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See that's some good poo poo. I wish there was a way to learn Cantonese just as a hobby. The only thing I've seen is like actual paid classes and stuff.
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Sep 26, 2017 22:44
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SniperWoreConverse posted:See that's some good poo poo. I wish there was a way to learn Cantonese just as a hobby. The only thing I've seen is like actual paid classes and stuff. Speaking of, what's the easiest way to learn spanish from the comfort of your own home? I took like three years of it and barely remember, naturally it would come in real fuckin' useful now
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Sep 26, 2017 22:47
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same. Isn't there something like duolingo or some thing that's like the free version of rosetta stone? The advice that was given to me is to watch Univision or other Spanish media with English subtitles. The one dude actually used playboy to help learn English so I guess it can work in the other direction.
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Sep 26, 2017 22:50
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there are many dialects of arabic
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Sep 26, 2017 23:30
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SniperWoreConverse posted:See that's some good poo poo. I wish there was a way to learn Cantonese just as a hobby. The only thing I've seen is like actual paid classes and stuff. https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-...aditional+hanzi This will get you through the first 1500 characters of the writing system. It's what I used to learn to read and write Taiwanese Mandarin, which uses the same characters as Cantonese. The best part is that you don't have to learn any pronunciation to learn to read and write. Just learn what the characters mean.
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Sep 27, 2017 00:31
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Nerses IV posted:Speaking of, what's the easiest way to learn spanish from the comfort of your own home? I took like three years of it and barely remember, naturally it would come in real fuckin' useful now Are you a collaborator in the original Red Dawn universe?
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Sep 27, 2017 01:04
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Atlas Hugged posted:English has a huge advantage here thanks to having an alphabet so we can invent new words all the time. it's real dumb all languages didn't eventually get to some type of alphabet.
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Sep 27, 2017 02:05
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SniperWoreConverse posted:See that's some good poo poo. I wish there was a way to learn Cantonese just as a hobby. The only thing I've seen is like actual paid classes and stuff. Not a hobby. You're gonna need it. And that right soon.
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Sep 27, 2017 03:06
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If your motivation for learning Chinese is to appeal to your eventual lords and masters then it's Mandarin you want. I think Glossika has a Cantonese course but they basically just teach you sentences and nothing else. Also the sentences are the same for each course they do. Also their Spanish one had a fuckload of mistakes.
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Sep 27, 2017 04:06
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Groovelord Neato posted:it's real dumb all languages didn't eventually get to some type of alphabet. Chinese has a perfectly good alphabet that's highly developed, highly phonetic, and has easy to read tone markers. It's called pinyin and it's how the majority of Chinese speakers input Chinese on a digital device. There are multiple reasons why pinyin hasn't replaced Chinese. Part of the reason is a fear of losing cultural heritage. This is undermined by the fact that they were perfectly happy to mutilate traditional to make the abomination that is simplified. Another reason is that if the majority of writing is done digitally, then you don't need to memorize stroke order. You just need to recognize characters, and recognition is a fairly easy skill, much easier than production. So if you're typing in pinyin anyway, wouldn't it make more sense and actually be faster to just leave the pinyin and not generate a character? Well, sometimes yes, sometimes no. As I mentioned, Chinese has very few possible syllables. This means that you have thousands of homophone pairs. I can't even tell you how many words are pronounced "shi". Yes, context will often tell you what word you're looking for, but why introduce a level of ambiguity you don't need? The characters contain the meaning and there's very little room to doubt what was meant. Captain Splendid posted:If your motivation for learning Chinese is to appeal to your eventual lords and masters then it's Mandarin you want. This is never going to happen. The only reason you should learn Mandarin is if you have an immediate functional use for it (you live there) or because you have a serious interest in the culture. Thinking it is going to give you a huge leg up in the coming decades is absurd. Go to the GBS China thread for further reading.
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Sep 27, 2017 04:53
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LOL I've been longingly reading this thread wishing I was as smart as some of you when I remembered an interesting language thing. Here's a peer review of the research, but the basic hypothesis is you can trace the roots of all vocal languages back to the South Central African territories, allegedly, due to the highest diversity of phonemes. Phonemes are the different sounds a mouth can make in language. The farther you get from Africa, the fewer different kinds of sounds are used in different local languages and dialects. Meanwhile, you have countries in Africa using clicks and tones and chirps found in South East Asia, South America, and the Yukon, all within barely a thousand square miles of one another.
