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[Kagus]

I suppose the final days of Humble's learn a new language bundle is as good enough a reason to start a thread of this nature...

Languages are like assholes; everyone has one, and some of them make some pretty weird noises. Whether you're looking to get some lingo advice, expand your mind with the amazing history and influence of language, or just want to point fingers and laugh at how incredibly cockamamie our various tongues can get; this is the thread to forget exists for such a purpose.


To start off, I'd like to point out some intricacies of the most beloved Scandinavian language: Norwegian.

Now, for the most part, Norwegian behaves reasonably well. A fair amount of the grammar is similar to English, and the words are actually pronounced the way they're spelled a good half of the time (there are, of course, completely illogical exceptions). It is a gendered language however, and as with many gendered languages the gendering of words often makes no goddamn sense and you basically just have to memorize it all so that you don't sound like an idiot all the time. This gets harder when certain dialects have their own, different rules for the gendering of words.

Ah yes, the dialects... You see, not wanting to be boring, Norwegians decided that they would garble and mangle the language with dozens of distinct, regional dialects. They then spent generations refining and distilling these dialects to the point that nobody outside of their immediate families could possibly understand the nonsense they were vibrating.

For example, to say "I", as in "I don't understand this silly language", you would use the Bokmål word "Jeg" (say "yeah" but change your mind halfway through and finish with "I" instead of "-ah"). Or you would, at least, if you lived in the capital... Go outside those safe boundaries, and you'll end up encountering peasants. Peasants who will instead substitute any of "Eg", "Æ", "Æg", or even "I" (pronounced "EE") to demonstrate their barbarism.

But let's leave them to their potatoes and their working-class words, and focus on the enlightened vocabulary of bog-standard proper Norwegian.

Words in Norwegian (Bokmål):

Tre
Both a noun meaning "tree" or "wood", and an adjective meaning "wooden". It is also the number three much like in Irish.

Tren
Specifically a military supply convoy. One of the more ridiculous words, it's probably only still used by the military because it's cheaper than the alternatives.

Trene
The act of training or working out, this is the preferred hobby of vacuous sporty types across the country.

Trener
The verb "working out", and the noun "personal trainer". So far so good, right?

Trenere
The nonspecific plural of personal trainers. Also the verb "(to) abbreviate".

Trenerer
"Abbreviating", or the adjective "in the act of abbreviating something".

Trenererende
Adjective. "This thing which abbreviates".

Trenert
Adjective. At last, we have successfully abbreviated something.



Other classic examples of Norwegian supremacy include:

Gift
Noun. "Poison"
Adjective. "Married"

Hell
Noun. "Luck"; "fortune"

Ass
Conversational. Used at the end of a sentence to denote emphasis, ass.

Orddelingsfeil
"Mistakes made in relation to the separation of compound words"



In summary, I am upset with Duolingo after accidentally losing my month-long Spanish streak. This happened several months ago.

[Enemy post]

I'm procrastinating on my German Duolingo lessons right now.

[MrRoboto75]

MGS V the Phantom Pain was wierd.

[Telgin]

I'm procrastinating on my German Duolingo lessons right now.

Duolingo is pretty cool, but I had enough trouble sticking to the Esperanto lessons.  Maybe that was difficult because there was so much repetition among the Esperanto refresher questions though, and I got bored with it.  Also didn't help that I kept screwing up the future vs. past tense when doing the listening exercises because who can really consistently hear the difference between -is, -os and -as verb endings in a full sentence?

I tried to start the French lessons on Duolingo, but after learning that I'd apparently forgotten everything from high school, it was kind of hard to get started again.

[Castlecliff]

Kept you waiting, huh?

[Arx]

I have been idly studying Chinese and Korean lately. The latter is almost infinitely easier than the former, principally for one reason:

Hanzi (Chinese characters) are a trainwreck.

Way back in the day, East Asian groups used pictograms to make records. Over time, these slowly became more stylized logograms for words that might not have direct physical appearances, which is a bit unintuitive, but it still works.

