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I hear you were talking about the best European language. It's Russian. I'm glad I could put your mind at rest. Too bad the weather and the politics are so lovely and they didn't have the good sense to colonize warm places like the other Euro powers.
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Jan 17, 2015 08:17
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I'm an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher, and I actually know something about this. Basically, English being super-difficult to acquire is a myth. Hundreds of millions of people have learned it as a second language, and they're not all geniuses or linguistically gifted. With that said, English has plenty of annoying characteristics, some of which have been mentioned: a bewildering array of rules and exceptions to said rules, poor sight-sound relationships (sound out the words "cough", "rough", "through", "though", and "bough" and see what I mean) and a pretty unforgiving word order. The list goes on. But there are also some nice things about English. For one, we only have one second-person pronoun- you. Formality, plurality, gender, social status, it's always just "you". IIRC, Hmong has 7, and rules to go along with each and every one of them. Unlike a lot of European languages, we don't have gendered nouns and all the associated agreement issues. English isn't a tonal language, nor does it have a complex and deeply culturally-derived honorifics system. We don't have a complicated future tense, we just stuck "will" in front of the verb to be conjugated and call it a day. Again, the list goes on. Also, while it's true that English plays fast and loose with the rules (to the endless frustration of ELLs everywhere, let me tell you) it turns out that's not very important in the grand scheme of language acquisition. It's a much more organic process than that: you can't just learn a language by memorizing its vocabulary and grammar, right? (Right.) So the lack of strict adherence to the rules isn't as big a deal as you might think, even though it often seems that way. ...oh, right, was there a game being played? I bought it thanks to this LP, and I still can't believe how well-crafted it is. I'd never played a Wolfenstein game before, but whatever I was expecting, it certainly wasn't this. Besides the clearly-talented development team, I have to give Bethesda props for agreeing to publish. Their hype machine may be obnoxious as hell, but shipping out what is IMO the best FPS to come along in years was pretty cool of them.
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Jan 17, 2015 08:26
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Also and ESL teacher here. What he said. Half the battle is getting people to just understand that English and their language are two different languages. My students always ask, "We can do this in Slovak, why not English?" and the answer is always, "Because English isn't Slovak." (Followed by an explanation of whatever rule they're trying to tell me doesn't exist.)
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Jan 17, 2015 11:10
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It makes one wonder what a good 'universal' language would entail of - I mean, I know about Esperanto; but what would people here think a... a simple, uncomplicated language should entail of?
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Jan 17, 2015 13:11
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Samovar posted:It makes one wonder what a good 'universal' language would entail of - I mean, I know about Esperanto; but what would people here think a... a simple, uncomplicated language should entail of? Something that doesn't have ties to any existing language.
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Jan 17, 2015 13:22
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Damegane posted:Something that doesn't have ties to any existing language. Wouldn't that be the ideal, though? If you just took Mandarin and "optimised" it to be as easy to learn and comprehensible as possible, you'd have one billion people who already half know your new language. This is all ignoring the elephant in the room though - how on earth are you going to get everyone on the planet to learn and speak a second language, even if they do half know it already?
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Jan 17, 2015 13:33
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Depends on your definition of simple, I think. Does simple mean not having cases and word endings for nouns? Now you need to have more strict rules pertaining to word order. Which is more simple, English having two present tenses, one for things happening at the moment of speaking and one for things that happen always, never, or repeatedly (I am playing soccer vs. I play soccer), or German having just one tense that then relies upon context (Ich spiele Fußball -- if you're kicking around a ball, you just said I'm playing, but if you're sitting at home with your soccer bag in the corner, you just said I play). In many Slavic languages articles as we understand them don't exist, but are rather a part of word endings. Is English, with its lack of word endings, the simpler of the two? Teaching indefinite/definite articles can be pretty awful sometimes when the language doesn't have articles. But if not having articles is simpler, now we have to deal with word endings. I think the more you simplify one aspect of a language, the more complicated another part then becomes. If there were some way to do things like eliminate word endings AND articles without loss of meaning, perhaps that would be simplest of all, but chances are whatever "rule" you invent to accomplish that is itself just as confusing. To answer Gort's 1st question: Would that be ideal though? More people speak a language that uses the Roman/Latin alphabet than Mandarin, and most countries whose languages use a different alphabet have some form of romanization or and their citizens would be accustomed to seeing it on things like road signs, where the romanization is often printed underneath the country's official script. By that account, using any language with a Roman alphabet would require the least amount of time teaching people a new alphabet, because even in China and India and the Middle East (places where the Roman alphabet is not the prevalent writing system), many of the people there already know the Roman alphabet as well. The 2nd one: Choice A) By force. Either people learn your language, or die. Either way, eventually everyone will know that language. Choice B) An unbelievably popular band whose lyrics subliminally teach you everything you need to know about the language so that after listening to their music for a long enough time you realize that you understand the language. gregory fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 13:35
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Anyone into this derail should read "The Adventure of English". It's easy to think of English as stealing words from others but a lot of loan words came from the invading Danes and Normans attempting to force their language upon English speakers. Loanwords are what make English awesome and are arguably why the language still exists. Words can be taken from other languages, but the original English word is still kept around. "Ask" and "demand" used to mean the exact same thing, except the first was English and the second was French. English has a habit of absorbing new words without bumping the old one, you can fine tune the concept they both represent, to the point where now the two words mean similar but significantly distinct things.
