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Disliking a certain language family | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| adab785 Newbie United States Joined 5750 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, French | Message 25 of 44 26 April 2009 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Personally, I dislike French. It's strange, but I love reading about the 18thC French philosophes and the "Encyclopedie," but I just don't like French for some reason. However, I kind of "need" to learn French, at least be able to read it with some fluency.
Personally, I love Spanish. I love the culture. I love the way it sounds, it's beautiful. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| portunhol Triglot Senior Member United States thelinguistblogger.w Joined 6258 days ago 198 posts - 299 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: German, Arabic (classical) | Message 26 of 44 26 April 2009 at 10:15pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Hate is a strong word. I don't hate any language family. I like learning tid bits about all languages. What language enthusiast doesn't? There are, however, only so many that I'm actually interested in learning well.
I have no interest in the Turkic languages. I'm not interested in Gaelic languages. I have very little interest in Basque, Hungarian, Lithuanian or Latvian. The languages of the Caucus do not make me too curious either. I only have a faint interest in the Guaraní dialects/languages but none of the other native languages from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego entice me. I have only a mild interest in the languages of the Indian Ocean and South Pacific. I don't see myself learning a native African language either. That said, you never know. Just because I'm not interested now doesn't mean I might not be in the future. I don't understand you people who don't like the Latin languages. For the most part, their writing system does a great job at representing how they actually speak. The verbs are complex but are also fairly straightforward. They have a wealth of literature that can only be rivaled by the Germanic languages. Between Spanish, French and Portuguese, Latin languages are found just about everywhere; you can actually use them once you learn them. The Latin cultures are known for being warm, friendly, caring and for throwing good parties. So making friends is easy and that also helps you learn the language well. I feel like it's as if some member of the forum said that he didn't like one of his coworkers because she's funny, generous, intelligent and good at her job. We're obviously talking about a pretty subjective topic here but I don't see what's not to like about Latin languages. They're too easy and you were forced to take French or Spanish in school? Those don't really seem like good reasons to me. Edited by portunhol on 26 April 2009 at 10:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Jar-ptitsa Triglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5904 days ago 980 posts - 1006 votes Speaks: French*, Dutch, German | Message 27 of 44 27 April 2009 at 12:13am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I don't like Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian or Ukrainian.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7162 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 28 of 44 27 April 2009 at 1:44am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
From the lens of your experience with Portuguese and Spanish, I'm not surprised that you extrapolate it to think that Romance languages have orthography that "for the most part does a great job at representing how they actually speak." I think that you'd change your tune drastically if you were learning French. What's more is that if you had read my comments, I'm not bothered by the languages or the family in isolation. The turn-off comes from the family's hype and questionable (or even stereotypical) judgments made by its users or learners. As I posted earlier, my disliking has nothing to do with "dry" aspects such as morphology, lexis, syntax and phonology because it seems illogical for a person to dislike a language because of its own linguistic characteristics. For example I'm all for equality and so on, but I'm unable to think that French and Slovak are "bad" because they have grammatical gender and Estonian and Hungarian are "good" because they don't have grammatical gender. In addition, I don't doubt the potential usefulness of knowing a Romance language (I owe one of my jobs to my knowledge of French). Yet to claim that "they're found just about everywhere" overlooks the fact that the usefulness of knowing a given language still often depends on the region or local environment. I'd be damned if knowing a Romance language would get someone overall further ahead than knowing Mandarin or even English in China, for example. You've inadvertently presented your views as a live example of why jbbar, Maximus, I and likely others are not that keen about Romance languages. Statements such as "[Romance languages] have a wealth of literature that can only be rivaled by Germanic languages" or "Latin cultures are known for being warm, friendly, caring and for throwing good parties" are hardly objective. They sound more like validations used by learners or native speakers to trumpet the virtue of their choice or ability in the associated languages. A high quantity of literature is not the same as high-quality literature and substantive arguments about quality would lead to you getting into some intense discussions/arguments with specialists in Ancient Greek, Slavonic, Hungarian, Indian or Chinese literature. I hate to burst your bubble but people who don't have the good fortune of belonging to "Latin cultures" are still capable of being "warm, friendly, caring" and more than able to throw "good parties". Perhaps the handle "Portunhol" is a good sign of the degree of emotion that you've invested in Portuguese and Spanish and may fit with the reaction used when encountering people who don't think quite as highly about something tied to a language family that you apparently love and have studied. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| icing_death Senior Member United States Joined 5867 days ago 296 posts - 302 votes Speaks: English* | Message 29 of 44 27 April 2009 at 2:02am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I don't dislike any language families, or single languages for that matter. But there are some cultures I don't care
for, which means that I won't learn a language associated with them (if the language is only for that culture). There is one exception to this - a language so big and dangerous to my existence that I feel I have to learn it to defend myself. I'm funny that way:) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| portunhol Triglot Senior Member United States thelinguistblogger.w Joined 6258 days ago 198 posts - 299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: German, Arabic (classical) | Message 30 of 44 27 April 2009 at 5:03am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Well I am truly sorry to hear that. Perhaps I over did it. My point was not to say that Latin languages are better than other languages but to bring up ample reasons (which is where I seemed to have gone overboard) for why Latin languages are very likable.
Not so. The first foreign language I ever studied was French. Though I have not achieved fluency I am quite familiar with the language. It is the hardest Latin language to read and still it is much easier than Hebrew, Thai or even English. The orthography is counterintuitive at first but it’s usually quite consistent, allowing the foreigner to pronounce words correctly that he/she has never seen or heard before. If it only get’s easier from there then I’d say that say that the orthography of the language family as a whole is pretty transparent, which was my original point.
Quite right. I freely admit that there are regions of the world where Latin languages are not particularly common or useful. However, if you lived in East Timor, Macau, Tokyo, the heavily populated parts of Australia, most of Africa, much of Europe or just about anywhere in the Americas, then you would find some very good use for your Latin languages. If it weren’t for English, would any other language family be nearly as well distributed?
Guilty as charged! Alas, I am not an unbiased advocate of the Latin language group. That does not mean, however, that my points are automatically invalid. Even when I sit back and strain to be objective the arguments against the Latin languages sound weak. When I started reading this thread I was shocked to see that the only language group being consistently picked was the Latin group. I just can’t understand how it can be, thus far, the most disliked group. It does well to remember that this is a subjective topic. Edited by portunhol on 27 April 2009 at 5:20am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| ChiaBrain Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5814 days ago 402 posts - 512 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish* Studies: Portuguese, Italian, French Studies: German | Message 31 of 44 27 April 2009 at 5:42am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Agreed 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Juan M. Senior Member Colombia Joined 5905 days ago 460 posts - 597 votes | Message 32 of 44 27 April 2009 at 3:54pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The only language I have a problem with is French. The proclivity of its cultural elite to sympathize with the most cruel and inhuman groups and movements around the world is more than I can stomach.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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