a small musing on language

[Faby]

I assume most people here are native English speakers, so I thought it'd be good to share this snippet I told a friend of mine when he asked me why I don't pursue German as a career or academic tool.

Most of the time, I find native English speakers berated on their laziness and their inability to learn other languages, and so I hope you'll find this adequately displacing.

A bit of background -- I'm from Romania, and am an English-German double major. People claim that everyone here can speak English and that German speakers are harder to find and are far more valuable on the capitalist market (ugh).

It's mostly a rant -- feel free to skip to the final few sentences for the gist of it.


"the long and short of it is this -- no matter how hard i try, german will always be alien to me, external, whereas english is.. it's hard to explain, but i never felt like english was a second language to me. for as far as i can remember, everything i've been doing, talking, thinking has been in english. i feel like i'm bilingual, even though my parents don't speak the language. and even though i understand anything in german and can speak it fluently and everything, it still feels tremendously awkward and out of place when i do it. i'm thinking i'm just not that good at foreign languages after all -- in the end, everyone can speak their native language to some extent or another. and anyhow, i don't believe it's the whole "oh, spend a month in x country and then it'll feel natural," because i know inside me it's not like that. english to me is an identity, it was and is my way to cope with a culture that i do not understand and do not want to be a part of, kind of like an open act of rebellion. german is simply a language."

And as a final note, I am deeply repulsed by the idea that people should use languages as tools for (financial) self-advancement. Maybe it's the philologist in me, but capitalism should stay the fuck out of things that don't concern it. Learn a language for its beauty, its weirdness, its sounds -- not because you'll get more money for speaking it.

[no]

But muh supply and demand!

[Ky]

Language - as much as I love it in an artistic sense - is primarily intended for communication. For some reason, a lot of people communicate in English, myself included.

One of the reasons I simultaneously love and hate the English language is because it's so nuanced and haphazard. Even words with the same spelling can sound different (heteronyms), like read and read, close and close, wind and wind, etc. And people constantly confuse your and you're, then and than, as well as there, they're, and their. Indeed, learning a language like, say, Spanish seems ridiculously easy by comparison; there are seldom words that are strangely pronounced, and you can read it aloud without making many errors in pronunciation - even if you don't understand the meaning of most of the words - if you at least know the spoken grammar rules. As for German, it's more complicated... partly because some words seem to be shorter words strung together (which is actually pretty cool).

French sounds almost classy. Italian, not quite as much, but somewhat. I find Japanese particularly interesting and exotic, but struggle to differentiate it from Chinese or Korean sometimes despite there ostensibly being a great deal of differences. Then there's the Slavic languages, and don't even get me started on Swahili...

Languages are neat, and its sad that there are so many practical concerns. As for those concerns, however, your colleague is wrong - in terms of communicating with people worldwide, speaking German is less valuable than speaking English precisely because it isn't as widely spoken, and because many who do speak it while participating in the world market also speak English. That doesn't mean, however, that it's any less worthwhile to learn.

[Faby]

German, on the whole, is really beautiful because it's very earthen. I know I'm taking on a position which might sound kinda C19 Romantic and protonazi, but you can still feel that the language on the whole is Germanic. English has that too, but to a lesser extent. It's a lot less raw, and even though German has big French influences too, it doesn't come close to English.

[vonunov]

(08-16-2015 01:10 AM)DoA Wrote:  As for German, it's more complicated... partly because some words seem to be shorter words strung together (which is actually pretty cool).

Yes, agglutination, pretty cool. If you look up some highly agglutinative languages, those can be an adventure.

Quote:I find Japanese particularly interesting and exotic, but struggle to differentiate it from Chinese or Korean sometimes despite there ostensibly being a great deal of differences.

I assume you already know what Japanese sounds like? Korean reminds me of Japanese, except it deviates obviously from the cons-vowel cons-vowel syllabary pattern, thus sounds more halting, and also has a lot of sentence endings sounding like "ida" / "mida" / "hamnida". Mandarin sounds very obviously broken up into blocks (words), often says the same word twice in a row for emphasis or bigger meaning (ren = person, ren ren = everyone), and, since Mandarin is a tonal language, the intonation doesn't make any subtextual sense the way we're used to. Cantonese is the same, except stranger and angrier-sounding.

Good practice: http://greatlanguagegame.com/

Or Youtube "<language> news".

Or are you talking of something else besides telling them apart by the sound?

[Ky]

You assume correctly - it's just that I haven't trained my ear to pick up on the differences.