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Jan 17, 2015 13:54
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I also love the Wolfenstein game and am totally pumped for the next section, and I still want to know where Romana's diaries are coming, because I think they're a really great part of the game (I didn't miss them, did I? LazyFire said they'd be coming later.). Also this thread has had some goddamn amazing derails.
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Jan 17, 2015 14:15
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gregory posted:I also love the Wolfenstein game and am totally pumped for the next section, and I still want to know where Romana's diaries are coming, because I think they're a really great part of the game (I didn't miss them, did I? LazyFire said they'd be coming later.). The diaries and the various letters will be shown off in two videos after the next episode. I realized that some of the letters were sort of spoilers as to where we would end up going (the moon) and so I decided that I would just put together a video for all of then and show it after there was nothing to spoil.
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Jan 17, 2015 14:21
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Snark posted:Anyone into this derail should read "The Adventure of English". This. One thing I hate about Lithuanian is that you can't just steal words (even if they're as cool as "commando"), you have to wait for the official people to come up with an alternative. Then you have become aware of it and learn it. And oh my God how not suited for computers it is. I sneer at anyone who uses Lithuanian for Windows or anything. A smaller tangent: gently caress French. If it wasn't for Kanji, Japanese would be better. ...a back to the game. I'm kind of surprised at headshots being not that important in the game. Probably because you don't have time to aim, as the enemy is shooting you relentlessly. Compare this to CoD...
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Jan 17, 2015 14:22
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English is the grey goo of languages. Give it enough time and it will consume everything else, leaving only more grey goo in its wake. As a native English speaker who only has a primitive knowledge of a few other languages, I am ok with this culturepocalypse. E: What's wrong with rhyming slang?
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Jan 17, 2015 14:31
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Is it just me or is that attached grenade launcher kinda lame? All the other weapons have cool effects, but the launcher just shoots bottle rockets in a slow, straight line.EggsAisle posted:I'm an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher, and I actually know something about this. Basically, English being super-difficult to acquire is a myth. Hundreds of millions of people have learned it as a second language, and they're not all geniuses or linguistically gifted. With that said, English has plenty of annoying characteristics, some of which have been mentioned: a bewildering array of rules and exceptions to said rules, poor sight-sound relationships (sound out the words "cough", "rough", "through", "though", and "bough" and see what I mean) and a pretty unforgiving word order. The list goes on. I dunno if you taught in Asia, like I did, but most kids I taught would disagree very thoroughly. There's just s many faux pas in English as any other language, you just can't put them on a chart. then there's the spelling and word order and articles and basically I spent a good part of my time talking intermediate students off of ledges.
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Jan 17, 2015 16:52
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I would, again, characterize English as being easy to learn but hard to master. Weird-rear end hard to remember rules aside, it's very easy to ask questions that are mutually intelligible. "Where bathroom?" for instance. Is it correct? No. Can an intended meaning be derived from it? Yes. Are there other languages where you can throw grammar out the window like this to ask a basic question?
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Jan 17, 2015 17:11
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Aerdan posted:I would, again, characterize English as being easy to learn but hard to master. Weird-rear end hard to remember rules aside, it's very easy to ask questions that are mutually intelligible. "Where bathroom?" for instance. Is it correct? No. Can an intended meaning be derived from it? Yes. Are there other languages where you can throw grammar out the window like this to ask a basic question? Yes, you can do that in German ("wo Klo?"), for example. When learning Italian, they withhold the entirety of the subjunctive from you until you're ready, which means you spent the past X years sounding like an idiot (anything expressing an opinion uses it, for example). It also has an entire tense, the passato rimoto, only used in novels.
