site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3970 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 21, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Language Learning

I've always loved languages. I had aspirations when I was younger to become a polyglot. I had (according to the DLAB) a high aptitude for language learning.

Unfortunately, I have also always been a lazy student, and so initial enthusiasm always ran into the reality that learning languages, especially to anything approaching fluency, is hard. (Yes, I know a lot of you non-Americans grew up in multilingual environments and spoke two or three languages by the time you were in high school. Americans generally have to make a serious effort, outside of our sparse language offerings in high school, to acquire another language.)

Over many years, I have acquired bits and pieces of nearly a dozen languages, and true proficiency in none of them. I can read Cyrillic, Hangul, Arabic, Hiragana and Katakana and a few Kanji. I know enough Russian, German, Korean, and Japanese to express my ignorance.

Over the years, I have dabbled or studied in:

French: One semester in junior high school. I remember "Marie est une fille" and "je nais parle pas Francais."

German: In my opinion, the easiest language for English speakers to learn. With my rusty high school German, I retain the basic grammar and can still occasionally pick up phrases, and if I studied in earnest and built up my vocabulary, I think I could quickly reach at least conversational fluency.

Russian: Oh my god. Second hardest language I ever studied. I began studying Russian because my first girlfriend was Russian, and I took a few semesters in college. What are these cases? How do Russians even verb? And what am I supposed to do with my tongue? (My girlfriend endlessly made fun of my pronunciation, said I couldn't even pronounce her name in Russian correctly.) I am never, ever in a million years going to read War and Peace in the original Russian. (I am actually reading the Maude translation now.)

Irish: Too bad @FarNearEverywhere isn't around anymore to make fun of me. I took a semester of Irish Gaelic in college. Fucking incomprehensible. I remember zero grammar and maybe two words (including my username). They should never have used the English alphabet for written Irish; borrowing Chinese characters, or just refining ogham, would have made as much sense.

Esperanto: Yes, I also took a semester of Esperanto in college, for fun. One of the first conlangs, it was meant to be an easy-to-learn universal language, made simple with the absence of irregular verbs or complicated grammatical rules or any of the other things that make most languages difficult. It still has a fairly large global community of enthusiasts (though maybe now they are outnumbered by fluent speakers of Klingon or Dothraki), most of whom are still living the pre-USSR socialist dream. Fun fact: William Shatner starred in a 1966 horror film called Incubus, with dialog entirely in Esperanto. You can watch the whole movie (yes, including William Shatner speaking in Esperanto!) on YouTube.

Japanese: Took several semesters in college. Did terribly, but despite not practicing it since then, I can still read hiragana and katakana and remember a few kanji, and even manage some basic polite phrases. Although many people say Japanese is hard, I actually found it surprisingly - I would not say easy, but practical. There are no sounds in Japanese that do not exist in English, so it's not hard to pronounce, and I find the grammar to actually be pretty logical. The hardest part is the many different pronouns and inflections to indicate different politeness levels, and of course, fucking kanji. Chinese characters that the Japanese borrowed, much the same way Irish borrowed Latin characters, but to be literate in Japanese you need to know both the Japanese and the Chinese readings, and Japanese elementary school students are expected to know over a thousand. I remember maybe 20.

Korean: I never studied it very intensely, but I can still read Hangul (which is much easier than Japanese hiragana and katakana). The funny thing about Korean and Japanese is that linguists say they are completely unrelated languages. I suspect some cultural bias is at play here (Japanese and Koreans accuse each other of stealing pretty much everything from one another). It's true that Korean and Japanese share very little vocabulary (unlike, say, English and German or Spanish and French), but I found the grammar to be very similar.

Arabic: The language I have the most experience with. It's hard to pronounce, many sounds are difficult to distinguish for English speakers, the script is difficult and non-standardized, the grammar is complicated, and verbs have a billion different inflections. Also, you usually learn Modern Standard Arabic (or "Fusha") in class, which is basically media Arabic that zero native speakers actually use in conversation. Dialectal Arabic is broken into several different regional variants that are sometimes mutually unintelligible.

Of course I hadn't actually practiced any of them in many years, and language skills deteriorate rapidly without practice. So I occasionally looked at my shelves of books and told myself someday, I would brush up and get back into language learning. Realistically, though, it was never going to happen.

But recently I got on a language kick again. It started with DuoLingo ("Let's see how well I do with all those languages I studied back in the day") and now I am seriously cracking books again, watching YouTube videos, and even considering italki lessons.

