Fun fact: when you say “Asian” to an American, their first thought is East or Southeast Asia, but a British person’s primary association with “Asianness”, for lack of a better term, is India and Pakistan.
We don’t call it that anymore. Haven’t for decades.
As for the why, the time when that term was in regular use was a time with a lot of anti-asian bigotry and most of the people who refuse to stop using it are the same ones who use other outdated terms/slurs for non-white and non-western people, so it has tons of negative connotations…
India and Pakistan are considered to be in Asia but more accurately they are considered to be in the Indian Subcontinent. The same way Iran, Saudi Arabia and the rest are also considered to be in Asia but they are more accurately considered to be on the Middle East.
How well do you speak those languages? For example, can you order pizza with pineapple and olives in any of those languages? What if the pizza you get is cold, there’s only one olive on it and the crust is soggy, could you get your complaints through in any language?
Or perhaps will the explanation be more like: “Pizza bad, no good. Want money back.”
I’m not from India but as another Asian, yes, we can have fluent conversations in several languages. (I grew up speaking English, Mandarin, Malay, Cantonese and a bit of Hakka)
That’s pretty cool. Took a quick look at the relationships those languages have, and it seems that Malay is the odd one out, all the others are in the sinitic family. I would expect that if you learn one, your mind isn’t going to explode if you try to learn the other two. However, Malay is completely different, so jumping into that world may require some extra effort.
To give a European example, if you already know Norwegian, learning Swedish it’s only one step away. Jumping into Danish or German at that point can be done, but it will require some extra effort. A similar situation exists between Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
It’s more to do with my multicultural upbringing - Malay is the national language here in Malaysia, so it’s pretty much compulsory to learn & speak. My parents are Cantonese & Hakka Chinese, I learnt to speak Malay & Mandarin in school (where ethnic Chinese kids from different dialect groups as well as ppl from other ethnicities mingle), and spoke mostly English in college & work. We also have Indians and other minorities who speak even more dialects/languages than I do.
It is complicated. India has at least four language families - Indo-European, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan. So Hindi (I-E) is closer related to English or Greek than to Tamil (Dra), Santali (AA) or Zeme (S-T). While it is rare for people to speak languages belonging to all four families, I know at least three people who can passably speak six languages from two or three families.
Oh wow can’t believe I actually remember learning words from 2nd grade. Like long long ago, haven’t used that language in over a decade. Somehow I can remember a decade old language I don’t even use anymore, but not my Bitwarden password.
There are few reasons to visit Mexico for most Americans, even those on the border. If you don’t understand that, then you’re ignorant of how things typically work here. I live there (in a border city), feel free to ask me questions.
This said, I agree that japanese is a pain in the ass to learn. Still, I’m really enjoying the process of it. I’m done with Hiragana, and I’m learning Katakana now. So, I’m a the level of a child, basically… But that’s okay. We all have to start somewhere, and judging strangers is kind of considered an asshole move here in America.
I assume in terms of incentive, there are more reason for Spanish speakers to learn English than English speakers to learn Spanish. Likewise most Spanish speakers within the US tend to keep to their own communities, and you're unlikely to directly interact with them unless you are friends with people in the group, or frequently do business with people who speak Spanish.
It's kinda like Russian and its bordering Countries. Many people in Kazakhstan can speak Russian, but not many Russians can speak Kazakh.
And good luck with your language endeavors as well. Japanese does get easier the more you interact with it. I am at the top of my game when I'm watching and reading media constantly.
That’s exactly correct. I can be in Mexico in a half an hour or less if I hopped in my car right now. Despite this, I haven’t heard anyone speak Spanish in literally years. There’s some communities here that will denegrate folks for not speaking English, although that’s thankfully not very common in my city.
Still, despite my cities approval and acceptance of immigrants, there’s been a cultural expectation for over a century for immigrants to assimilate here, rather than mix. This leads to English, the most convenient language for us to learn, often being the only one we learn. It also means bilingual immigrants are often pushed to abandon further study in their original language in order to fully embrace and improve their English.
The fact English is the most popular language on the planet, and the one used most often in international business, gives further incentive to master it over starting or continuing a different language. As the poorly constructed meme above sloppily showcases, most people (forget only targeting Americans) don’t master this language. I can only imagine it’s not the easiest one out there to learn.
Japanese is a lot of fun so far! I love anime, and I look forward to someday watching without subs or dubs. It only took a few weeks to learn the Hiragana, but the Kanji are likely to humble me greatly.
I recommend the pokemon anime, especially if you grew up with the English dub. It's a kid's anime, so the difficulty level isn't very high, and if you are familiar with the episodes, it can help you fill in the gaps to where your comprehension ends. Plus its really interesting seeing the subtle differences in the music, edited scenes restored, and even getting to see outright banned episodes.
I am dating a man from England and it’s amazing how many people don’t understand his accent. It might just be me getting to know him, but I don’t find his accent (or even tough accents like Irish or Scottish) hard to understand anymore.
Bland and nails on chalkboard? That's like the opposite of bland. Not great, but definitely not bland. Bland is blunt and flat. Nails on chalkboard is shrill, sharp, and grating. I just don't understand how you can believe both at the same time.
