What do you love about your second language(s)?

General discussion about learning languages
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eido
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Re: What do you love about your second language(s)?

Postby eido » Wed Jul 04, 2018 1:04 am

I love how emotive it can be. Every accent is this way - they all have a different way of expressing themselves, but one which is uniquely Spanish. I feel that I can be my true self in this language, or even something more. I am me, but better, more intelligent, wiser. I can fit in with people I otherwise wouldn't. It makes me sensitive; it makes me think. I can't really describe in words why I love it. I just do.
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Re: What do you love about your second language(s)?

Postby kulaputra » Wed Jul 04, 2018 6:32 pm

Spanish = telenovelas w/o guilt. Also, Márquez, Lorca, Isabel Allende, Borges, Llosa amongst others. Oh, and I love Barcelona (and yes, I'll get around to Catalan some day, for the same reason).
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Re: What do you love about your second language(s)?

Postby zatris » Wed Jul 04, 2018 6:57 pm

Always the literature. But some specific things:

English - The flexibility, the huge vocabulary, the easiness to form new words, the poetic possibilities. I mean things like

T. S. Eliot wrote:"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
"They called me the hyacinth girl."
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.


-- one of my favorite little snippets of poetry in any language.

French - The marvelous way it sounds, the elegance of expression (I've posted in my log an excerpt from Louis Lavelle), the beauty of the spelling (impractical, surely, but very pleasing to the eyes).
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Re: What do you love about your second language(s)?

Postby Cavesa » Thu Jul 05, 2018 12:31 pm

To the original question and not the general reasons to learn a language:

French: their fantasy and scifi books. Also their medical textbooks are great!

Spanish: their tv series. Also the attitude of the natives towards the learners

German: the huge bookmarket. And I like all those bits that I actually know from Czech, just sometimes without having realised that

Italian: It is beautiful, it is comfortable in the mouth, it is the best language for singing in!
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Re: What do you love about your second language(s)?

Postby Denzagathist » Thu Jul 05, 2018 1:07 pm

Turkish: İstanbul is reason enough to learn it. It also just sounds awesome and I get crazy thrills from the agglutinative forms and the vowel harmony. And that's to say nothing of Turkish food and soap operas...

BCMS: Croatia is the country I've lived in where I've felt the most at home. I find the language beautiful to listen to and some of my favorite music is in it. The countries it is spoken in are some of my absolute favorites. I love how absurdly complicated the socio-politico-linguistic situation surrounding the language(s) is.

Japanese: I have a love-hate relationship with it, depending on my mood. I love-hate the different layers of formality, and the impeccably polite and indirect way that everything is expressed. I love-hate how vastly different it is from most Western languages in practically every aspect. I think hiragana is so beautiful and elegant in a quintessentially Japanese way. (I could do without katakana in my life, though.) Kanji are beautiful too, but I consider them more Chinese than Japanese.

Mandarin: Tones and characters. Every time I succeed at either, even in the simplest contexts, I feel such a sense of accomplishment.
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Re: What do you love about your second language(s)?

Postby 80Percent » Thu Jul 05, 2018 2:14 pm

I think Mandarin tones are kickass and makes speaking Mandarin so much fun.

I also love that because there are fewer sounds there's so much rhyming so it's easier to remember the words (for me at least)

And i looooooooove the lack of conjugation, masc/fem, articles. Yes please!

And i think it just sounds pretty.
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Re: What do you love about your second language(s)?

Postby devilyoudont » Thu Jul 05, 2018 9:33 pm

Japanese: Something about Japanese grammar just seems incredibly logical to me. Also, I think Japanese sounds beautiful, and the written from looks beautiful.

Spanish: I love how Spanish isn't standardized. There's tons of different Spanishes. Can't explain why, just that it is endlessly interesting to me. Also, I love Spanish orthography!

Esperanto: I love how easy esperanto is! I love the compound words. I love how international the community is. (Actually I just love the community in general)
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Re: What do you love about your second language(s)?