I am concentrating on Arabic and Japanese. (Yes, for really serious language learning I'd stick with one; expert opinion is mixed on the effectiveness of studying multiple languages at once, but there's no question that it means dividing your time.) If I can stay motivated, I have decided to set a goal of someday achieving a CEFR level of C1 in Arabic. (Currently, I am, generously, at A2-B1.) I would like to do the same in Japanese, but right now I am actually doing a lot of Arabic practice and just dabbling in Japanese.

If I stick with it, I may post updates on my progress.

I had (according to the DLAB) a high aptitude for language learning.

Now that I know this test exists, I want to take it so that if I lack the capacity to learn a new language I can spare myself the wasted effort. Is the test (or a variant of it) available online anywhere?

As far as I know, it's only given to applicants to the Department of Defense, but apparently there are DLAB prep guides available.

That said, I'd take it with a grain of salt. I don't think it's precise enough to tell you that you lack the capacity to learn a new language. Nor does scoring high on it mean you are a language prodigy (as I am proof).

I've studied German, Spanish, Japanese and French in school and in immersion (as in, visiting the countries where they're spoken and living for a few months in each.) I agree with you that German is the easiest for English speakers to learn (though Spanish is not very hard either.) Also agree with Japanese being a rather practical language and pronunciation is very easy. I got lost on the kanji too though.

I find that English natives learning Japanese tend to have issues hearing/pronouncing the “r” sound, the “t/ch/ts” sound (for ち and つ, respectively), and the “f” sound (for ふ) ; even the “u” sound sometimes gets mangled. Is that your experience? My guess is that a Spanish background would help a lot, at least with the “r” sound, and German with “u”.

Hmm, I don't think I've noticed myself or other english speakers having trouble with the r or t/ch/ts sounds but maybe it's something that's more pronounced for people who've spoken Japanese their whole lives and there's a nuance that I'm not aware of. I have noticed that the "ふ" sound is a lot breathier or "h-like" than the way English speakers usually pronounce "fu".

I generally have trouble with vowels more than consonants in all languages, my vowels tend to be really flat (I don't like nasal sounds so when I say "cat" for example, in english, I avoid the nasal a and voice it a bit more like an "ah" sound if that makes sense.) The vowels in Japanese, German and Spanish are all essentially the same though in my mind (disregarding the umlauted ones in German.) The r in Japanese is similar to the "tap r" in Spanish. Sometimes the "u" in Japanese is a bit like the umlauted u (ü) but it seems a bit more of an affect or personal choice rather than common Japanese, I'm not sure

Hmm, I don't think I've noticed myself or other english speakers having trouble with the r or t/ch/ts sounds but maybe it's something that's more pronounced for people who've spoken Japanese their whole lives and there's a nuance that I'm not aware of.

The easiest way I can put it is that I think the た row romanisation, ta/chi/tsu/te/to, is a bit misleading, and the t/ch/ts are actually quite similar if not identical in terms of the thing I’m doing with my mouth during the consonant part.

I think it’s clearest with ち. English-only learners tend to make the ch in ち sound like the ch in church, when I think it’s more like…a cross between ch, ts, and t? There’s much less lower jaw/lip movement than if I say a ch- word in English. The closest English equivalent I can think of would be the ch in itch, but even that can be a bit too heavy on the ch-sound, depending on how you pronounce it.

Similarly with つ - the “s” tends to be overemphasized I think.

I have noticed that the "ふ" sound is a lot breathier or "h-like" than the way English speakers usually pronounce "fu".

Yes! Similar to the above た row kana, pronouncing the は row kana consonants similarly gets ふ closer to the native pronunciation - it’s still recognisably kind of an F sound, but with much more of a H-quality to it.

The vowels in Japanese, German and Spanish are all essentially the same though in my mind (disregarding the umlauted ones in German.) The r in Japanese is similar to the "tap r" in Spanish. Sometimes the "u" in Japanese is a bit like the umlauted u (ü) but it seems a bit more of an affect or personal choice rather than common Japanese, I'm not sure

That’s what I mean, yeah. I find that English-only people trying to pick up Japanese have difficulty with the r (and it contributes to the “lol japanese people always get the L and R in English words wrong”, because what it sounds like is kind of in between the English L and R), but to my ear it sounds very similar to the Spanish flap r (not having learned Spanish but knowing people who speak it).

I definitely think the umlauted u is closer to the general pronunciation of the entire u-column than what English speakers do (which tends to be closer to the oo in roof).

Like, take 内（うち）— my impression of many English-only speakers trying to pronounce that is “oochee”, which sounds atrocious to me.

to my ear it sounds very similar to the Spanish flap r (not having learned Spanish but knowing people who speak it)

It is that sound exactly. If you simply assume that whatever sound a language writes with the letter r is an alveolar tap then you will be correct the vast majority of the time. The affricate ch in Japanese is also different from its English counterpart, but since the English sound is not present in Japanese there isn't a pressing need to distinguish it to be understood.