Here, I mean more the reaction to it, I sometimes cringe at the pronunciation or intonation in the way one would to nails on a chalkboard (the idiom can have more than one meaning or reaction attached to it)
That doesn't change the argument. Bland and cringe are also not like each other. I'm all for you criticizing something because it's different than you, but at least use your language consistently and properly. How would anyone interpret a secondary analogy without knowing how you personally react? It already has a clear meaning on its surface. Occam's razor would indicate that's enough. Why would anyone invent a second possible scenario that's only knowable if you have access to information that isn't well known, and in this case, near certainty of being unknown? Just say hearing the accent from some other country makes you cringe. Communication doesn't have to be difficult unless you make it so.
Right so don’t really know if this is bait… but that’s one kind of accent (and the tickest pronunciation at that) in ulster, specifically greater Belfast/co. Antrim and very few people speak that thick. For the most part they should be quite understandable from the perspective of anyone who consumes any English language media outside of only American or only London (RP) English. The number of times I have had people have trouble with my accent in Europe and then I ask them what they watched when learning English and the answer is American TV is astounding.
This is me getting on my wee podium now but I have a huge problem with the Americans and Brits for this, they marginalise the fuck out if our dialect, make fun of it for being unitelligible (after making no effort to understand it), and often deny it any legitimacy.
In reality Irish English is spoken by 5-7million people, as large as some dialects of European languages (eg. Austrian/swiss German, Belgian/Swiss French, etc) and if you learn French or German you still get some exposure to those dialects and if you out your mind to it understand it.
I have a huge problem with the Americans and Brits for this, they marginalise the fuck out if our dialect, make fun of it for being unitelligible
I mean I know you’re talking about the wider world and not just this thread, but you started the conversation by being disingenuous about Americans and their dialects. It’s kind of hard for people to take “I have a legitimate dialect” seriously when you just got done trashing half a continent’s worth of dialects
Maybe if we all broach the topic with a little more understanding, you and everyone will feel better about it. For example Appalachian English and Northern Ireland English are both dialects with their own rules of pronunciation and grammar. They’re both legitimate. But it’s not surprising they’d have trouble understanding each other because they have so little interaction. But with patience and mutual respect it can happen
You just also seem to have a problem of marginalizing US English and UK English. They vary drastically. Just like how you just stated accents in your own country can vary.
I mean if you never leave the US (easy to do, it’s gigantic and travel is expensive), it’s kinda understandable that you’d struggle with accents because you rarely hear any, let alone other languages. I know americans that have trouble with english accents lmao
My god son, just how many marbles were you trying to eat while talking to those nice Americans? You do know that the untied states has around 30 dialects, and every accent from around the world, right? I’m sure you knew better than that when you generalized 300 million people into one anecdote.
I’m using duolingo and am almost done with the first big section. It is so different compared to germanic and latin languages! But that was one of the reasons to learn it, so kinda expected. I’m also enjoying it, I don’t worry so much about reading and writing and focus on speaking and understanding, like a child would do. Reading and writing is the next step and I hope that it comes somewhat naturally this way.
I’m also using that platform, and I’m learning the written languages along the way as they prompt them. I assumed it was helping me learn, but I have no idea haha. The Hiragana and Katakana are neat compared to English letters!
Is it a lot harder to learn compared to the others you know? Other than ASL, this is my first genuine attempt after flunking Italian many, many years ago in school. I assumed I’d never tackle another language ever again, but I’m loving this so far. I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that the gamification aspect is motivating me.
My 3 favorite experiences with language as an American:
(1) My Jamaican coworker who I couldn’t understand for the life of me and my Ukrainian coworker who my Jamaican couldn’t understand at all, the Ukrainian coworker understood the Jamaican coworker just fine though and I understood my Ukrainian coworker just fine. Basically it turns into a fun game of telephone whenever we need to talk.
(2) My former coworker from Haiti who no one but the hiring manager and I could understand, the best part about this is that I didn’t know he had an accent. I just didn’t hear it somehow. He was a great guy, he went back home a few years ago when his mother passed. Got stuck due to the pandemic and never came back to the company. I hope he’s doing well.
(3) My former coworker from Guatemala insisting English wasn’t my first language as to him it sounded like English was my second language at best. I’ve been working on it since then. I still suck at it.
Complaining about bilingual (english + french) positions in the public service is a favorite hobby of anglo public servants, as if the french ones didn’t need to learn a second language to get the job… Heck, it’s not rare to see/hear one argue that french Canadians should just start speaking english and stop bothering them about their “unique culture”…
I can confirm this, in high school (Québec) no one really gives a f**k about learning English as they don’t need it if they stay in Québec and don’t understand that knowing English is a valuable asset.
An ethnicity or ethnic group is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, society, nation, religion, or social treatment within their residing area
American here, I’m going to challenge myself to remember as many as I can.
Set: A group of things that go together.
Set: Letting a dessert cool in the fridge
Set: A stage for a play or film
Set: A command to put something somewhere
Set: A part of Tennis
…
5/704 isn’t so bad, right?