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Jan 17, 2015 17:37
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Aerdan posted:I would, again, characterize English as being easy to learn but hard to master. Weird-rear end hard to remember rules aside, it's very easy to ask questions that are mutually intelligible. "Where bathroom?" for instance. Is it correct? No. Can an intended meaning be derived from it? Yes. Are there other languages where you can throw grammar out the window like this to ask a basic question? Can totally do that in Lithuanian, though it would sound a little rude.
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Jan 17, 2015 18:01
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Aerdan posted:Are there other languages where you can throw grammar out the window like this to ask a basic question? Probably all of them.
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Jan 17, 2015 18:09
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I think you can do that in most languages, the issue is learning which words mean which things. My dad knows that "Donde esta el baño" means "where is the bathroom" but he doesn't for sure know that baño means bathroom. Or that he can't use esta for other words, or that words have different meanings in English and Spanish, and you can't transfer that knowledge very easily. Case in point, Molestar means "to bother" in Spanish, molest has a much different connotation in English. So when my native speaking Spanish teacher got frustrated with a female student and asked her "am I bothering you?" The class got real quiet until he realized what he had said. So "Donde esta me" would make sense to an English speaking mind as "where am i" but in Spanish it's a sentence fragment with a random reflexive attached.
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Jan 17, 2015 18:34
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I think that it's hard to say "oh this language is easy to learn" on a universal scale just because you need to take into account what other languages a person already knows. With most languages, I think, you'd be able to make yourself barely understood just from knowing a few different nouns and verbs (I know like, 50-100 words in Slovak and I can still order food and buy clothes and groceries without using English or having the cashier switch to English). Think, the romance languages have similar structures, so theoretically it would be easier to learn a romance language if you already spoke one than it would be to learn something else. Languages coming from the same roots obviously would have more in common, like English and German, than say, Mandarin and Portuguese. Knowledge of other languages affects how you acquire new ones, and it can do so in both positive and negative ways. Yeah for languages that use articles and things, English is easy because we only have one definite article and two indefinite ones, but teaching that unit to languages that don't use articles is pretty tricky. A lot of my students who know a second language (this happens moreso when it's German as opposed to Russian) end up making more mistakes than the others because their brain goes "Okay, I need to use the non-Slovak grammar," and then they use German grammar instead of English. Also, false cognates. Ever try teaching German speakers about where, who, and will? It's basically a more confusing version of the "Who's on first?" sketch. gregory fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 18:47
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gschmidl posted:Yes, you can do that in German ("wo Klo?"), for example. When learning Italian, they withhold the entirety of the subjunctive from you until you're ready, which means you spent the past X years sounding like an idiot (anything expressing an opinion uses it, for example). It also has an entire tense, the passato rimoto, only used in novels. Okay. How quickly can you move on from a basic question to a more complex question that's still mutually intelligible, with the minimum possible grammar to get the concepts across?
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Jan 17, 2015 18:49
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On the subject of languages, I've worked with quite a few people for whom English is a second language, and they've all said that English is a pretty easy language to learn - not from an academic standpoint, but simply to learn to speak. That's probably because there's so much media available in English for people to watch and listen to. Hell, my head chef at the Italian restaurant I used to work at learned to speak English from watching soap operas (he moved to Britain in his late teens, and didn't speak a word of it when he arrived). I doubt he could tell you what a subjunctive even is, but he speaks the language almost as well as I do, and I was born and raised here. Thing is, by and large, pretty much any given spoken language (as opposed to the writing system that accompanies it) is almost exactly as complex as any other - just in different areas. English might not be tonal, but the grammar is far more complex than in Mandarin or Cantonese. We don't have honorifics before and after words, but we have loads more irregular verbs than Japanese. We don't have gendered nouns or mutations like Welsh does, but unlike in Welsh our irregular verbs, once conjugated, often sound nothing like the basic verb and often have no rhyme or reason as to how they conjugate. That's why how easy or difficult a language is to learn largely depends on how similar the language is to one that the learner already speaks.
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Jan 17, 2015 18:55
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Aerdan posted:Okay. How quickly can you move on from a basic question to a more complex question that's still mutually intelligible, with the minimum possible grammar to get the concepts across? For Italian, I did come in with some basic knowledge (vocabulary, numbers, present tense declensions) and after ~2 weeks of immersive study I was able to negotiate the purchase of a 3G USB stick including getting an Italian VAT exemption document without switching to another language. As a native speaker of German with knowledge of Latin, Italian was not that hard to grasp, but I really couldn't tell you how easy or hard it is to get to that level in German since I never had to learn it from scratch as an adult. You could still get through in German with present tense and, ideally, knowing how to change word order to turn a sentence into a question (which Italian doesn't have). Articles and declensions aren't that important, but conjugations are since German (and Italian) has a formal and informal mode of addressing someone.
