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You know you’re a language nerd when...

  Tags: Language Geek
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
3737 messages over 468 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 243 ... 467 468 Next >>
psy88
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5341 days ago

469 posts - 882 votes 
Studies: Spanish*, Japanese, Latin, French

 
 Message 1937 of 3737
07 September 2011 at 5:21am | IP Logged 
meramarina wrote:
Quote:
Just a post-Irene follow up. Are you okay? I hope you survived Irene without too much damage to your books , home, or to you.s


Yes I'm OK, thank you! Had an unfortunate hospitalization following the storm (not really storm-related, unless you count the stress) but I'm on the mend now.

And you know you are a language nerd when you're ill and the doctor asks so, what's the problem, and you look down in embarrassment, hesitate, then stammer: "It's . . . it's . . . (sigh) . . . it's nerdery (flop onto cot).

And everyone, doctors, nurses and fellow patients, back away from you . . . No, not that! Isolation! Contamination!   This condition is extremely contagious!

(I knoww, I should have learned by now NEVER to make jokes!)








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 6453 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 
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 6640 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 
YKYALNW this commercial makes your day:

http://www.toyota.fr/yaris
8 persons have voted this message useful



Josquin
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 4594 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 
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 4921 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 
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 4578 days ago

2371 posts - 3676 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Danish, Welsh

 
 Message 1943 of 3737
12 September 2011 at 2:27am | IP Logged 
Amerykanka wrote:
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).


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 4800 days ago

212 posts - 264 votes 
Studies: German

 
 Message 1944 of 3737
12 September 2011 at 3:08am | IP Logged 
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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