Languages

[Hunchman801]

I've only been to the Faroe Islands but I understand both languages are close enough.

[PluMGMK]

I think they're pretty similar all right, but as I understand it Faroese spelling is about as screwed up as English, whereas Icelandic is a bit easier to read

[Hunchman801]

Indeed, English seems to have the least logical pronunciation of them all:

Xavier Marjou uses an artificial neural network to rank 17 orthographies according to their level of transparency. Among the tested orthographies, Chinese and French orthographies, followed by English and Russian, are the most opaque regarding writing (i.e. phonemes to graphemes direction) and English, followed by Dutch, is the most opaque regarding reading (i.e. graphemes to phonemes direction); Esperanto, Arabic, Finnish, Korean, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish are very shallow both to read and to write; Italian is shallow to read and very shallow to write, Breton, German, Portuguese and Spanish are shallow to read and to write.

[PluMGMK]

I'm surprised that Spanish is rated less shallow than Italian. I guess because of the alternation between 〈ll〉 and 〈y〉, and between 〈c/z〉 and 〈s〉. But some dialects still need that so an analysis of those particular varieties might have yielded a "shallower" result…

But regarding French's opaqueness to write, yeah… I used to be surprised to find native speakers here making so many orthographical errors all the time (like mixing up infinitive -er with past participle -é, and such), but as I learned to speak the language more naturally I realized that there really is a considerable cognitive load in maintaining those distinctions, and it's quite easy to screw it up!

[Hunchman801]

To think there are languages so transparent that people barely make any orthographical errors at all! Sounds otherworldly for a French speaker.

[PluMGMK]

I'm wondering where Irish fits on the scale. The spelling looks really scary to anyone unfamiliar with the language, and I think people here generally struggle with it. But then its phonology is really complicated, with broad/slender and soft/hard consonants, and even though everybody learns it in school, most don't really learn to produce/distinguish all those sounds. For people who can (e.g. the dwindling population of native speakers), the spelling probably makes a lot of sense in most cases!

Actually, thinking again about Spanish, it does have etymological 〈h〉s, which are pretty opaque for writing. Maybe that's why it's less transparent than Italian!

[PluMGMK]

Bump. I honestly thought this topic had been used more recently than this, and I wasn't expecting to have to double-post to revive it, but, life is full of surprises…

The other day I introduced a couple of coworkers to the Irish expression "meascán mearaidhe" (or mearaí), referring to the way you can end up walking in circles without realizing it (like in a dense uncharted forest). The funny thing is, even though I pronounced it carefully in Munster Irish, they both thought I was speaking French!

I think it's because in Munster Irish both of those words take stress on the final syllable (like French words), the ending "-án" sounds a bit like a lengthened nasal vowel, and "mearaí" sounds superficially like the name "Marie". Also, the "-án" probably sounded even more French in that particular phrase, because the N runs straight into the following M so it could easily be missed…

It's still quite funny though. Like if my Irish could be mistaken for French, that would make it French spoken with a weird rural Irish accent – but that's not how I actually speak French myself! (Although I probably did ten years ago, back when I was still in school )

[Hunchman801]

I had some text-to-speech online tool pronounce it and it sounded more like Spanish to me.

[PluMGMK]

Yeah, I think it's definitely more "what Irish people think French sounds like" than actually sounding French!

Maybe I should record a sentence where I say both "en masquant Marie" and "meascán mearaidhe" to make the difference clearer – I'm sure I could contrive something

[Hunchman801]

This somehow reminds me of this trend of adding fake, humorous subtitles to foreign songs in a way that vaguely preserves the pronunciation.

[DaveRattlehead]

I'm surprised that Spanish is rated less shallow than Italian. I guess because of the alternation between 〈ll〉 and 〈y〉, and between 〈c/z〉 and 〈s〉. But some dialects still need that so an analysis of those particular varieties might have yielded a "shallower" result…

I am too! I thought Spanish was even more predictable than Italian

And in regards of this, I also find surprising that most of the people find English easier than Italian or Spanish. People always say it's all about the verbs, but I've always found the inconsistency in English a bigger problem

[Rsandee]

I'm currently learning Turkish, Duolingo has been of some help (among other sources) but I've grown incredibly frustrated with the platform as I believe it's been milked dry of all the resources that made it great in order to make more money. I was wondering whether any other language enthousiast has a website or platform they use semi-frequently in order to study languages.

[PluMGMK]

I recall trying to learn German via Wikiversity (Wikibooks?) ten years ago – it got me started, but not much more than that

[EdgyRabbid]

Ive always wanted to learn the language of my indigenous ancestors! Problem is that 1. i dont know which langauge they spoke and 2 idk where to start!

[Tribelle2026]

I really want to learn Japanese but it's one of the hardest languages to learn. The japanese alphabet has over 1000 characters

[Greengoop]

I think only learning languages in my range is the best idea. I visit Germany and France quite a lot so I can get familiar with those languages whilst I go.

[Zarcatus]

Apart from English and German, I never really needed another language. But I did have Latin in school (which ofc we were not intended to speak but rather read and translate) and it helped with understanding languages more in general. After school, I did try to learn Spanish with Duolingo for about two years but stopped after I finished the tree. And I doubt it was worth it. I realised too late that the app is not primarilly focussed on getting you fluent.

[Aaron]

Apart from English and German, I never really needed another language. But I did have Latin in school (which ofc we were not intended to speak but rather read and translate) and it helped with understanding languages more in general. After school, I did try to learn Spanish with Duolingo for about two years but stopped after I finished the tree. And I doubt it was worth it. I realised too late that the app is not primarilly focussed on getting you fluent.

Interesting, I do remember trying to learn Russian with Duolingo once but giving up immediately after because I got intimidated by all the cyrillic characters and how they look nothing like how they sound, lol. Lately I've been learning Japanese as my main language with Duolingo, but I might get back to French and Italian at some point, too.

[PluMGMK]

I mean, Latin characters look nothing like they sound either

[DaveRattlehead]

I personally gave up with languages. Thank god English is more than enough for me