Language Learning General

gingermilk · 2023-01-07T02:44:16+00:00

Hello sheeps! What is your native language? What language are you trying to learn? How many languages do you know already? This is a general thread for anyt...

Lumeinshin

MO
Speak for yourself. A lot of the terms you think are from the UK, are from the United States, and a lot of terms you associate with us, are from you.

I dont really see people use many US specific versions of words in the UK, thats the one thing weirdly people will actually point out. Nobody says Soccer here, its football. cookies have developed a distinction and are different from biscuits. nobody says sneakers for trainers.
I got 'told off' for saying zip-ties instead of cable-ties. I just couldnt remember the word and said the first thing I thought of.

I was moreso speaking with regard to popular internet slang always replacing the original words and muddying the meaning. And how the French have a more proper standard for speaking. We have some things, but like I said, we arent exactly bullish about it. Of course I know that a lot of English words have developed based on latin, french, scottish etc.

MO

Lumeinshin Granted, I do get ungodly angry when people use the terms "Literal" and "Metaphorical" interchangeably. The dictionaries do this, politicians do this, even famous writers from 150 years ago did this.

Also "Politically Correct" means believing publicly whatever won't get you made into a Political Prisoner, within the Soviet Union. I'm tired of people I physically know, using the term to mean "Not homophobic enough".

And don't get me started on people (Republicans) saying "We don't live in a Democracy, we live in a Republic." MFer, "Res Publica" means "The State" (Literally, "The Peoples Affair). All states are Res Publica. Democracy means "Rule of the People" or "People Power", it has meaning within the word itself.

Oh and people who think anything that bad happens to them is "ironic".

It's like people either don't want me to understand what we are talking about, or want to make up definitions for words just to **** with me.

Gigachad

MO
I feel the same way but ask yourself. Yes, you look up definitions but when was the last time you saw anyone else ever look up a definition? My mother is the only one I've known and where I got the habit. Never had a friend (outside of school. Homework is cheating, you were forced to) look up a definition to make sure they used a word correctly. In their defence my friends were not the brightest bulbs but good people.

Trondei

Gonna open that can of worms — conlang. Has anyone learned one or created one?

Fimm

MO
Learning cyrillic wasn't hard at all. They're roughly the same sounds but with different letters. It was easy to memorize them.
Of course, just because I can read them doesn't mean I understand much any of it хаха.

Gigachad

Ok finn speaking people (and the one dude in a college class for it). I wanna confirm something.
The häntä bit. That is a paritive form of hän and its using it because it indicates the action is on going and not a complete one. Right? (Edit) Or and I'm gonna feel really fucking stupid. Is it him/her to he/she? Not gonna erase my mistake. Just gonna leave this here as an example of why hash and finnish can be a fun but very confusing mix.

And yes i know duolingo sucks. It's great for memorization and to dip your toes into the language. I have a grammer book but I'm only so far into it.

Is this the place to ask something like this? I can make like a help/homework thread but I didn't know what falls under "learning general".

Fimm

Gigachad
In "he halaavat häntä" the action is ongoing.
If the action was complete, the phrase would ne "he halasivat häntä.
I hope that helped at all. I suck grammar so I can't teach very well.

And you can't tell which gender is it. This is something you have to figure out using context clues, or if people just outright say what gender they're talking about. Here you can guess it's he/him because the name Matti is one of the options.

MO

Gigachad If we misuse what words mean, we're going to just confuse people who know what words mean, or not have words for things or have too many words for things.

Gigachad

Fimm
Thank you for your help. I know the gender neutral bit. The him to he bit threw me way the fuck off. I won't get to covering verbs till the second grammer book. I do appericiate your help. My only complaint about teaching myself is that it's hard to word questions out in a way that makes sense to anyone but me.

If your a beginner into finnish I recommend this book. It's been great. I'm just not that far into yet but what I have covered I've used in every lesson in some way since. And I know like 3 out 4 words used for examples. That part really gives me hope.

Gigachad

Fimm If the action was complete, the phrase would ne "he halasivat häntä"

Ok my favorite finnbro, I have another question. I came across this part in my book.

