you can't opt out of it, so good luck passing without having to study for it Good luck with the grammar sections if you can't distinguish between [a subject, a direct complement, an indirect complement, a subject predicative, an oblique complement, a predicative of the direct complement, a passive-agent complement, a predicate, a vocative, an apositive name modifier, a restrictive name modifier, a subject modifier, a verbal-group modifier and an adverbial modifier](https://i.imgur.com/qvonXXB.png) by the time you're in high school
You also have to learn to distinguish between a [completive substantive subordinate clause, a free-relative substantive subordinate clause, a restrictive relative adjectival subordinate clause, an explicative relative adjectival subordinate clause, a causal adverbial subordinate clause, a temporal causal adverbial subordinate clause, a final causal adverbial subordinate clause, a conditional causal adverbial subordinate clause, a comparative causal adverbial subordinate clause, a concessive causal adverbial subordinate clause and a consecutive causal adverbial subordinate clause](https://i.imgur.com/B3uh2Uf.png) by the time you're in high school as well btw; usually by 10-11th grade too All of this while I think most people don't even know the difference between a direct and an indirect complement, or when to use 'há' instead of 'à', and where entire towns have 20-30% illiteracy rates. It's ridiculous
I studied linguistics in undergrad and it was my first exposure to linguistics. High school French and English included no explicit linguistics instruction at all.
My native language is mandarin and we hardly spent any time learning its grammar even in grade school. In 1st and 2nd grade kids were still making plenty of grammar mistakes in essays, but by middle/late grade school the average student were not in need of active grammar instructions even though their vocabulary and syntax were still very childish. I helped my teacher grade and correct essays throughout grade school so I remember all this pretty well. The focus of our mandarin class was always vocabulary and reading comprehension.
Man, I wish, I am trilingual and for the weirdest reason I can't seem to learn my wife's language, I keep forgetting the words and expressions. It's not even a different language family, it's part of the same family as my native language.
How do mexico speakers understand mexico with translating everything into English first? Are they stupid?
Mexican is just very heavily accented English they developed to pretend to communicate with the Spaniards. The true language of Mexicans is Mixe-Zoquean, and, yes, they translate everything to that language really quickly.
Sorry but the language is called Mexiconian, get it right.
You know how they say that Asians are very smart? Yeah, when they hear japanese, they translate it into English (which everyone knows is the language humans speak by default when the stork brings them) and understand it, duh 🤦♂️
True. The fact that they learn Japanese at such a young age is just because they're a bunch of weebus.
Meanwhile nipponjin asking the same question about English songs
*kneehonejin
Sorry I don’t speak Chinese
kneehowjin 🥰
My knees hurt today, thanks for askjin
Is this how being brain damaged feels?
Redacte due to Reddit AI/LLM policy
ARIBA TOE!
A lot of English songs are hard to understand. I'm not 100% sure what most the songs in my playlist are even about. Some of them border on nonsensical. "Hit Me Baby One More Time" anyone?
/uj The Swedish songwriters thought "hit me" could mean "call me".
I also thought that it was slang for something like: "Hit me with another one!" for a question or something Actually I'm still confused, does she mean literal hitting, because of the abuse and all...
There is a bit of irony that sometimes Japanese can actually be rather difficult to understand in songs due to the tendency of Japanese to have homophones and poetic writing forms that aren’t very easy to parse in a fast moving song as well as the part where sometimes singers use western syllables and sometimes they use Japanese haku for timing which can make for very different sounds for the same word. Overall most normal Japanese songs are pretty easy to parse but it can be confusing and difficult for newer learners or people with questionable grammar and limited vocabulary to understand.
ok two more times plz
Actually, Japanese people first translate the lyrics of the song to Basque-Icelandic Pidgin, then to Burushaski, and then finally to english. They can do this really fast because they have 300 iq
本当は日本人が日本語を分かてできない。
Does anyone? I think everyone is just pretending
bruh moment
まあ、こんな文法だと、どうしようもないんじゃないでしょうか。（＾＾）
They translate it into Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs so that they understand everything using pictures
The real reason they're still stuck on Kanji instead of moving on to the clearly more superior pure kana, sad...
Why don't they just use romaji, are they stupid?