If you start modeling too you could become a large language model.

…. I’ll see myself out.

I'm already a small language model.

I clearly respond to prompt engineering.

  • Tulpamancy and Demonology? -> Prompt engineering an agent.

  • Learning by watching my betters? -> Training Data.

  • Esoteric low Magick rituals? -> That's prompt engineering again. I just set the vibe and the general intelligence in my subconscious does the work.

  • Insisting I have some identity or another and watching my irl behavior fall into place? -> Just more prompt engineering.

Next step? Chimerize with my sibling models and become larger.

So yeah,

If you start modeling too you could become a large language model.

This but unironically.

You’ll have to join myself and @self_made_human in the cyber verse once the Singularity happens. We’ll have a whole gaggle of Motte based transhumanists.

Yessss, Motte friends-

I've noticed you two around.

It's always nice to see your takes on things.

I speak Russian, English and German, the latter worse than the first two (good enough to einkaufen, not good enough to complain to the manager or wage culture war in). Some Italian at barbarian level.

I checked out Turkish and Hungarian for emigration-related reasons and damn, non-Indoeuropean languages are a pain to learn.

Learning an IE language if you already speak a couple is like fixing a vacuum cleaner by a brand you're unfamiliar with: you might not know how to make it do the fancy stuff, but you have a pretty good idea what parts go together to make it suck.

Then you see a sentence in Hungarian and it laughs at your attempts to analyze it.

I speak English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese to varying degrees of fluency; I’d like to pick up a couple more languages someday (maybe something very similar like Korean - my understanding is also that Japanese and Korean are syntactically very alike, and Cantonese sounds quite close to Korean for the same words in many cases, I’m told).

I do browse the internet in Japanese and set most of my display languages to Japanese (the language I am least familiar with), and I read Chinese texts when I can. Even then, it’s difficult trying to maintain proficiency — the lack of a good conversation partner in Mandarin and Japanese in my social circles means that my ability to converse beyond daily chitchat is slipping hard.

It doesn’t help that life is too busy for me to set aside an hour every day just to practice languages!

Do you have a specific vernacular form of Arabic that you are studying or planning to study in addition to the Standard? The two common choices are Egyptian and Lebanese and I've been trying to decide between them for whenever I stop playing around with the script and get to the hard part. Egyptian has more total speakers and a big media presence but the Arab diaspora seems to be disproportionately from Lebanon and places with similar dialects like Syria and Palestine. Or is it possible to muddle along with a passive understanding of a few varieties in addition to speaking and reading MSA?

Right now, I am mostly focusing on MSA because that serves as a "lingua franca" in the Arab world and will allow me to watch most media and read books.

You can talk to Arabic speakers in MSA. They will understand you, it just sounds kind of like addressing someone in King James Bible English.

Eventually, I will need to start practicing a dialect for everyday conversation. As you say, Egyptian and Levantine are the most common choices, but I'm kind of drawn to Gulf dialect.

I am proudly tetralingual! I speak English, Bengali, Hindi and Urdu.

(Let's not quibble about the fact that Urdu and Hindu are pretty much the same language with a different script, that's beneath us)

It seems my brain hyperfixated on English since early childhood, or at least after I spent a good chunk of time in the States. I speak and write it more fluently than 99.999% of native speakers, and certainly you'll be hard pressed to find an Indian in India who speaks it better.

In contrast, my ADHD made me give less than zero shits about learning other regional Indian languages. They had to be drilled into my head with enough force to crack my thick skull, and I can't say I've ever read any literature in them outside of the school curriculum, barring road signs and skimmed newspapers.

I can't say I'm particularly interested in learning new ones, it seems like a lot of pain for minimal payoff unless I intend to shift over, maybe I could justify German or some of the Nordic languages, since there's concrete benefits to being a practising doctor there.

But I'm pretty sure that ubiquitous real-time translation is almost here, so people can rattle off whatever the hell they like, and can be sure that the recipient understands it.

(Let's not quibble about the fact that Urdu and Hindu are pretty much the same language with a different script, that's beneath us)

Not knowing either, my mental model is that the spoken languages map in the same way that American English and British English map. Different vocabulary for various things, but once you internalize the truck/lorry pairing (for example) you're okay. Is that the case?

The difference between the standard varieties is increasing over time as Urdu speakers add more Persian and Arabic loanwords while Hindi speakers make every effort to purge the ones acquired during Mughal times and to replace them with older Sanskrit vocabulary, but this takes a while to trickle down to the way the average person speaks.