Of course, sometimes they found themselves wanting to write a word that had never been written before, which is awkward when your alphabet is no longer pictographic or phonetic. That's okay! It became convention to write it as a small radical indicating what kind of thing it means, and another word indicating how it was pronounced. Well, apart from all the times the second part has nothing to do with the pronunciation, which is often enough that you can never be sure.

Then there's the small matter of language evolution. You see, back in the old days of hanzi, most Chinese words were monosyllabic and that made the logograms really convenient! Unfortunately, most modern Mandarin words are disyllabic, so instead of writing a single character per word you need two or more, which is much less convenient and kinda defeats the point of a logogram in the first place.

...so in summary, hanzi is a writing system with no consistent derivation and no phonetic mapping, designed for a language that has changed significantly since its inception. Also, to be able to read Chinese well, you need to know 2400 or more of these. Did I mention there's no longer a reliable mapping between how a word looks and either what it means or how it sounds? Reading and speaking Chinese are essentially two completely unrelated skills, which is really weird when you're trying to study it as an English speaker.

On the other hand, hangeul is like the Latin alphabet with an additional rule on how you write out the letters. It's absolute bliss. Plus Korean doesn't have the same heavy tonality as Chinese.

[Kagus]

Are you learning simplified or traditional? Or both? Is one form more "sensible" than the other?

Also I'm reminded of Ricepirate's Chinese for Lazy American People educational series. Note: It's about as culturally sensitive as you'd expect from Newgrounds.

[Arx]

Nominally simplified, although I do a lot of my learning of characters from a dictionary that has both.

Neither really makes sense in the way a Western language speaker might expect them to, but Simplified is at least easier to remember because the characters are, well, simpler.

[scriver]

Skrattretande! Norska är inget komplicerat språk, Kaguslelle

[balrogkernel]

traditional characters will teach you more about the origin of the character.  use sources like yellowbridge to better understand the combinations of characters. 

[dragdeler]

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[CABL]

Not gonna lie, "lelle" is the most hilarious diminutive suffix I've ever heard... It's pronounced "Leh-leh", correct?

Anyway, Duolingo pissed me off today by being very anal about gendered articles: It writes in Russian, "Эта старая лампа" (This (is) old lamp), while I respond in German, "Die alte Lampe" (the old lamp). Duolingo swears at me and says that it actually should be "Das ist eine alte Lampe". Thing is, Russian doesn't have articles, so the closest words to them are "Это/То" (This/That) pronouns, and "Эта" is a variation used for feminine gender. In German, "Das" is a definite neuter article, while "Die" is a feminine one, so "Die alte Lampe" would be more correct, considering that "Эта" is also of female gender. Helps that "lamp" in both German and Russian is of female gender.

[Kagus]

Huh, I'm not actually familiar with -lelle. I'm guessing it's just "-little"? Norwegian does it with a prefix instead, "Lillekagus" or "Lillescriver".

There's also "Læll", which means something completely different. "Læll" is middle/north-Norway slang for "regardless", and is probably most frequently used in the military. You see, once you reach a certain point in your year of "mandatory" service, you're so close to getting discharged that nobody really cares what you do or don't do anymore. And people are generally pretty sick of serving by that point, so they're quite happy to faff about and be useless. Hence the motto "Dimme læll", "We're getting discharged anyways". Often converted to Delta-Lima, because gotta have some excuse to use the phonetic alphabet...


And yeah, Duolingo knows what it wants, including things that are... I guess the phrase would be "found in translation"? Words that don't exist/aren't used in the source language, but that they want to have in the translated version. Great stuff, truly. Definitely doesn't fuck with your point total for that exercise.

[dragdeler]

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[scriver]

Yes, "lelle" is just "lille" (little) but with a dialectal spelling. In Swedish dimminutives can go both before and after the targetword depending on inflection (and dialect). In case of after it's usually not suffixed but a separate word, so it should probably be written "Kagus lelle" or "kagus-lelle" instead. But it doesn't look quite right writing it like that. I don't know how to write out that kind of semi-pause in a way that feels right.