You know you're a language nerd when…

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

Postby Brun Ugle » Sat Apr 06, 2019 6:02 am

jeff_lindqvist wrote:...when you're at work and bump into one of the few polyglots in town, chat about Esperanto/Dutch/Irish (Modern and Old)/Mandarin, brush over some of the main differences in phonology between Mandarin and Cantonese, and after five minutes you get the comment: "You should give lectures during next Polyglot Gathering!". Yeah, right...

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

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sat Apr 06, 2019 5:39 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:
jeff_lindqvist wrote:...when you're at work and bump into one of the few polyglots in town, chat about Esperanto/Dutch/Irish (Modern and Old)/Mandarin, brush over some of the main differences in phonology between Mandarin and Cantonese, and after five minutes you get the comment: "You should give lectures during next Polyglot Gathering!". Yeah, right...


You should!


Haha, not in this life! Thanks for the encouragement, though.
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby zenmonkey » Sun Apr 07, 2019 4:51 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:
Brun Ugle wrote:
jeff_lindqvist wrote:...when you're at work and bump into one of the few polyglots in town, chat about Esperanto/Dutch/Irish (Modern and Old)/Mandarin, brush over some of the main differences in phonology between Mandarin and Cantonese, and after five minutes you get the comment: "You should give lectures during next Polyglot Gathering!". Yeah, right...


You should!


Haha, not in this life! Thanks for the encouragement, though.


But really, you should.
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby zenmonkey » Sun Apr 07, 2019 5:01 pm

When you are intently reading a text about one language on a website and it takes you a few minutes to figure out that you've been reading something in a language you "haven't learned".

L'alfabet hebreu, també conegut com a àlef-bet en hebreu a partir del nom de les primeres dues lletres, és un conjunt de 22 lletres usades en l'escriptura del llenguatge hebreu. A banda de per l'idioma hebreu, aquest alfabet també ha estat usat i s'usa, amb algunes adaptacions, per l'escriptura de diferents llengües de la diàspora jueva, com ara el judeoàrab, el judeoespanyol (o sefardita), l'ídix, el judeoprovençal (o shoadit), i fins i tot el català. Alguns dels seus caràcters també s'usen en el domini de les matemàtiques.


Then you head over to google translate to have it confirm your suspicion about the language you are reading. And then you want to learn both Catalan and these new languages (shoadit). My original query concerned the spelling of the name of a letter in Yiddish ("חיריק יוד") and now I know how to write Yiddish in Catalan! (l'ídix)

Never mind that Catalan isn't on the table. Apparently reading it isn't too hard given Spanish, French, my poor Italian and the 30 minutes I spent on L'Occitan Assimil, so far.
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby golyplot » Sun Apr 07, 2019 5:18 pm

What language is that? At first I thought it was just a French dialect with nonstandard spelling but then it started throwing Spanish into the mix as well. It is surprisingly easy to read given knowledge of French and Spanish.

Edit: It appears to be Catalan.
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Cenwalh » Sun Apr 07, 2019 5:37 pm

golyplot wrote:What language is that? At first I thought it was just a French dialect with nonstandard spelling but then it started throwing Spanish into the mix as well. It is surprisingly easy to read given knowledge of French and Spanish.

Edit: It appears to be Catalan.


Did you get that from looking at the text itself, or by reading the commentary after it that said it was Catalan? ;)
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby golyplot » Mon Apr 08, 2019 6:34 am

I figured out it was Catalan by Googling the text and finding the original Wikipedia article.
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Cavesa » Thu Apr 11, 2019 12:24 pm

When you open a random book, a drawer, or uncover a place on your desk, and you find old bookmarks with random vocab on them everywhere.
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Brun Ugle » Thu Apr 11, 2019 1:01 pm

Cavesa wrote:When you open a random book, a drawer, or uncover a place on your desk, and you find old bookmarks with random vocab on them everywhere.

That happens to me all the time. I’m not sure if makes me a language nerd or a slob. It’s great when you can look at the list and realize you know all those words now. Sometimes it goes the other way though. Sometimes I see the list and have no idea what the words mean.
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Cavesa » Thu Apr 11, 2019 1:28 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:
Cavesa wrote:When you open a random book, a drawer, or uncover a place on your desk, and you find old bookmarks with random vocab on them everywhere.

That happens to me all the time. I’m not sure if makes me a language nerd or a slob. It’s great when you can look at the list and realize you know all those words now. Sometimes it goes the other way though. Sometimes I see the list and have no idea what the words mean.


Exactly. But whichever it is, I always get the "I should stop being lazy and start working with the vocab I encounter somehow" feeling of guilt :-D Fortunately, extensive reading works like a miracle for me anyways, even if I always fail to either write stuff down or to not lose the bookmark.
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