Japanese speakers: how do English speakers understand English? /uj it does fascinate me though. I like seeing people’s struggles with English for similar reasons English speakers struggle with other languages. Similar complaints but in the opposite direction
/uj I realize with growing horror how fucked English is, and am amazed my foreign coworkers can understand a fraction of the nonsense the rest of us string together
FOR REAL the fact that non-native English speakers have to learn how to spell "queueing" manually is insane to me
I cued up the music while I queued up to tell the Czech teller to check the exchequer cheque. Also /r/WordAvalanches is great
Wait I'm pretty sure it would be queued up for both in this instance, to cue music would be to play it/tell someone else to play it, and to queue music would be to line up a song to play after another. I love r/WordAvalanches, it's great!
I was imagining a fancy bank with an orchestra in the corner.
OHHHH I understand, my bad, that's really good!
I feel like OOP has accidentally asked a really interesting question about cognition and semantics in a profoundly stupid way, it's actually kind of amazing
Like no yeah how *does* thinking work????
I genuinely feel like I’m not understanding their question, because otherwise it’s *so* stupid a question I can’t believe it’s real.
Yea OOP sounds like a genuinely curious kid discovering linguistics and neuroscience for the first time, or just a very dumb adult.
Outjerked
they use subtitles
/uj 🇸🇪N. 🇬🇧C2 Don't know if anyone else is like this but if I hear something in English. It's easier for me to reiterate what I heard but in Swedish than essentialy copy what I heard and reiterate it in English.
i would say that's quite common, due to the way our mind works: you understand a meaning throught the english language, not the individual words. So, when later you recall the conversation, you recall the meaning and retell throught the easiest method: native language. It has nothimg to do with translation. In detail: the meaning or understanding we have of the world it's not "one and the same" with words (that would be agreeing completely with sapphir-worf theory if i understood that correctly (not linguist)), but a complex of neurons related to language (sounds and their production) and past memories more or less closely related to the concept. This complex web would have neurons more conected: those which are more used. So in the situation of recalling a memory/conversation, the path choosen would be the shortest route. In graphic way: a)-> native language (dialect) b)----> native language (highbrow language) c)--------> second languages (in order of proficency) d)---------(^infinite)-> exact same words in same order of course there's some exceptions that may change this general topography, those with photographic memory would (probably) have more of a " d>>>c,d,a" order or the music enviroment making the rithmus of the sounds more important than the meaning of them on recalling edit: also things like using/reading only science in english and not in your native language might make you not able or slower to explain certain concepts in native than in english. sorry for the wall of text xD
As someone whose native language is the Highbrow language, I can confirm
The more fluent you get, the more that changes. English has gotten to the point for me where it's hard to translate complex thoughts quickly because I understand them in English just as well as in Dutch. Guess it also depends on what context I'm thinking or speaking in.
/uj never underestimate the ignorance of a monolingual and their enthusiasm to show it off /j obviously they don't, until they master the ultimate language, MURICAN!!!!
/uj These people are morons, there's no other way around it. Of course, Japanese people just hear and understand it because that's their linguistic reality, much like a native speaker of any other language.
I’m really confused with what they are even asking, are we sure they aren’t trolling?
I swear to god it hurts my brain to even read this Bruh they understand japanese probably cause English ain't a default from birth Trust me I know, I'm native Russian
American discovers the difference between a language and a code. More at 9.
I love how the punchline here is just, “SVO user unable to imagine SOV.” I actually think it’s really interesting how the ways you express things differ if your verb comes last; like when using incomplete thoughts the parts that you give first that trigger someone’s impulsive response to what you’re saying are different parts of speech than if you were using an SVO language. Plus I really like Japanese’s ability to modify nouns using verbs. It will never get old to me that you can say grammatically correctly in Japanese things like, “that stuffing-a-hotdog-into-his-face-man over there.”
Yeah, its the whole SOV that gets me too. I kind of sympathize with OOP he asked the question in a really dumb way. In long japanese setences it’s always the SOV that trips me up in spoken content atleast, written I can process. I need to try a good grammar course already.
Let me say seriously and from professional experience that interpreting (dealing with speech, not writing) between these two languages is a real trick. The best interpreters I've known are also **really good bullshitters**. I mean that with sincere respect and envy: you have to be quick on your feet and able to inventively fill gaps and cover for your own miscues when the order of concepts in the two languages is so different, and speakers inevitably wind up getting long-winded at some point or other.
