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You know you’re a language nerd when... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| aspie.sharaf Tetraglot Newbie Denmark Joined 4366 days ago 21 posts - 39 votes Speaks: Danish*, English, Serbo-Croatian, Dutch Studies: Persian, German, Russian, Arabic (Written), Turkish, Thai, Polish, Bulgarian, Pashto, Urdu, French | Message 2929 of 3737 02 May 2013 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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When you spend all your money on assimil and teach yourself books on Amazon and don´t have enough left for clothes.
5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2930 of 3737 02 May 2013 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | ||
This reminds me of a time when I dropped by a friend's place in Poland and over homemade mushroom soup (zupa grzybowa) we ended up talking about how Proto-Slavonic *g- is now pronounced h in some of the daughter languages but not in Polish and the others, reeling off modern cognates, and how one could reclassify Slavonic languages based on this evolution. (E.g. Polish zupa grzybowa vs. Czech hřibová (houbová) polévka) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5922 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 2931 of 3737 03 May 2013 at 9:44am | IP Logged | ||
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When I read a discussion thread on Yahoo! Answers where someone asked a question about how long it usually takes English speakers to learn to speak Arabic well and whether the fact that Arabic isn't an Indo-European language would make it more difficult to learn. I was shocked when I saw that the response with the second-highest number of votes said "First of all, Arabic is an Indo-European language." What!?!?... My shock turned to outrage and then sadness when I noticed that this thread was no longer accepting votes or responses so I couldn't explain that Arabic is in fact an Afro-Asiatic language. Edited by mick33 on 03 May 2013 at 7:07pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Amerykanka Hexaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5169 days ago 657 posts - 890 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Polish, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian | Message 2932 of 3737 04 May 2013 at 12:13am | IP Logged | ||
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When deducing etymologies is second nature to you. For example, while looking up Spanish vocabulary you
happen to see the Spanish word for "centipede" (ciempiés) and decide to add it to your flashcards. As you do so, you think to yourself, "Hmm, it's just like in English - the word consists of two other words." And then you realize that for most English speakers, the word "centipede" does not mean "100 legs", like ciempiés does in Spanish. When, in the middle of the library, you speak to your mother in Polish, she tries to guess what you mean, and the librarian thinks you're a foreign exchange student unable to speak English. (Awkward situation!) When your priest starts speaking in Latin while you're at Mass and you don't even notice until several moments later, because you understand exactly what he is saying. Edited by Amerykanka on 04 May 2013 at 12:17am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 2933 of 3737 04 May 2013 at 1:33am | IP Logged | ||
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| WentworthsGal Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4886 days ago 191 posts - 246 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish, Spanish | Message 2934 of 3737 04 May 2013 at 10:27am | IP Logged | ||
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...When you want to be immortal. Yes, there are loads of cool reasons but being able to have the time to learn sooo many languages to such a high degree would be awesome! Plus you'd be able to track their changes through time which would be great too! :o)
6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5965 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 2935 of 3737 05 May 2013 at 9:53am | IP Logged | ||
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When you think you might have to add some international contacts to your Faceebook friend list, because most of mine are monolingual, in nearby time zones, and they are usually sleeping at night. Now that's no fun and would never happen on this forum!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4826 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 2936 of 3737 05 May 2013 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | ||
When you'd like a time machine, to find out, for example, whether Anglo-Saxon really was as inscrutable as it seems, for a modern day English person, the degree to which the Anglo-Saxons really could understand the speech of the nordic invaders, and to try to find out what really did happen to the Celts in England; did they mostly flee, or did many stay, and integrate, and if the latter, how quickly did they begin to lose their language, and when did it finally go? (The evidence of Cumbric suggests that it hung on for much longer in some places than in others). 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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