From what I can tell, they sound nigh-identical, even more commonality than different English accents across the pond.

Urdu has additonal arabic loan words, but most Hindi speakers understand them fine, when I met a lot of Pakistanis for the first time, there was no obvious way of telling they spoke a different language.

The colloquial dialect of Hindi and Urdu are very similar. But their more formal registers have sufficient differences in vocabulary to confuse a casual Hindi speaker a bit.

I remember stumbling on a news report in Urdu and finding that while I understood everything that was being said, I had to infer the meaning of quite a few unfamiliar Persian/Arabic origin words by context.

Possible reasons for a difference in opinion.

In the order of fluency, I can speak English, Kannada and Hindi with my grasp over Hindi primarily being through the Bookish register and some exposure to the colloquial one during undergrad. I also do not consume Bollywood movies/music which I've read tends to use Hindi that leans slightly more towards Urdu vocabulary.

Have you considered learning a lightweight conlang? Something like Toki Pona, with a limited vocabulary and strategic design.

I guess it depends on what you want to get out of the process.

German

German is an amazing language. The closest thing to a simplied-Sanskrit using the English-alphabet.

I grew up fluent in English, Marathi and Hindi. Learned a decent bit of Sanskrit grammar, but was never able to sustain a conversation in it.

German was the one language I learned in adulthood, and my 2 distinct experiences with learning German have helped crystallize certain opinions on language learning.

There is no such thing as leisurely language learning. You need to be thrown into the deep end of the pool. Now, this might seem like surface level advocacy for immersion based learning, but there is more to it. I am going to squeeze every little bit of metaphor from that analogy. Similar to drowning, you need to feel that sense of hopelessness for it to work.

I studied Sanskrit for 3 years and never got close to stringing more than 2 sentences together. I got a 99/100 in my exams for it, but leisurely learning with zero desperation meant that learning it was more like storing facts / gotchas in my head, rather than any from-fundamentals understanding of the language.

I studied A2 German for 3 months after a shitty A1 class, and the new class had 1 rule. You could not speak any other language in the class. Not with the instructor or your fellow classmates. Any mistake meant an actual monetary fine. It sounded ridiculous.

How am I supposed to ask what I don't know in a language that I don't know. How am I supposed to understand explanations for simple German I don't understand in more simple German I don't understand. It was also humiliating, because everyone else had done the good A1 class and were far ahead of me on day 1. It was desperate and the first few days were brutal.

But the human brain is a miracle machine. A few weeks in, I could almost feel my brain rewiring. It stopped reaching for English as an intermediate crutch and started grounding my understanding of less-simple German in the simplest German words. I have never since learned anything as fast in my life. In 3 months I was more fluent in German, than my friends who had spent a year or two in Germany. They had greater immersion, but they weren't desperate. They were in the shallow end of the pool. Most importantly, in 3 months, my German was better than my Sanskrit had gotten over 3 years, and both are practically the same language !

It's been 10 years since, and I have completely forgotten all my German. But, I feel confident that just like swimming, it will come back to me with a little bit of desperation.

In autumn of last year, I learned LOGO for a class I’m teaching, and it felt amazing. To quote my own metaphor, using C++ feels like conversing in raw logic, but using LOGO feels like dancing with logic itself.

You’ve got me wanting to learn Sanskrit, and Screye has me wanting to learn German, for the same reason.

Another good reason to learn Sanskrit, is that a great many manuscripts remain untranslated. Even when they are translated, they are done by woke moralists who interpret the works through a 2023-western-woke lens.

The hard part of learning Sanskrit, is like Latin, no one actually speaks it. So you would only ever be fluent in it as a written language.

Unfortunately I don't speak it myself even though I know dozens of words in it just by learning about Buddhism/Advaita Vedanta.

I believe that is also how Mormons teach language when preparing missionaries for foreign lands - throw them way in the deep end, no more English after the first one or two days. It apparently works! IIRC the missionaries come in completely blind to the language and go out after six weeks with at least a functional grasp of it, which is incredible to me.

Too bad @FarNearEverywhere isn't around anymore to make fun of me.

Some say she lurks this forum to this very day. Legend has it she will offer sardonic clarification to any user truly in need.

You read accounts of famous 'geniuses' of old and many of them are noted for being fluent in like 3+ languages, often starting at an early age.

I often wonder how many of these accounts are hyperbolized, since in my experience just flat out learning languages from scratch is a miserable task with only marginal success.

It feels like in principle it should be possible to learn some 'universal' rules that let you see the congruence common to all languages and thus make it easier to learn new ones and translate between one's you already know, but in practice the intricacies end up making each one so different as to feel almost incomparable.