Edit: looking up the definitions shows a lot of sub-definitions that essentially have the same meaning. I don’t think it’s appropriate to say that the word has 435 meanings when “set a course” and “set a fire” are basically “start a thing,” yet they’re listed as different definitions. The are many many of these cases even just on Google’s definition blurb.
its also as if you’re being disingenuous, because try to say that shit to some hardcore right wing patriots of any country and see how fast you get your faced caved in.
Make a joke about Americans being fucking idiots and don’t expect Americans to laugh along. I mean what do you expect? Yeah we drink a lot of coffee and did slavery and use little creamer cups and eat lots of fried food and spend too much on our military. Americans, right? This? No thanks.
You mean the French with the white flag and baguette jokes? Spaniards with the lazy/siesta jokes? Italians with the pasta and pizza jokes? South europeans with the poor/debt jokes? Irish with the alcoholism jokes? British with their shitty food cuisine jokes? Swedish and their immigrant policy jokes?
Americans are not special. Each country has their joke topic, yours in a nutshell are about yall being very self centered, and it shows tbh.
I’ve experienced only the opposite. Americans love self deprecating humor but Yuros will literally cry about you “abusing my country” if you say one negative thing.
jokes are funnier when they’ve got a nugget of truth i think. if the joke was about americans being fat and putting cheese on everything, or about how we’re the richest country in the world but people die all the time because they can’t afford basic medicine, i doubt there’d by any complaints. but saying that we can’t speak any language feels less like poking fun at regional differences, and more like just, idk, lying for the sake of being cruel?
Go easy on us, our 1% needs to keep us stupid for myriad reasons, mostly to stay in power. Don’t worry though, they’ll come for you next, wherever you are. Likely selling you on some other enemy or distraction.
I know you are joking but based on my purely anecdotal personal experience, the French (at least in Paris) can now speak and are willing to speak in English much more than a few decades back.
The first time I went to France, almost 25 years back, I had a rough time communicating at restaurants or even buying tickets at the Paris metro stations. Not sure if the latter was an ability or willingness issue because even holding up two fingers and saying “two tickets” was apparently indecipherable. Had to muster my school days French and say “deux billets” to produce instant results.
Edit: And no, the two fingers I was holding up were not the middle finger of each hand :P
well because it’s kind of a forced adoption in an ideal world we would have developed a common tongue by slowly merging the languages, or at least would have taken one that’s pretty good and then improve on it. For example Hungarian is much better in the sense that what you write is what you pronounce, not the mess that is English, so in an ideal common tongue I feel like that aspect would be adopted.
Of course Hungarian also has stupid parts, ly (<- that’s supposed to be indeed one letter) and j is the same thing. x is just ks, y is pronounced the same as i and w is just v so there is some extra fat on it, but other than that the 44 letters cover all the sounds you make while pronouncing words.
Hungarian is like Chinese to most romanic / germanic languages.
While being excellent in describing every little thing pretty efficiently and short, the problem I see with highly advanced languages is imho that they are pretty complicated to learn.
Hello fellow Indian. This is very similar to my linguistic capabilities if you substitute Japanese for the bit of French I learnt in school / college 30 years ago. Ok, I can’t really follow someone when they speak French, but I can read it well enough even now.
Nice. I know every language is pretty difficult mostly, but as someone who’s had a hard time learning Hindi after realising it uses the same script and yet is a different language from Marathi, French just blows my fucking mind.
In my experience, it was reasonably simple to learn how to read / write French. We had it in school for 3 years and then college for a couple of years. The emphasis was on reading / writing and not so much on speaking / listening, though I remember we had to recite some French poetry once. The teacher’s ears must have fallen of hearing our impeccable accents :D
Definitely is. I forgot the actual name of the writing style, but for children’s books it is also not uncommon to have kanji with their hiragana transliteration above/beside it. Requiring someone to immediately write kanji when they learn japanese, especially as a secondary+ language is insane
Canadian here, I am fluent in English, French and Russian. Currently learning Spanish as well. If I can do it at 15y, you can too. Edit: Uyuu pointed out that its actually easier when you are young and I agree.
I had no patients or focus to do it when I was younger. I actually learned more Japanese and Chinese in the past 3 years, than I had ever done in childhood or university.
Pretty sure I can’t since I’m no longer younger than 15
In all seriousness though I’m curious how you’ve been finding Spanish, just if it kinda fits with my experience where, coming from French, it seemed overall quite easy to learn and improve (especially on the comprehension side of things.
Its not that bad. I joined a school with spanish classes this year and the others had 2y more of knowledge on me as I did not learn Spanish at my previous school, but I still managed to pull off a year average of 82% without studying. If you know french, then its a lot easier to learn Spanish as the verb and sentence structure is similar, not speaking about the amount of words that are the same in both languages. Knowing Russian helps as well as it also has some similarities. If Inhad a tip to give, it would be to not be shy trying to speak as there aure no negative and the positives are major. If you mispronounced a word, someone will just correct you and you will likely not repeat the same mistake again instead of you being shy to say something wrong.
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