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When TL IRKS you and how to deal with it | ||
Tags: Language Trivia | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4907 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 17 of 26 19 August 2013 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | ||
I guess a lot of us got stuck on this point because it so clearly needed correction (or at least clarification). The way I personally cope with something that irks me is to learn more about it. Usually, increased understanding leads me to be less bothered by it. I suppose for me if something bothers me I solve it by understanding it better. Emk, excellent examples from French. Another good example is the one mentioned by Michel Thomas about gender in German: a girl is neuter, then a woman is feminine, but a wife is neuter. Mark Twain's famous jokes about these words and others are based on intentionally mixing up the words "sex" and "gender" (the joke being that girls and wives have no sex, so they are neuter). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4251 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 18 of 26 19 August 2013 at 6:56pm | IP Logged | ||
Now that's some good advice. Frustration clouds judgment and the only thing that can cure it is to understand it. Any links where to begin understanding the declensional difference and how they merged with people and their genders in patterns? I really need to learn this. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5260 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 19 of 26 19 August 2013 at 7:29pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree with tarvos. When I was in the Army, I often wondered why they did things the way they did. Many of the regulations and orders made no sense whatsoever. If you thought about it too much it had a tendency to drive you crazy because there wasn't a rational explanation most of the time. It wasn't until I began to accept those things as they were without trying to make them fit into my logic that I began to have peace of mind. "There's the right way, the wrong way and the Army way." I do the same thing with languages. That's what keeps me sane as I learn. 1 person has 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 20 of 26 19 August 2013 at 7:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Mobile stress is a real pain (compounded by spelling conventions that don't reflect the stress placement). I'm looking at you, Ukrainian.
The trouble with mobile stress is not only that the syllable that bears the accents can vary depending on the inflection, but the stress pattern for a verb's conjugation in present tense is linked to forming the imperative. Basically for me is that it ends up imposing more memorization compared to kindred languages that use fixed stress (e.g. Czech, Polish, Slovak). While I vaguely understand how most Slavonic languages acquired their current schemes for vowel length and/or stress placement, it doesn't remove all of the frustration. A close second and third for their irksomeness is consonant gradation in Northern Saami (Estonian and Finnish consonant gradation have nothing on the Saamic model) and the virtual anarchy in Estonian for determining the endings of the partitive plural. Again I vaguely understand the historical linguistic background for these features but that's little comfort to me in the 21st century whenever I have to express myself grammatically or coherently in these languages. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4251 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 21 of 26 19 August 2013 at 7:58pm | IP Logged | ||
I so agree on both remarks, especially the partitive plural. I for the life of me can't understand the rules behind it. Ah well I guess it's just more work. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5764 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 22 of 26 20 August 2013 at 12:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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As for politeness/formality levels, I grew up in a social environment where the usage of Sie was deemed oldfashioned and unegalitarian. It was not easy for me as a teenager when I was expected to learn how to function in society.
So I accepted that levels of formality are a reality and I have to look at people other than the environment I grew up in to figure out how I am supposed to use them, and what function they have in a particular situation. To me, higher level of formality in European is simply a way of reminding everyone involved that we are dealing with a situation in which people represent groups or institutions, and they have to act their role and reduce their individuality for the time being. It's a way of making the switch between scripted interaction and personal interaction easier. Between European languages it's alright, I think. Of course, I sometimes feel inadequate, but then I use my foreigner's bonus and ask people when I'm unsure about how they want to be addressed or which word is acceptable to use. What's difficult for me, though, is politeness levels in Japanese, or rather, switching back and forth between German and Japanese. Something else I found hard to deal with was the way Spanish requires its speakers to make gendered statements about themselves. In German or English you can get by without ever referring to your own physiological gender, if that's what you want to do - and I think even learners can do it without drawing much attention to it. Well, in Spain I just had to accept that most statements I made about myself, including my current state of mind or mood, included a reference to my physiological gender. Over time, it started to feel less like I had to identify with these statements, and more like I was saying 'and I acknowledge that the person you categorize me as is a young foreign female'. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5007 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 23 of 26 20 August 2013 at 3:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Most of these things that irk me can be solved by a good explanation (or overview) and input. What irks me twice as much is when I cannot find a good explanation or overview of the matter (and I usually find it months or years later, when I no longer need it).
1.articles. It took me ages to get used to some of them. Especially French ones are a nightmare for a beginner, the more when their native language doesn't have articles at all. 2.English irregular verbs. This thing, combined with a bad teacher, was destroying me for several years. Nearly every usual verb is irregular! 3.English phrasal verbs. When I started encountering them, it looked as if the people were just crazy. They had perfectly good normal verbs but were using these chaotic inventions instead. Again, took years of input. 4.Swedish accent/prosody. Don't get me wrong,it sounds awesome. But my incompetence is terrifying. It will take a long time before I get it right. 5.Lack of explanation. None of my books (and not even the Berliner teacher) could answer me whether most verbs using sein instead of haben in perfect are movement verbs, like in French. Yes, they are. Or at least it is a perfectly good crutch for a beginner but they all kept telling me there is no such "rule" or similarity. My dream course book (as realistic idea as a watch with fountain or the babblefish) would tell me things like "no worries, this is the same as in French. But unlike in English, you need to... Or this sound is the same as in Spanish". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4251 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 24 of 26 20 August 2013 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | ||
1. I always explained it to myself as articles being useful in languages that have them. The expression benefits from knowing whether it's a definite or indefinite object. 2. English irregular verbs come from the old Germanic strong verbs, which came from proto-Germanic and can usually be traced back all the way to the roots, and those forms were retained because the most used words are least likely to change. They're not "irregular", there just aren't as many anymore because obviously you can't really create something that is old. A lot of the old strong verbs have been "regularized" in modern English; for example the verb "to thrive" which is an old verb used to be strong/vocalic/irregular, having the past declension of "throve" but nowadays "thrived" is much more common. 3. Exactly. Phrasal verbs are one of the most cumbersome things in the English language to get right. Native speakers rarely even realize that something like "go on!" can confuse a beginner of English very quickly. I don't know how these came to be but if you look at other Germanic languages like Swedish, they attach the preposition in front of the stem like; att visa; anvisa avvisa framvisa förvisa hänvisa tillbakavisa tillrättavisa undervisa utvisa 4. Watch a lot of movies and tv-shows. That should remedy that. 5. I'm not completely sure but I think the auxiliary is chosen by transitivity of the verb. Verbs of movement more often than not don't have objects so they use a different auxiliary as something like "to choose". Most movement verbs are intransitive, such as fall; I fell. (no object) But its causative form "to fell" gets an object; I felled the tree. I think it goes like this; (correct me if I'm wrong) In German the intransitive verb gets "sein" as its auxiliary; Ich bin gefallen and the transitive gets "haben" Ich habe den Baum gefällt Edited by Henkkles on 20 August 2013 at 3:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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