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Jan 17, 2015 19:05
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With English to German specifically, word order isn't a great deal different than English. Of course there are places where it's totally different, and the verb position rules differ for most tenses but otherwise it's not radically new. When I lived in Germany, one of my roommates had zero German experience before her study abroad (luckily I was pretty fluent at that point, as I only had one roommate who could speak English better than "Where come you?" and other google translate sounding phrases). This girl had no German and was taking classes in English, but she also had a two-hours-daily German course, plus she lived in an apartment with 6 Germans (and me), so she got a lot of exposure from watching Wetten, dass...? and Tatort with us. I had been lower intermediate when I first got to Germany, and after a month she was pretty much at that same point herself. In a situation where you aren't surrounded by the language, I expect it would take longer, but if you were really dedicated and took an intensive course or soemthing, you could be semi-competent pretty quickly, all things considered. Personally, I tend to have the most trouble in German with the things that we just don't have in English--cases and declination, the fact that there's a past tense for speaking and a different past tense for writing (which, oddly enough, the writing one is closer to English than the speaking one but I have trouble with the writing one because I learned the other one first), the fun stuff, really. gregory fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 19:29
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Aerdan posted:I would, again, characterize English as being easy to learn but hard to master. I'm endlessly amused by the fact that spelling contests are a thing. VVVVV That too. Fat Samurai fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 19:37
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I'm amused by the fact that an LP about shooting retrofuture Nazis has become a discussion about language. The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Games > Let's Play! > Let's Kill All the Nazis and Talk about Language in Wolfenstein: The New Order
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Jan 17, 2015 19:48
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Eifert Posting posted:I dunno if you taught in Asia, like I did, but most kids I taught would disagree very thoroughly. There's just s many faux pas in English as any other language, you just can't put them on a chart. then there's the spelling and word order and articles and basically I spent a good part of my time talking intermediate students off of ledges. I bet you did. Hell, I've spent a fair amount of time doing that here. Learning a second language is really complicated and really frustrating, and there's always going to be setbacks and backsliding and stupid little things you can never keep straight. I also teach French, and I can guarantee you that those students bitch about French just as much as my ELLs about English. I certainly did when I was learning it. It's all part of the process. Plus, students coming from an Asian language background can't transfer much from their mother tongue to English, which is plenty irritating in of itself. I've also heard that many Asian countries rely on a rote education (i.e. memorization-based) model, which, when it comes to language acquisition, isn't especially brain-friendly. gschmidl posted:For Italian, I did come in with some basic knowledge (vocabulary, numbers, present tense declensions) and after ~2 weeks of immersive study I was able to negotiate the purchase of a 3G USB stick including getting an Italian VAT exemption document without switching to another language. As a native speaker of German with knowledge of Latin, Italian was not that hard to grasp, but I really couldn't tell you how easy or hard it is to get to that level in German since I never had to learn it from scratch as an adult. You could still get through in German with present tense and, ideally, knowing how to change word order to turn a sentence into a question (which Italian doesn't have). Articles and declensions aren't that important, but conjugations are since German (and Italian) has a formal and informal mode of addressing someone. Well, you're also literate in English and (I assume) German. Once you've mastered a second language, picking up subsequent languages tends to go a lot more smoothly. I've been trying to teach myself German in my spare time, but my progress has been delayed by Let's Plays and unnecessarily brilliant first-person shooters, so... mein Deutsch is nicht gut. Or is it mein Deutsch nicht is gut?
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Jan 17, 2015 19:52
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ffff
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Jan 17, 2015 19:55
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EggsAisle posted:mein Deutsch is nicht gut. Or is it mein Deutsch nicht is gut? Ist.
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Jan 17, 2015 19:56
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"Mein Deutsch ist nicht gut." Present simple has generally the same word order in English and German. Generally. My language learning problem is that I speak fluent English and German, I can kinda manage with Spanish and spoken Japanese (think 500-1,000 words plus a little grammar), and I live in Slovakia and have picked up a little Slovak, but I'm trying to learn Bulgarian. There are so many languages bouncing around through my brain it feels like it's going to drive me insane until I spend 14 years in a mental hospital but miraculously suffer no loss of muscle!full circleeeee
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Jan 17, 2015 20:23
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Well, my first guess was sort of right, except for ist. I told you it was nicht gut.  You see, guys? Wolfenstein is educational, of all things.