Postby iguanamon » Thu Jul 05, 2018 10:09 pm

Spanish is the language I am most likely to run into on a daily basis. I love the cultures from Spain to Mexico and the Caribbean where I live. Salsa, plena, bomba and son music are a part of me. The poetry of Pablo Neruda and Garcia Lorca move my soul.

Portuguese is probably my favorite language. It was the first language I learned after Spanish. It gives me an entry into the cultures of Brasil and Portugal. Portuguese speakers don't expect a foreigner to speak their language well and when that happens, they welcome you with open arms. Brazilian music is also a part of who I am. Portuguese has a world of great literature and poetry to explore- Mia Couto from Moçambique and Fernando Pessoa are two of my favorites.

Haitian Creole is a language no foreigner is expected to speak. Haitians are a very warm and friendly people. Haitian music will get you to dance. The folk tales and proverbs alone make it worth learning the language to a high level.

Lesser Antilles French Creole is another language no foreigner is expected to speak and people are always friendly and open when I do. It gives great music (Zouk) and for me, conversation with people from time to time who have a deep wisdom about life in the islands and life in general.

Ladino/Djudeo-espanyol is a language I love for its culture. I am not Jewish but if I were, I'd want to be Sephardic. The Sephardim brought printing to the Ottoman Empire. There's a long history of literature in the language, especially religious literature. The Djoha tales and other folktales are a goldmine of wisdom. I love being able to read the language in Rashi, Meruba and Soletreo scripts from right to left and come out with a language based on Medieval Spanish. It is a truly pan-Mediterranean language with influences from Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, French and Italian. I wanted to learn the language because I was curious about how a people expelled from their homeland over 500 years* ago managed to maintain their culture and language for most of that time living in peace with their Muslim and Christian neighbors until the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the coming of the Second World War and the Holocaust ended it. For all practical intents and purposes, Djudeo-espanyol is a "dead language walking". It will cease to be spoken natively in another 40-50 years.
*When the Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal, they had been there for over seven hundred years, longer than Europeans have been settled in the Americas.
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Re: What do you love about your second language(s)?

Postby Querneus » Fri Jul 06, 2018 12:40 am

I learn the languages I learn for various reasons (some are linguistic, some practical, some cultural), but if I stick to linguistic features:

English

Its deep orthography, which in my experience was much harder to get used to than that of French, is just great. Both orthographies seem daunting to a beginner of course, but whereas an intermediate student of French (now used to all the obligatory and optional liaison) will only be surprised now and then by special cases like cul [ky] or il convainc [i(l) kõvæ̃], the English language continues to be annoying to its intermediate students well into the low-advanced level, at least if they're like me and want to get every phoneme right.

You learn loving has [ʌ] and moving has [u] early enough, but then you hit the more uncommon word roving only to discover it has neither: [ˈɹoʊ.vɪŋ]...

I find its relatively strict word order rules interesting and beautiful too. I like the way adverbs of manner can be placed in the middle of compound verbs (I have finally done it) or verbal periphrases (I should finally do it), and even retain their position after transformations like subject-verb inversion (have I finally done it?). Notice how adverbs of manner and frequency typically appear before the verb (when the verb is simple and not in a periphrasis), but they appear after the verb if the verb is specifically "to be": I never go there on Saturdays ~ I am never there on Saturdays (*I never am there on Saturdays). Subject-verb inversion is triggered by certain negative words near the beginning of the sentence: never had I imagined it would be like this, nor did I think it was possible in the first place... You can form a past-tense contrary-to-fact condition by simply changing word order: had I done it on time, ... ~ if I had done it on time... Nice little things like that, you know?

French

I like how strange it is compared to the rest of Romance languages. There are so many words that seem shortened in comparison (Spanish isla ~ French île [il], golpe ~ coup [ku]), and when I look up etymologies many words turn out to be from Old Frankish too.