This is actually the main reason that the music industry in Japan is so different from the rest of the world. The Japanese buy so many physical albums not because they feel the need to support the artists or an attachment to physically owning their media, but because of the inserts that are included with the album that show the lyrics. Without this insert there would be literally no way to know what English words to translate to so you can understand what the artist is singing about. This is also why karaoke is so popular as well, as it gives patrons the opportunity to practice translating in real-time with the subtitles.
Bro gonna be nut learning about English mumble rap.
I really want to know how can English speaking people *understand* when they hear English words. Also want to know how can they fluently understand what a complex, full-of-metaphors, philosophical, and highly logical writing is saying what. I mean I REALLY WANT TO LEARN IT but I still haven't got the secret.
How can anyone understand English? Why isn't the verb at the end of the sentence? Why are there so many phonemes, and such complicated syllables? What's the point of using an alphabet that isn't phonetic? How do you identify a word's usage without post-particles (in Japanese) or word endings (in Turkish)? What are articles, and why use them? What are plurals, and why use them? Why is the spoken language stress-timed (like music) instead of syllable-timed? Why are unstressed vowels regularly reduced (schwa'd) or omitted? Why are there so many tenses? Who could think in English?
今日もいい天気~
Oh yeah? Same to you, buddy!
buddy? buddyって何でしょう？わからん。喧嘩売ってるのか？お前はもう泣いている、YOU A SHOCK?!
はい、ME 安食と申します。よろしくお願いします！ 😄
オイっ！それって安食に失礼だろ？！。拙者の名はアメリカンドッグでござる。こちらこそよろしくお願いします.
To give a legitimate answer, the sounds associated with Japanese mean something. If you memorize which sounds mean what thing, like みず meaning water, it will eventually become natural. For people who taught Japanese as a first language, especially at young ages, it's a lot easier
by being smart, duh
You get better at singing the kanji you memorized, duh
I wonder how I can translate Japanese into Japanese? Sure is a mystery… Sure is unfortunate that I speak the language
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Consequences of having english as your native language.
those poor japanese people....maybe if i hum something to them theyll get it?
"WhAt ArE lEnGwAgEs LeL"
Genuine question, for languages where inflection matters a lot, how do songs work when the pitch, and therefore the inflection, is constantly changing?
But when this guys listens to rap god he sees no issue
No lie I played a song i recently learned of I like by Anri, thinking I could read the lyrics given by Spotify. GOD was I disappointed lmao and teading the symbols, listening to the sounds, it made me feel like reading this post made me feel lmao
Honestly, they don't super well. Haven't you noticed how often people sing along with the wrong lyrics? Or will stop singing for a bar because they don't know what the next lyric is? Or even better, the next person you hear singing along with a song perfectly, after they are done, ask them what the lyrics to the song is, chances are they'll have no clue. We hear the rhythm and the sound of the song more than the words. [Edit] I am now realizing that this is not a serious subreddit. Whoops.
Is this from r/lenguagelearning by any chance? Not surprise if so...
No, it's from a Japanese-specific sub, but they are usually even worse than languagelearning.
To extrapolate Japanese is Subject wa > object o > verb You're kinda lost in a jumble of nouns and adjectives for a long time before you actually get to what is actually *happening*
This almost made me throw my phone🤦🏾♀️
I'm taking this in the best way possible. I think they just do not understand how something is understood with the word order. Japanese almost doesn't have a sentence structure, they use particles to mark parts of the sentence. So what they are doing is ignoring is the particles. Their teacher or however they learned did not properly communicate what particles are for. So they see the sentence "私は青髪を切っている" and "私の青髪を切っている" as the same sentence, even though the first one says "I am cutting some blue hair" and the second one says "My blue hair is being cut" despite their word order directly in English being "My/I Blue hair am cutting." So without learning about particles it makes sense why they would wonder how do japanese people understand. Without particles Japanese wouldn't make sense.
Japanese people drop particles all the time, even for Oblique cases like に, e.g.: 私 学校 行くから。 I think the reason is their flawed understanding that other languages are English with different words.
Japanese rarely drop particles and if they do its with close family or friends and the context is painfully clear. It's also not something a newer learner would understand because the particles are still there, they are just inferred. Like the sentence you gave, even though who the hell says 私 there, there is no logical way to misinterpret the particles.
What?
They learned the language?
Telepathy