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Jan 17, 2015 20:40
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Starhawk64 posted:I'm amused by the fact that an LP about shooting retrofuture Nazis has become a discussion about language. Imagine my surprise when I saw all the posts in the thread over the last few hours...and they were all about languages. So far the tangents in the thread are that, Japanese airplanes and tanks that I can remember off the top of my head. This thread has the weirdest tangents that somehow stay related to the subject matter. Lazyfire fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 20:45
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Well, it was a world war.
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Jan 17, 2015 21:05
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EggsAisle posted:I bet you did. Hell, I've spent a fair amount of time doing that here. Learning a second language is really complicated and really frustrating, and there's always going to be setbacks and backsliding and stupid little things you can never keep straight. I also teach French, and I can guarantee you that those students bitch about French just as much as my ELLs about English. I certainly did when I was learning it. It's all part of the process. As someone who has learned both English and French as foreign languages, English is much, much easier if only for the fact that each verb has a maximum of like 7 forms, with most only having four while French has something around three dozen. Also, on a side note, French language can go eat a buffet of dicks.
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Jan 17, 2015 21:13
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Speaking of universal languages, the most likely I've heard of is Toki Pona. It's deliberately very simple and pidgin-like, to make it as easy as possible to learn. You obviously can't communicate great and complex concepts through it, but you can very easily create mutual understanding of basic concepts and relationships.
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Jan 17, 2015 22:06
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gregory posted:[...] the fact that there's a past tense for speaking and a different past tense for writing [...] Wait, we have that in german? Huh. Never knew that...
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Jan 17, 2015 23:16
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anthrax posted:Wait, we have that in german? Huh. Never knew that... Well, compared to the English understanding of the tenses, essentially in spoken German you use Perfekt to establish past tense "Er hat ein Auto gekauft," whereas in writing you'd use the Präteritum, "Er kaufte ein Auto." "He has bought a car," in English can have a very different meaning from, "He bought a car," thus this is probably the most mindfuck section of German for English learners. Where we would use perfect tense in English, German usually just uses present, for example, "I have lived in Slovakia for a year," would be "Ich lebe seit einem Jahr in der Slowakei." gregory fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 23:38
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gregory posted:Well, compared to the English understanding of the tenses, essentially in spoken German you use Perfekt to establish past tense "Er hat ein Auto gekauft," whereas in writing you'd use the Präteritum, "Er kaufte ein Auto." English uses the perfect too sometimes "I have lived in X for Y" is how we do it in English too since it's an ongoing event. and "He has bought a car" would be perfectly fine if you were describing an event that has just occurred, rather than an event that occurred in the relative past. But if you're talking about something that happened a month ago, or even earlier that day you'd probably want to use "He bought a car" instead.
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Jan 18, 2015 00:04
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Kurieg posted:English uses the perfect too sometimes "I have lived in X for Y" is how we do it in English too since it's an ongoing event. You misunderstand; my point with this is that Germans don't do that. "Ich lebe seit einem Jahr in der Slowakei" translates directly to "I live for a year in Slovakia". Kurieg posted:"He has bought a car" would be perfectly fine if you were describing an event that has just occurred, rather than an event that occurred in the relative past. But if you're talking about something that happened a month ago, or even earlier that day you'd probably want to use "He bought a car" instead. Right. That's why I said they can have a very different meaning. Try this one: Er hat gestern ein Auto gekauft. "He has bought a car yesterday." This is completely normal, okey-dokey, hunky-dory German, but English rules say you can't use perfect with an exact time, only with an amount of time or a time period (since/for). If you ask me in German what he did last month, I'd say "Er hat ein Auto gekauft." If you ask me what he's just done, I'd say, "Er hat ein Auto gekauft." In spoken German, you use the perfect for both. And, as a stars-and-stripes-blooded American, I tend to use simple past in both of those situations anyway. "I just ate." has no difference in meaning from "I've just eaten." (though, in the American dialect, both are acceptable forms, the former is simply more common) Also question for our German natives out there, the more I look at "Ich lebe seit einem Jahr in der Slowakei" the more wrong it looks. Would you use leben or wohnen there? (drat, my German's getting rusty) gregory fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 00:39
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Both are perfectly fine. In my neck of the woods, "Ich wohne seit..." is slightly more common since it's a bit less formal, but I keep hearing both quite often.
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Jan 18, 2015 00:53
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anthrax posted:Both are perfectly fine. In my neck of the woods, "Ich wohne seit..." is slightly more common since it's a bit less formal, but I keep hearing both quite often. Ah, okay. When I lived in Germany I don't think I heard anyone ever use leben, which makes sense because we were all informal college kids.
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Jan 18, 2015 01:21
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