The spoken language is also surprisingly different from the formal written language among pretty much all native speakers, more so than what you can find in Spanish at least. The idealized written standard has been lagging behind innovations in the spoken language at a rate I find interesting, even in basic things like how to make normal content questions. People are still sometimes writing Que pouvons-nous faire ? 'What can we do?' in certain contexts, even when they might otherwise regularly say Qu'est-ce qu'on peut faire ? or On peut faire quoi ?

Latin

It's an old attested form of my own native language, and it is fascinating to sound out my good old words in older ways, e.g. edad [eˈðað] was pronounced aetātem [aɪˈtaː.tẽː] once upon a time. New meanings can be interesting to observe: mūtāre 'to change' became Spanish mudar 'to move (to another house/city); to shed skin (said of a snake)', cibus 'food' became cebo 'fishing bait'.

Even better, I find it fascinating whenever I see informal Spanish (or French) words attested back then with the same or a very similar meaning. Would you believe Spanish panza 'belly (especially a fat one)' was already used with that meaning by Plautus more than 2100 years ago? Eō vōs vostrōsque panticēs madefacitis, quom ego sim hīc siccus (from his comedy Pseudolus, in act I, near the beginning). The fact Latin writers typically avoided this word using venter instead, or īlia if they were poets, suggests it was a vulgar word.

In terms of grammar, it's the opposite of English with its incredibly flexible syntax. I especially like the way words can get out of relative clauses, and the way a noun phrase can be broken up appearing in two or even three separated bits. (Yes, I'm talking about prose!) Also, the way those little connecting words enim, vero and autem (also igitur, for most but not all writers) can break up even personal names because they so stubbornly must appear in a certain position near (but not at!) the beginning of a sentence (Marcus enim Tullius Cicero dixerat...).

Mandarin

I like the characters, as well as the fact many words have both a one-syllable and a two-syllable form (已(經) yi3(jing1) 'already', 桌(子) zhuo1(zi) 'table', (贈)送 (zeng4)song4 'to give (something as a gift)', (戰)勝 (zhan4)sheng4 'to defeat'). I am saddened that none of the English-Mandarin dictionaries in existence like to be clear about this. You look up 'fork' and they give you either 叉 cha1 or 叉子 cha1zi but not both. I would in fact like to be given the variants if they're both in common use in the modern language.

Also, certain concepts are expressed by pairing opposites, and the examples are endless and endlessly fascinating. Here are some: 父母 fu4mu3 'parents' lit. father-mother (in apocopated form, otherwise 父親 fu4qin1 and 母親 mu3qin1), 薪水 xin1shui3 'salary' lit. firewood-water, 大小 da4xiao3 'size' lit. big-small, 姓名 xing4ming2 'name' lit. surname-given name (in the East Asian order of course), 東西 dong1xi 'thing' lit. East-West (apparently originally a reference to market locations in a city), 歌曲 ge1qu3 'song' lit. lyrics-tune, 潮汐 chao2xi1 'tide' lit. morning tide-evening tide, 方圓 fang1yuan2 'the surrounding area' lit. square-circle, 呼吸 hu1xi1 'breath' lit. exhale-inhale. And the great thing is that they're very obvious thanks to the writing system. Otherwise I would have thought the Mandarin word for salary was 心水 "heart-water" or 新水 "new-water", since the normal word for 'firewood' is 木柴 mu4chai2. After all, it's not entirely obvious to an English speaker that the word "salary" has something to do with "salt", even though it totally does! Or that "obvious" (probably) has something to do with "way" (from Proto-Indo-European weǵʰ-), because something is obvious if it stands in your way.
Last edited by Querneus on Fri Jul 06, 2018 2:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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renaissancemedici
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Re: What do you love about your second language(s)?

Postby renaissancemedici » Fri Jul 06, 2018 4:42 am

English is simply beautiful. The fact that Shakespeare did what he did with it speaks volumes. I love that it has so many accents and variations around the world.

French sounds enchanting to me.
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