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Would you change your native language | ||
Tags: Native Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| P0nd3r Bilingual Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5014 days ago 30 posts - 35 votes Speaks: English*, Persian* Studies: Swedish, Japanese | Message 82 of 100 05 February 2011 at 12:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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"Persian makes extensive use of word building and combining affixes, stems, nouns and adjectives. Persian frequently uses derivational agglutination to form new words from nouns, adjectives, and verbal stems. New words are extensively formed by compounding – two existing words combining into a new one, as is common in German. Professor Mahmoud Hessaby demonstrated that Persian can derive 226 million words."
No, I think I'm right. I don't want to reconsider. :P Source: Source #2 Source Edited by P0nd3r on 05 February 2011 at 12:33am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Phantom Kat Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4873 days ago 160 posts - 253 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Finnish | Message 83 of 100 05 February 2011 at 1:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well I can't really complain about my situation. Spanish I got for free as a native tongue and English just as effortless for moving to the US really young, so that's two languages I was fluent in by the time I was thirteen. Plus, it's cool to be a native in a language that is almost as important as English in the US.
I would have loved to have a native language with very little speakers just to turn heads here in Texas, though. Or maybe language that didn't use the Roman alphabet or one that used tones; that would have been nice. (But if I didn't know Spanish, I wouldn't be able to watch Llena de Amor, my must-watch novela. D:) - Kat Edited by Phantom Kat on 05 February 2011 at 1:30am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| RealJames Diglot Newbie Japan realizeenglish.com/ Joined 4934 days ago 37 posts - 42 votes Speaks: French, English* Studies: Japanese | Message 84 of 100 05 February 2011 at 5:10am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think that it's a close tie between English and Spanish or English and Chinese for being the most advantageous. I bet there are very few places you can't go without being able to speak to the locals... Spanish sounds better than English imo, that's almost enough for me to want to change to Spanish! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Capsula Diglot Groupie Andorra Joined 5072 days ago 42 posts - 52 votes Studies: Catalan*, Spanish, English Studies: Italian | Message 85 of 100 05 February 2011 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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"Would you change your native language"
Absolutely. An unexpressive language, not beautiful at all, with no original words, whose 50% of words have been borrowed from Spanish in the past 50 years, completely useless in its own country, hard to speak because every word has been borrowed from Spanish and you don't know what's the original Catalan word, hated by most people, it's not a very desirable language. What's even more: if you try to speak Catalan to foreigners, you're seen as a green alien. People treat you like you were a patriotic-catalan-born-to-fight-against-the-world only because you don't switch to Spanish, which would be "normal". Then, linguists and Catalan patriots say if you switch to Spanish too often, Catalan will die and you'll be remembered as a nasty Catalan. I'm tired. At this moment, every language would be better than Catalan, I think. I don't care, maybe English, Spanish, Chinese, or a completely invented language spoken by a green alien. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| getreallanguage Diglot Senior Member Argentina youtube.com/getreall Joined 5281 days ago 240 posts - 371 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Italian, Dutch | Message 86 of 100 06 February 2011 at 1:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Whether Spanish is 'poor in sounds' or not depends on how you look at it. If you compare Spanish vowels to say, American English vowels, the latter has more monophthongs (at least 12) than the former (5), but Spanish has more diphthongs (14 or 15 to 5 or 6 in English). When it comes to consonant sounds, Spanish has a few less consonant phonemes than English, but not by much. English does give you the advantage of a relatively rare (by international standards) phoneme like the TH sound, both voiced and voiceless, while castizo Spanish also comes with the voiceless TH sound included (represented by the letters C/Z). The 'advantage' of English as far as consonants go is all the voiced fricative phonemes (the V, J, Z, zh, voiced TH sounds) and the glottal stop. But then again Spanish has its own J sound (which is found in Arabic, by the way), the RR sound, the bilabial fricative (the sound of B/V between vowels) and a handful of others which are at first listen completely alien to speakers of English. Granted, certain varieties of Spanish, for example Caribbean Spanish, have a slightly smaller sound inventory, if you will. However 'easy to learn' certain consonant clusters (combinations) seem probably has to do with the fact that your native language _is_ Spanish to begin with. Italian has a lot less consonant clusters, for example. I believe part of the reason the inventory of Spanish consonants seems so much smaller is because even though the number of sounds is about the same the number of phonemes is lower, meaning that those extra sounds are percieved just as variations of other sounds in the inventory, and because of this the brain doesn't really process them as different sounds. It's possible to perceive these differences but it takes a lot of conscious effort and is quite difficult for the average language learner to do. An example is the 'softer' sound of G when it's between vowels - the same thing happens with B and D. Objectively speaking they are different sounds but native speakers hear them as identical. (Figure out how to properly reproduce the 'soft D' sound on command, tweak it slightly, and you will be able to pronounce the voiced English TH. The same thing goes for the other two sounds - the 'soft G' will help you with French, if I'm not mistaken. This is not an easy process but if you ask me it can be easier than producing a sound you have actually never physically produced.) When it comes to spelling though, I'll have to agree with you. English spelling has a lot more personality. Of course, many people would just call that 'being difficult'. (By the way, the Ñ sound doesn't really exist in English if you ask me. 'Gnome' is pronounced like 'nome' in modern English. Other examples of the same thing are 'gnat' and 'gnu'.) Edited by getreallanguage on 06 February 2011 at 7:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Vos Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5376 days ago 766 posts - 1020 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Polish | Message 87 of 100 06 February 2011 at 5:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I would change mine to Icelandic. Why? Firstly because it's a beautiful, pure and proud language. It has seen very
little influence from other tongues. It's an ancient language which goes quite far back unchanged, allowing one to read old norse quite easily. And also due to the good educational system over in Iceland, I would be fluent in English by my teenage years anyway, not to mention have that most wonderful Icelandic accent when speaking English. And I would be able to roll my tongue like a crazy person. All pros!! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Waegukin Newbie Korea, South Joined 5310 days ago 19 posts - 22 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean | Message 88 of 100 06 February 2011 at 7:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm tempted to agree with the people disowning English because people end up learning it
anyway (however I'd have to disagree about the extent to which people tend to get good at it...), but I love Tori Amos and other more metaphorical pieces of writing and music, which can be hard enough to understand in my native tongue, much less as a second language, so I'll stick with English (that's not the only reason of course, but it's one that I haven't seen cited yet)....but I agree that being raised bilingual would have been great. The two languages I want to learn most are Korean and Swedish, but for variety purposes maybe something like Navajo--something kind of obscure, with tones, and a different word order than English so I'd have a bit of everything =] 1 person has voted this message useful |
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