I thought, ok cool. Partitive case when the action is ongoing or not complete and gentitive for completed. So the example "he halasivat häntä" is not in a gentitive case because ....? Or is it? I know your not a finnish tutor but I do appericiate your help.

I figured out I can use the text to speech translator to see if my finnish sounds correct-ish. I'm not terribly far off but even I can hear my peggy hill ass accent trying to make gobbledygook words sound legible. I swear one time I fucked it up entirely and it came out correct.

Gigachad

MO or have too many words for things.

Is that possible? I think it just shows what that society places greater emphasis on. Are there really too many ways to say penis? You're correct about confusing people but bringing the bottom up is harder than bringing the top down and humans are inherently lazy.

MO

Gigachad Whenever I see a long word that is overly complicated, and I don't know this word, and I have to look it up... only see that there is a three syllable word that is shorter with the exact same meaning... I am not amused.

Sure, maybe we don't want to use short words all the time, but there is no point using a long word barely no one knows, when there is a long word that people who have a bachelor's degree know.

Taka

gingermilk I'm learning a couple of languages as an EFL. I know a decent amount of French, and have just started learning German. It's going alright so far.

Murderbunny

gingermilk Being American my native language is English (PNW English to be precise), but my father is German and we learned (spoken) German as kids. My family is Tridentine Catholic so I've learned Ecclesiastical Latin on Sunday school and then some more in highschool. I think I've got a pretty good grasp on the grammar side of things but since I've never practiced it reading anything but religious texts my actual vocabulary is pretty limited. I've been self-teaching myself Russian for about 8 months now, and I'm at the point where I can at least guess the meaning of simple phrases, but don't ask me to deal with stuff like vowel mutation just yet, plz.

Fimm

Gigachad
I thought about this all day.

"He halasivat häntä" is a partitive.
It seems partitives can be used for actions that are complete AND ongoing.

I even called my grandma who was a language teacher, to make sure. She confirmed that "he halasivat häntä" is a partitive. And that cases don't necessarily have to have anything to do with time.

While looking things up I found this presentation about partitives vs genitives, which you may or may not find helpful:

Gigachad

Fimm
Thank you finnbro. You earn that title. You didn't have to do all you did and that's what makes you so great. Sorry if my questions bother you. I figure as a native speaker you're probably the best source but I also realize I personally havnt studied english in over a decade and it's probably the same for your finnish.

Fimm is a true ewe.

Fimm

Gigachad
No problem! And it doesn't bother me at all. That's what we're here for : DDDD

NaiJi

My native language is Russian. I had to learn English at some point for obvious reasons, and now am actively learning Spanish ( 🇦🇷 ). I thank English for introducing articles and some function words (such as 'of') as it made Spanish much and much easier to understand, as always hardest part is vocabulary grind 💢

tangerine

I speak English and Russian. Working on French currently, and at one point I also spoke conversational Italian, although not so much any more.

friffri Do you have any blogs/news sites/forums you like in Italian? It's hard to find interesting pages on the web in a foreign language but I'd like to practice reading more.

NaiJi

tangerine woooo! a fellow Russian ESL 🤝

friffri

tangerine
Not really, no. The only Italian stuff I read nowadays are multiplayer.it which is a videogame news site. They also have a forum but I don't read it.
The r/italy subreddit is alive but kinda boring in the last few years. There are a few more italian subreddits but they are either populated by teenagers or they are really low quality compared to the english version, so not much there to see.
There are one or two italian imageboards but they are mostly dead and filled with porn spam. diochan.com (get the pun?) is probably the biggest one

Italian internet is dead nowadays.

Many years ago this blog was mildy popular on r/italy: https://bagniproeliator.it/ (the header image was also a lot more NSFW at the time).
I haven't read it at all in the last years, but I liked a few articles I came across years ago. I remember this one:

https://bagniproeliator.it/cerca-una-pallina-da-golf-trova-ritardati-mentali/

Other than that you might like Zerocalcare's web comics. He blew up in the last years and even got a film and a Netflix show, but he started by posting his comics on his site.
Beware though, he writes in roman dialect for comedic effect, that's going to be much harder to read than normal Italian.

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