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You know you’re a language nerd when... | ||
Tags: Language Geek | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5768 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes  Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian | Message 1337 of 3737 21 December 2010 at 1:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
You're welcome! The vast majority of my friends are language nerds, fortunately, so though that might not sound all that fun to most people, it does to us. The others would probably like the drinking games further down the list, but if *everyone* who turns up is multilingual, which is likely, even the conversation around those will be in some language other than English :] 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6921 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes Speaks: English* | Message 1338 of 3737 21 December 2010 at 4:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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People ask you how to say something in a different language because you are supposed to have learned the whole dictionary by heart...
You loathe gerunds and false friends. You frequently have nightmares in which you're chased by Saussure, Chomsky, Halliday or Pinker. You find certain words, expressions or translations utterly amusing... Yes, you laugh at words. You have fun translating proverbs or idioms literally, such as "putting was the goose". You find yourself looking up a word in the dictionary and you know you've already looked it up a thousand times before in your life. You have run out of insults because this peculiar word seems to be nowhere in the world, but in the text you are trying to read. You find out how much money you've spent on books, videos and magazines and you realize you could be a millionaire if you had saved up all that money. You can remember making weird noises to yourself, just because you were practicing your Lenis Voiced Dental Fricative. You know that the same meaning is hidden in these two sentences: "It's rude to point" and "Deixis is rude". You know that the Spanish words "interface" and "interfaz" are not synonyms. You can hold a coherent conversation with a colleague about derivational morphology or passive and middle voice. You can list all the differences between unergative and unaccusative verbs, and you know the difference between a creole and a pidgin. You know the difference between PRO and traces/copies, and ECM and subject/object control verbs. You know the different countless types of Spanish polysemic "se". Drawing trees is the worst thing that can ever happen to you, because it no longer means pencils, branches and leaves, but subject, tense phrase and wh- movement. You know how useless the RAE dictionary is, but you learn to cope with it. It doesn't matter how hard you try to learn a language, there's always going to be someone who will disagree and will suggest that you are completely hopeless. You must restrain yourself from slapping people on their faces when you hear them producing horrible ungrammatical sentences. A friend asks for the meaning of a word and you clear your throat and start giving a lecture on etymology. It takes you at least 10 minutes to look up just one word in the dictionary, because you find at least 10 other interesting words before the one you need. You're starting a band called "Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously", and your hit song is "I'm a lonely NP". Edited by translator2 on 21 December 2010 at 4:53pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| dotdotdot Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5221 days ago 24 posts - 37 votes Speaks: Korean, English* Studies: Italian, Russian | Message 1339 of 3737 21 December 2010 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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When you randomly start lecturing(to no one in particular) about differences between Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, and also the similarities between those two and other Altaic languages... in math class.
When you are the person people go to when they want to learn a language but don't know what resources to get. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Pau20 Triglot Newbie MexicoRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5222 days ago 9 posts - 11 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English, Italian Studies: French, German | Message 1340 of 3737 22 December 2010 at 12:32am | IP Logged | |||||
Ooh lucky you! I want your language nerd friends! I only have 2 :( Btw... we didn't play any game, unless breaking a piñata counts as a game. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 1341 of 3737 22 December 2010 at 2:07am | IP Logged | |||||
...when these are your Christmas cookies. (sorry about the huge size)
Going from left to right and from top to bottom, they are... Spanish, Portuguese, French, Catalan, Italian, Romanian Dutch, German, Swedish, Icelandic, Esperanto, Chinese Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovenian, Hungarian Greek, Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Arabic, Navajo Irish, Welsh, Persian, Hindi, Georgian And my brother ate the ones in Finnish and Swahili before I took the picture. 13 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| psy88 Senior Member United States Joined 5593 days ago 469 posts - 882 votes Studies: Spanish*, Japanese, Latin, French | Message 1342 of 3737 22 December 2010 at 2:54am | IP Logged | |||||
when you don't even know what a lot of this means..but you sure wish you did!! And hope one day to be as knowledgeable. Edited by psy88 on 22 December 2010 at 2:57am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dotdotdot Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5221 days ago 24 posts - 37 votes Speaks: Korean, English* Studies: Italian, Russian | Message 1343 of 3737 22 December 2010 at 5:01am | IP Logged | |||||
Darn it, I thought about making a band called that! I guess I have to settle with "Total Annihilation Challenge" ;) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6374 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes Speaks: English* | Message 1344 of 3737 22 December 2010 at 8:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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When you spend five minutes reading the books in the displays at Ikea because they're in
Swedish. You don't speak Swedish. You are highly tempted to steal one or two of them. When you find this table in Ikea and think it was designed for you.  Edited by zerothinking on 22 December 2010 at 8:43am 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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