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You know you’re a language nerd when... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| psy88 Senior Member United States Joined 5590 days ago 469 posts - 882 votes  Studies: Spanish*, Japanese, Latin, French | Message 1937 of 3737 07 September 2011 at 5:21am | IP Logged | |||||
Welcome back! My area was hit hard by Irene but I was fortunate to have little damage. Glad to hear that you are okay. PS Language Nerdery is terminal. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 1938 of 3737 08 September 2011 at 12:32am | IP Logged | |||||
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Welcome back to our Irene-struck members (my first thought was actually the irony of Greek ειρήνή meaning 'peace').
Nerdery can sometimes show itself in small things. Like when I today wanted to look up πρωτοβουλία ('initiative') in the dictionary beside my armchair. But I couldn't find it. Well, maybe there was a spelling error, so I searched instead under πρoτοβουλία, but no - it wasn't there either. Back to πρωτο- ... and then it struck me: shouldn't ω (omega) be the last letter in the alphabet? Then what is that я ('ja') doing there .. and not one word with omega in sight. The the truth finally dawned on me: I was trying to look a Greek word up in a Russian dictionary, and I didn't even notice that it was the wrong alphabet. Earlier this evening I had in fact been studying Russian, and after that I decided to copy some text in Polish. So I looked at the page and began writing: "Правдоподобние" .. and only then I realized that Polish is written with Roman letters - and so was of course the word I was trying to copy: prawdopodobnie, which means 'probably'. Maybe I should go to bed and get a good night's sleep now, but I have promised myself to consume at least one Canto from "Os Lusíadas" by Luís de Camões daily - no book should be allowed to take more than max.one week of anybody's time. Edited by Iversen on 08 September 2011 at 12:47am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| janalisa Triglot Senior Member France janafadness.com/blog Joined 6889 days ago 284 posts - 466 votes Speaks: English*, French, Japanese Studies: Russian, Norwegian | Message 1939 of 3737 08 September 2011 at 10:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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YKYALNW this commercial makes your day:
http://www.toyota.fr/yaris 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4843 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 1941 of 3737 10 September 2011 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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YKYALN when you've been reading a Dutch thread in this forum for hours although you don't even speak Dutch and can only make educated guesses at what is being said. But thanks to my German mothertongue and Google Translate I always got the gist! :) Edited by Josquin on 11 September 2011 at 12:37am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Amerykanka Hexaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5170 days ago 657 posts - 890 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Polish, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian | Message 1942 of 3737 11 September 2011 at 10:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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When your English spelling skills (which used to be above-average) start deteriorating rapidly due to your frequent exposure to other languages. Due to Spanish, you constantly find yourself writing things like recepcionist instead of receptionist, responsable instead of resposible, and even capitain instead of captain. Due to Polish, you write cywilization instead of civilization and gramar instead of grammar.
When you think it is fascinating that you spelled Egyptian as Eygeptian last week (you still like thinking about it and being amused). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4827 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 1943 of 3737 12 September 2011 at 2:27am | IP Logged | |||||
A similar, and worrying thing is when your actual native vocabulary seems to shrink, after you have been absorbed in a target language book for hours - you read a sentence, know exactly what it means, but are stuck for the moment for some of the native language words, and you'd be unable to translate it. I suppose this is a good fault, and the effect is only temporary (I hope!), since we are told "not to translate", but it's disconcerting. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| LebensForm Senior Member Austria Joined 5049 days ago 212 posts - 264 votes Studies: German | Message 1944 of 3737 12 September 2011 at 3:08am | IP Logged | |||||
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When you attempt to be social and go bowling, but instead you end up sitting at a table there and talk to an exchange student from Germany because afterall, that's more appealing to you than bowling your bra size.
When a friend wrote Ich liebe dich (I love you) on my whiteboard on my door here at school only to notice some guy left his phone number for you to call him because apparently you love a certain part of the male anatonmy, which in all, you find this whole deal extremely offensive to the German language, you don't even care that some creep wrote on your board... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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