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Languages and Colors | ||
Tags: Synesthesia | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 9 of 24 13 April 2011 at 2:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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I tend to compare language books to crisp packets.
In the UK, most brands traditionally used the following convention Plain (salted): Dark blue and red Salt & vinegar: Light blue Cheese & onion: Green But then Walkers became big and they use a different colour scheme Plain (salted): Red Salt & vinegar: Green Cheese & onion: Mid-blue It jarred with me for years. Cheese and onion should be green! Anyway, I used to get a similar reaction to language materials that weren't coloured according to the convention I was used to, which was: French: Royal blue (with red and white) Italian: Green (with red and white) Spanish: Red and yellow The reason I got over it was probably the Gaelic. The "big four" (German, French, Italian and Spanish) are coloured according to their flags, and Gaelic doesn't have a flag. All the stuff I bought was different colours. Thinking about it, the colour coding by flag colour seems to be something most popular among people who sell to schools. Maybe schools like having a neat system like that, which makes it easy to find the appropriate materials quickly. But if you go into a bookshop, everything's sorted by language, so you don't need the colour to navigate. People like TY and Colloquial use colour as part of their brand, in order to stick out, and that probably means more sales. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5336 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 10 of 24 13 April 2011 at 2:54pm | IP Logged | ||
Barely, only the v is green. But at least it's less yellow than Esperanto. ;-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 11 of 24 14 April 2011 at 2:49am | IP Logged | ||
... yesterday when I was bored I started the phonology drills of FSI Yoruba and had to find out that the reason why I can tell apart b and gb is because their b sounds blue-ish green and their gb more like a muddy, reddish ochre.
They turn 'somewhat dark letters on light grey with a yellow undertone' with use. And maybe some cappuccino. Edited by Bao on 14 April 2011 at 5:51am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6950 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 12 of 24 14 April 2011 at 3:48am | IP Logged | ||
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You can add me to the list of non-synaesthetes who associate a color with each language
and mentally resist published works that don't adhere to their color scheme. Most of my colors are based on flags, so have been mentioned by others a few times here. However, few publishers seem to agree with my assessment of German as blue (my university German classroom had blue carpeting, and the textbooks had blue covers and blue headings in the text) and Japanese as green (in my early days of learning Japanese, I watched a video about the Shinto religion which showed dense, secluded mountain forests and described how the Japanese used to revere nature.) I use these colors to help me separate the languages in my mind. For example, while I'm speaking German, I purposefully envision in my mind that the world as well as my words are blue (I'll also think the words 'Ich will' or something simple like that to help me switch gears). If I need to suddenly switch to Japanese, I'll switch the color in my mind to green and think "私はすごく" or some other few words, and it keeps me from mixing them up. Also, I make liberal use of the cloze deletion feature in Anki, but the default color this feature uses for deleted text is blue. This drives me crazy and I have to replace it with the color of my current language to make sure that the appropriate word in that language, and only that language comes to mind. Edited by Lucky Charms on 14 April 2011 at 3:49am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Leurre Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5426 days ago 219 posts - 372 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Korean, Haitian Creole, SpanishC2 Studies: Japanese | Message 13 of 24 14 April 2011 at 4:09am | IP Logged | ||
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Interestingly enough, I make a lot of similar associations myself! Maybe it's associated
with the countries flags, though I don't know many other them well Spanish - Orangeish yellow Italian: Red French: Blue Korean: blue-green German: orange-blue Romanian+Hausa: Mauve Indonesian: Light green 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5010 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 15 of 24 15 April 2011 at 11:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've always associated languages with colors but those have changed quite recently.
Before, it was blue for English, red for French, no color for my native Czech. Now, it is still no color for Czech but English kind of lost it's color as well. That doesn't mean I speak as a native, understand everything and not write any mistakes, I just got used to reading in it and communicating on internet with it so that it doesn't feel foreign to me anymore. As I started learning Spanish, it immediately got the red for itself, so it seems like French has been moving to the blue during last few years. (I don't like orange so I cannot associate it with any of my languages). I've got German on my hitlist but cannot choose whether it's green or black. But there is one more color I really like. Violet. Maybe I should put another language on my list for it. :-D Lucky Charm's post is interesting, as he purposefully envisions the colors. For me, it works the opposite way. I hear something in Spanish, and I "feel" it red, perhaps as a reminder "this is foreign". 1 person has voted this message useful |
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