You know you're a language nerd when…

General discussion about learning languages
kelvin921019
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby kelvin921019 » Wed Jun 10, 2020 7:40 am

At work:
Boss: we are going to expand our business to these countries (list out a few)
Me: Silently write down a list of languages to be learnt.
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Deinonysus
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Deinonysus » Fri Jun 12, 2020 4:03 pm

When you find multilingual board books for your toddler and have to buy them.

When you get mad that the books use a random transliteration for Mandarin instead of using pinyin, so now you have to memorize the tones for the numbers 1-10 and a bunch of random colors so you can read it right.

When the first number your toddler can pronounce is yī, rather than a number in a language you or anyone in your family actually speaks.
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/daɪ.nə.ˈnaɪ.səs/

Cavesa
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Cavesa » Sat Jun 13, 2020 9:26 am

When you compare the quality of several dubbings of the same show. :-)
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golyplot
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby golyplot » Sat Jun 13, 2020 1:55 pm

Cavesa wrote:When you compare the quality of several dubbings of the same show. :-)


When a character refers to a foreign language in the dialog and you check all the dubs to see what they changed it to in the dub.
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Cavesa » Sat Jun 13, 2020 2:04 pm

golyplot wrote:
Cavesa wrote:When you compare the quality of several dubbings of the same show. :-)


When a character refers to a foreign language in the dialog and you check all the dubs to see what they changed it to in the dub.


When you are laughing at some of the dubbing created problems. Such as French dubbed americans speaking bad French in Paris, or the differently bad pronunciation of French or Spanish in the various dubbings. And you have your favourite voice variant of the same character and actor :-D

But there is a clear downside to not needing the subtitles. When I turn them off and the characters suddenly switch to something I don't speak (Mandarin, Japanese, Klingon, Elvish, ...), I am lost.
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby golyplot » Sun Jun 14, 2020 5:16 am

Cavesa wrote:But there is a clear downside to not needing the subtitles. When I turn them off and the characters suddenly switch to something I don't speak (Mandarin, Japanese, Klingon, Elvish, ...), I am lost.


Ug, this used to drive me so crazy back during the DVD era. It made a number of movies unwatchable, such as Jenseits der Stille or Nirgendwo im Afrika, which are German movies but have substantial dialog in German Sign Language and Swahilli respectively. The American DVD releases only had two options - English subtitles or nothing, which means that if you try to watch it without subtitles to practice your German, you won't understand half the movie.

Luckily, such issues have mostly gone away in the Netflix international streaming era. If you set audio to a given language, it will generally correctly throw up subtitles for any dialog that's not in that language. Although I do remember being really frustrated to discover that watching Men in Black in Spanish on Netflix meant no subtitles for the "alien language" in the movie, making it unwatchable. But that's probably just a DVD rip - the legacy of the pre-international distribution era I talked about before.

P.S. If you really want to give your mind a workout, check out the Flemish series Undercover. There's one scene late in the series where the characters speak Flemish, English, Spanish, and French (IIRC) in quick succession, all in one scene. (They're pretending to try to set up a drug deal with a Latin American cartel via a French intermediary with the various characters in that scene speaking different subsets of those languages, necessitating some translation).
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Cèid Donn
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Cèid Donn » Fri Jun 19, 2020 4:04 pm

Iversen wrote:When it irritates you that the articles in Wikipedia in Afrikaans about particle physics aren't as long and detailed as those in the English version.


This is a frequent problems with many of my TLs. There'll be a decent article in English on a topic on Wiki and when I go to the corresponding article in another language it's barely more than a stub, like the article on Onion Johnnies. Since this is about Bretons and Breton culture, you'd think the Breton article would be more in-depth but nann.

Conversely, sometimes I can manage to find Wiki articles in my TLs that have no corresponding English article at all. Then I weirdly feel like I've made some great step toward being fluent because I've accessed a stash of knowledge that has no virtual English path to it. :lol:
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Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.

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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Cavesa » Fri Jun 19, 2020 5:11 pm

Cèid Donn wrote:
Iversen wrote:When it irritates you that the articles in Wikipedia in Afrikaans about particle physics aren't as long and detailed as those in the English version.


This is a frequent problems with many of my TLs. There'll be a decent article in English on a topic on Wiki and when I go to the corresponding article in another language it's barely more than a stub, like the article on Onion Johnnies. Since this is about Bretons and Breton culture, you'd think the Breton article would be more in-depth but nann.

Conversely, sometimes I can manage to find Wiki articles in my TLs that have no corresponding English article at all. Then I weirdly feel like I've made some great step toward being fluent because I've accessed a stash of knowledge that has no virtual English path to it. :lol:


Yes, it is annoying but not universally true about the better quality of the English articles. It really depends. When it comes to stuff closely related to a non anglophone country, you're likely to have better luck in that language. And when it comes to some other topics, I love those "hey, this is better than English" surprises too.

Could you share your secret English-free stash please?
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ANGELINA
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby ANGELINA » Wed Jun 24, 2020 10:58 am

I awlays want to jon in an Esperanto lesson as ONE day I hope when I travel to the other countries that I never need to find a translator to company me .
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Cavesa
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Cavesa » Sun Jun 28, 2020 8:18 pm

When you forget not everybody can tell Korean from Mandarin at first sight.

I was giving advice to my dad, like "buy the korean one, not the chinese, it is for the same price but works much better". dad: "ok, but how do I tell which one is korean?" "look at the boxes, one has korean writing on it". Nope, he didn't find this helpful enough. :-D
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