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Sep 27, 2017 05:00
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Bust Rodd posted:LOL I've been longingly reading this thread wishing I was as smart as some of you when I remembered an interesting language thing. Part this may also be the Bantu migration pushing a lot of Central African ethnic groups south so you get language families that developed a thousand miles from each other suddenly right next door. Eastern Europe and Mesoamerica were both at the end of similarly long migration routes and are similarly weird linguistic patchworks.
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Sep 27, 2017 05:09
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Atlas Hugged posted:I can't even tell you how many words are pronounced "shi". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jtiw721RAg
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Sep 27, 2017 05:21
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Without any kind of real knowledge, Africa having the roots of all language does make a certain kind of sense. Is it not the nexus of all human biological diversity? I heard that Africa has the highest number of genotypes or allotropes or basal gene lines or whatever. It works. Maybe it's coincidental reevolution of language, but it has a sense to it. Maybe not that related, but the single most interesting thing irt language as far as I'm concerned, is the most extremely basal communication systems, because that can give you some kind of idea about the sorts of minds the fist people had. I don't think it's that different from now, but you hear stuff like from upthread about the yumi or how there are concepts like everything is animisticly "a being" and it's loving fascinating to me. Sometimes I look at pics of rock carvings from a hundred thousand years ago and it's like "holy gently caress" some of them are super realistic and on the same carving there are seemingly symbolic images. What does that really mean or represent? If you strip off all the thousands of years of built up convention, what do you get? Oral and graphical traditions of every kind shape the kinds of thoughts you can even have, so looking at the really truly old stuff is almost eerie. What were they honestly like? What were people like before there was a concept like Jesus, or holy, or hero, or anything? Real drat weird. Take away all that inherited culture and it's the same as now but unfathomably strange. Like the Senegalese who never were in contact with the outside world, they tried to communicate but those guys were appalled by relatively common modern concepts like "a doll." They came out on the beach near the helicopters and hosed in front of them and buried all the artifacts left behind by outsiders. What if you stripped out even those alien traditions? What mode of thinking did people have when fire and rocks were cutting edge? We weren't stupid animals even then, but what could that even be like, one hundred thousand years ago? I'm drunk and serious posting in gbs, but this is something I've come back to for years now.
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Sep 27, 2017 07:22
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Africa could also be the most diverse because of its geography. New Guinea is one of the most linguistically diverse places on Earth despite being a small place where humans arrived relatively late. It has a shitload of different ethnic groups though because the jungle and mountains made it hard for people to get around or build nations that were bigger than a few thousand people. I don't know how it ranks on the raw phoneme count (Oceania as a whole is at the bottom, which I blame on the Polynesians and their perverted vowel-lust), but that could just be because there's only so many tribes you can fit on one island. Central Africa has a rugged patchwork geography similar to New Guinea, but on a much larger scale. When you have people who've spent their whole lives in forests so dense that being under open sky gives them vertigo living just a few miles and a ridge away from a group of highland cattle herders a foot and a half taller than them and these people can live next to each other for centuries while barely interacting, absurd language diversity is only natural.
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Sep 27, 2017 07:52
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Atlas Hugged posted:This is never going to happen. The only reason you should learn Mandarin is if you have an immediate functional use for it (you live there) or because you have a serious interest in the culture. Thinking it is going to give you a huge leg up in the coming decades is absurd. Go to the GBS China thread for further reading.
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Sep 27, 2017 08:07
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Extant homosapien languages being the root of all other extant homosapien languages seems totally bunk to me on a surface language, not least because Neanderthal likely had some form of spoken communication and that almost certainly had an impact on the development of languages outside of Africa. This is always fun.
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Sep 27, 2017 08:54
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Czech has to be the vowel deprived language on the planet Strč prst skrz krk
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Sep 27, 2017 09:10
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Bust Rodd posted:Phonemes are the different sounds a mouth can make in language. No they are not. Phonemes are the meaningfully different sounds in a language.
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Sep 27, 2017 12:42
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