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If Languages were Food... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Xenops Senior Member United States thexenops.deviantart Joined 3824 days ago 112 posts - 158 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 1 of 17 05 October 2014 at 11:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For fun, I want to know if other people can think of foreign languages as food. In your mind, would a language be
meaty, vegetarian, creamy? Here are my ideas for examples: Spanish--most certainly some kind of fruit salad. Japanese--marinated beef with a slightly sweet sauce and little green onions. French (based on what little I know)--something creamy, with one or two spices to make it pop. Italian--Pesto sauce (slightly culturally biased here). Hungarian (what i have heard of it)--hearty beef stew, all the way. Now it's your turn: what food and languages do you think of? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jtdotto Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5228 days ago 73 posts - 172 votes Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, German | Message 2 of 17 08 October 2014 at 6:08am | IP Logged | |||||
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Just from my limited but great international experiences...
Korean - big slices of kimchi sizzling on the bbq with pork belly and garlic, multiple empty bottles of soju and a nice black pot of steaming soy bean soup... cigarette afterwards, cuz it's probably a dirt cheap place in the middle of the night in the summer and the only other people there are college students or a group of piss drunk middle aged men smoking away German - sausages, local beer, fat chunk of good cheese Portuguese - feijoada! (obviously Brazilian Port here) Japanese - small little platters of perfectly sliced pink fish, with little balls of green wasabi, small thing of rice, some ginger pieces, tiny little glass of something bitter Dutch - a good African coffee with a joint American English - giant hot dog and overpriced beer at the ballpark watching the Seattle Mariners lose again, but oh well 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 3 of 17 08 October 2014 at 7:35am | IP Logged | |||||
Quoting myself from a three-and-a-half-year-old post, which mostly compares my languages to beverages, but still:
I guess I should add Spanish and Portuguese, now: Speaking Spanish is like drinking lightly flavored sparkling water. It's very active and fizzy and stuff is happening in your mouth in rapid succession, but the taste is pretty simple and straightforward. Speaking Portuguese is like drinking a Coke floater (that is, Coke with ice cream). It's got the bubbly feeling of Spanish, though not as strongly, and theres stuff in there that you feel are all wrong and weird, but somehow it works and the familiar flavors manage to combine into something new and interesting. 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4307 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 4 of 17 08 October 2014 at 11:47am | IP Logged | |||||
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Ari, are you perhaps describing the "bubbly" feeling of the "r" and "rr" sounds in Spanish, when
compared with English (and German, also maybe other Germanic languages too)? I notice this especially in consonant clusters with "r", like in "sobre" or "sangre." I find these clusters very satisfying to pronounce. Almost like going over two roadbumps in a car. That said, I'm not sure I can think in the same way that all of you are doing. Perhaps you are all mildly synaesthesic? I wonder if it is an advantage in language learning: specifically in the mental separation of different known languages. Alexander Arguelles mentions that he uses the metaphor of a bureau in which each language is like a different draw, but it would be less dull and more vivid to think of a language as having it's own flavours, smells and colours, like some type of food. Though, like I said, I admit that I lack this capacity personally. For me, the sounds and constructions of a language suggest a type of personality, though nothing more abstract. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 5 of 17 08 October 2014 at 12:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
I was more referring to the high rate of syllable production in Spanish. Lots of syllables per word means you're spitting out phonemes in a very rapid pace.
Not at all, in my case. I'm being metaphorical. I could just as well liken my languages to personalities, or sports, or astrophysical phenomena. Swedish is a yellow sun, predictable but nice. Portuguese is gaseous proto-star, hard to get a grip. Spanish is a rapidly rotating pulsar, and Mandarin a predictable, largely featureless cepheid variable, or maybe a red giant. :) Cantonese, of course, is a supernova, shining with the light of a billion stars but all too soon it will burn out and disappear. :( 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5765 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 6 of 17 08 October 2014 at 1:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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English'd give me diarrhea.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 7 of 17 08 October 2014 at 4:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think Ari's comparison of one's native language to water is excellent and applies for many language learners.
English is like beer for me, I do like it but I rarely actually drink it. I've popped lots of vitamin B tablets when I could just be watching American movies. Finnish is like apple juice, while Portuguese is grape juice. I love both, they're sweet and awesome but I still won't drink only one for the rest of my life. Continuing from the previous comparison, Scandinavian languages are like cider and Spanish is like white wine. I love all the connections, I can get drunk on the etymology but I don't understand how some folks drink this stuff every day. Italian is red wine. I love the etymological and linguistic connections but I also simply love red wine. Much more than white wine/Spanish. German is like coffee. I like when it's offered to me, but I can't be bothered to brew it properly, however I also hate instant coffee. The Slavic languages are like tea. I can enjoy the various flavours or I can just satisfy my thirst. And I only realize how much I need it if there's none. I also like some varieties more than others, and the Balkan can be too strong sometimes. Becherovka and Kinnie are Catalan and Dutch. I like them a lot but I barely ever drink them. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7155 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 8 of 17 09 October 2014 at 8:20am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm tempted to link my homemade bulgogi (marinated the way I like it) with Korean, for example, but I can honestly link only Polish with food. Polish is comforting for me. Making and having soup are also comforting for me. In summer, Polish is chłodnik (cold borscht) while in the rest of the year it's żurek (sour rye soup with meat). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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