I always wanted to learn Vietnamese.
Because anything written in it looks like a ritual to summon an elder god.
Xin chào, tôi là người lái rừng.
Trong ngôi nhà của ḿnh dưới biển, chờ đợi thần bạch tuộc phải đối mặt với chết thơ mộng.
But I'm stuck with Spanish, and a horrible Spanish teacher to boot.
Oh, look, a personal rage sneaked into my post.
Vietnamese is both cool-looking and hard to learn how to write. Maybe not as a first language, because in the end the assignment of characters to sounds is arbitrary anyway, but as a second language it would be tricky because Vietnamese has letters that most languages don't (the horned o, for example) and many of the letters/digraphs that do exist in other languages are used weirdly. IIRC the normal d in Vietnamese represents either an English y or a z-sound. So does the "gi" digraph.
Most of the other sounds are weirdly Romance-language-inspired because Vietnam was controlled by France, I guess. So you spell the k-sound sometimes with a k and sometimes with a c, unless it's a kw-sound, then it's spelled "qu". I know that English is the exact same way, but English has the excuse that those are naturally evolved spellings, while modern Vietnamese writing was pretty much invented on the spot, so there's no reason for it to be that irregular.
Vietnamese as a language in general is weird. Isolating tonal languages, eh.
I much prefer Spanish, personally. It's a language that actually is widely spoken enough to find both learning supplies and media for it, for one thing, and easy-ish for English speakers to learn because there's a lot of common grammar in general combined with some "convergent evolution".
The one big non-Indo-European language I want to learn someday is Hungarian. It's... I can't say why. Fortunately there is apparently a Hungarian Duolingo course in the works, almost at beta stage. I might give that a try.
I got pretty close for not having German'd in over a decade. I wouldn't expect you to remember the '01 batting order for the world series Diamondbacks.
Diamondbacks are the hovercrafts than can shoot while moving, right?
That were made campaign-only because Korean professionals bitched that they were too gamebreaky. Yes.
And, of course, Arizona's only MLB team, and, fun fact, one of two whose games I've been to (the other being the Twins).
I feel a lot of nostalgia for Arizona sometimes, even though I barely remember living there and realize now, in my more politically aware stage of life, that it is governed by xenophobic crazies. And that it was really, really hot.
Also, "ein/eine" can also mean "a/an".
So can "un/una" and Old English "an" ("one", somehow the two meanings diverged). In fact, it seems to be universal in European languages with indefinite articles. It might be an areal feature, since Hungarian does the same with "egy".
Author
Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3784530 times)