Depending on how big the "+" part is... I am reasonably fluent in 3 languages (meaning, can maintain a conversation, read a newspaper, would likely understand about any book not specifically written to be incomprehensible, etc.) and can easily understand another one though not speak fluently, for the lack of practice. Not a genius by any measure. So I'd imagine if somebody had real skills and worked on it... I don't see why achieving something like 8-10 would be impossible. I mean, once you got once Romance language, a reasonable effort would probably give you about 5 of them. Add German and English, you're already at 7. Then you can add Dutch and Norwegian and Swedish, since you already familiar with Germanics, and you've got 10. And we didn't even have to leave Europe!

You read accounts of famous 'geniuses' of old and many of them are noted for being fluent in like 3+ languages, often starting at an early age.

Surely being fluent in 3+ languages starting at an early age is less impressive than being fluent in 3+ languages starting at a late age!

I’ve always been confused about why people emphasize how many languages some 18th century child prodigy speaks. Surely this is the easiest time to pick up a language? And it’s not like it was uncommon to speak multiple languages in antiquity if there was use for it - educated folk in the Byzantine empire would’ve spoken at least Greek and Latin, right? Was “fluency” a much more stringent assessment before the 20th century?

There are a lot of confounding factors. If the languages are closely related e.g. Spanish, Italian, French, Latin, then it isn't too hard, particularly if you are a native speaker of one of them. If you truly, absolutely need to master a language for work as an adult e.g. English for immigrants to the US, then you aren't going to hear many complaints like "oh, I'm bad at languages" that you get from monolingual Americans or Brits. It's just that most English-speakers are never put in a situation where knowing a foreign language is essential, so the opportunity cost for them is too great.

I grew up in a State Department household (my parents speak 9 languages between them) that hopped from country to country so of course I'm biased, but I don't find learning a language at least to the basic "can barter for groceries and ask for directions" level to be that miserable of an experience. Sure, you might sound like a fool who can't conjugate verbs, but it can still be a lifesaver if you happen to be stranded in a third world country without any other means of communication with the locals. The hardest grammatical rules tend to come relatively far along the path of diminishing returns when it comes to language learning. Pronunciation can be trickier, but I would only expect that to be an absolute communication barrier at first in something like Chinese or Arabic.

I'm not sure what sorts of universal rules you are thinking of, but I find that learning the linguistic terminology for things like verb tenses, noun declensions, particles, etc. does help a lot when starting a new language, so I'm glad I went through the traditional schooling approach with a grammar textbook for at least one language. Of course you will encounter more new things the farther you stray from your mother tongue, but that's to be expected.

I'm just saying that I've worked on learning the basics of Japanese, Russian, and German and dear lord do the rules you learn in one mostly NOT help you learning the others.

There is a lot of snake oil peddled in the language learning field. (Any class or video or program that promises "Fluency in X weeks!" is bullshit.)

Nobody - literally nobody - can become "fully fluent" in a new language in a matter of weeks. Even with the most intense immersion program, you could only get up to a barely functional level.

That said, it has long been known that children learn languages incredibly easily compared to adults. Up until about age 12, a child immersed in a new language can probably acquire native fluency within a couple of years.

If you look on YouTube, there are a lot of so-called "polyglots" who claim to speak up to 20 languages. At most, some of them speak 3 or 4 at anything like native fluency, and all those other languages are ones where they've memorized enough canned phrases and dialogs to make an impressive-sounding YouTube video.

Around 20 years ago I met a Greek guy who’d studied Finnish for six months from language cassettes and then spent two months here speaking the language. At that point he was fluent to the extent that I first thought he’d been living here for a decade. I’ve never seen anyone else come even remotely close to that and the guy turned out to be a language genius (he spoke around a dozen languages more or less proficiently).

Yeah, that's about my conclusion.

Either you learn multiple languages as a child when your brain is specifically attuned to learning them, or you're bottlenecked forever thereafter.

That said, I've been using Duolingo for Spanish for around 10 years now, and I think I'm actually capable of reading it and grasping the meaning pretty fluently, and I can notice and follow snippets of conversations around me. Even though AI translation is now strictly superior to humans, I will probably keep at it for the pure sake of 'brain exercise.'

I suspect people claiming fluency in many languages are using it kind of like membership in Mensa, just a signal they can send of their intelligence, even if, practically speaking it isn't that useful to them and they're far less impressive than it implies.

Indeed, most people who are truly fluent in multiple languages would just get jobs as translators, which isn't a field known for it's megageniuses or paying massive amounts. It's pretty much just a rote skill like any other and is only situationally useful to develop.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats