Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4957
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17549

Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby Cavesa » Tue May 04, 2021 8:30 am

Thank you for the support. It was really appreciated!

So, the interview is behind me now. Subjectively, it was horrible. My dad says that such a feeling is always a good sign in my case. Well, I felt extremely stupid, didn't even speak that well, the time limit was very short to explain stuff, and so on. Well, it's done now. At least I know that. Now I wait for any info from the other specialty (which is even worse. They had taken a month to send an email "we don't know, whether there will be any interview. We'll let you know, but we don't know when."). And a few months of waiting for the results.

Time to do a bit of Italian for fun, and then go and continue with my life, crazy paperwork, internship, second job hunting,...

The 6wc right now has a nice therapeutic role in all this.
9 x

Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4957
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17549

Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby Cavesa » Thu May 13, 2021 7:42 pm

I've recently watched both series of Altered Carbon in Italian. I know, I know, it is a dubbing. But it was harder than for example Lucifer, being used to someone or not really plays a huge role :-D But now I am stopping any dubbings till the end of the 6wc. And the series is good btw. Altered Carbon is cyberpunk, working with some old themes, but still very good and sometimes surprising (the season 1 more than the season 2). There will be no season 3 though, as it was not popular enough for the cost. Which is a shame. I know, there are tons of scifi shows these days, perhaps more than you could watch (at least if you also want to keep a job or something :-D ), but our society desperately needs this ethical sandbox. And it's also very relaxing, it must be just very hard to think of topics distant enough from our everyday lives (for example, I avoid on purpose anything with epidemias. Unless it's zombies, but even that is not too attractive now).

And I am adding Speakly and Speechling time there.

I think I am slightly improving, especially the pronunciation work should be notable. But no, it is not. The staff in the italian restaurant a friend and I went to last weekend (YAY!!!) found me speaking the hybrid and asked whether I was a Spanish native :-D :-D :-D It's ok... no, it's not. I am really a bit worried about this interference. But I am sure I can get through this and emerge victorious, speaking three distinct romance languages. At least I hope so.
10 x

User avatar
MorkTheFiddle
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2109
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 8:59 pm
Location: North Texas USA
Languages: English (N). Read (only) French and Spanish. Studying Ancient Greek. Studying a bit of Latin. Once studied Old Norse. Dabbled in Catalan, Provençal and Italian.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 11#p133911
x 4806

Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Thu May 13, 2021 11:00 pm

Cavesa wrote: but our society desperately needs this ethical sandbox.

"Ethical sandbox." A nice phrase definitely worth stealing, which I will. :)
3 x
Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4957
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17549

Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby Cavesa » Sat May 15, 2021 10:25 am

Glad you like it :-D
..........
Language learning goes slowly, but I progress a bit. Italian is fun.

I am considering applying for another job, which would be great (the offer looks tempting and I fit a large part of the requirements). But unfortunately, it also requires Flemish, even if it is a job meant to serve Wallonie. Well, I could learn that, the job requires solid comprehension skills, not necessarily speaking. So, it would be possible rather fast, I am a very good comprehension learner, and this type of work is full of rather universal international vocab. But I don't like the language (less important as a reason), and I don't like Belgium. I really don't feel too good here, France is much better (a much better ratio of good and bad things about living there). Well, I'll apply anyways, perhaps they won't have many candidates that fit every requirement, including all the languages :-D IF they'd take me, I'd learn it.
........
I don't know whether or how to count one activity for the 6WC. I've recently felt like rewatching Sherlock, but it is worse in any dubbing, so I kept the English sound (it is after all one of the very few shows, that at a few points present a comprehension challenge). And Italian subtitles. It was great, I even wrote down some of the vocab. But I cannot really count that as a full studying time. Well, I just won't count it at all.

But overall, the subtitles in the TL are something, I may have underestimated. I still think it is not a good way to spend your language learning time, but it is surprisingly good as a side activity, when you want to watching something in a nonTL language anyways.
........
There is a discussion about loanwords on Agorima's log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=16605. And I find it interesting and even replied.

Loanwords are indeed a controversial thing. In every language. There are always some purists, who take them for a foreign invasion and a damage to the language. And their stance is partially valid. Overuse of these words is a problem.

However, Agorima picked examples, where the loan word solved a lack of an exact purely Czech equivalent. It's not about some languages being worse than others, not at all. And I think this question was settled back in the 19th century. But the loan words also reflect changes in the society or science.

I won't rewrite my comment from there, I added the link. But the examples clearly show (ok, perhaps except the last one, which is taken from a song that makes fun of the loanwords and their usage), that there is a need for the loanwords. To "restart" really means something else than "znovu začít", it emphasizes the fact that you need to stop something before trying again. A "teenager" really means something else, than the closest equivalents, because the whole role, definition, and perception of this part of the society has changed in the last decades. So, using purely Czech words out of pride would be worse in some communication situations. Plus it is totally annoying in science, if majority of the world use the same loanword (from English, Latin, or whatever else), and the Czechs insist on their own word. An unnecessary barrier, and the word is often less practical or precise.

So, loan words are necessary. It is important to not use too many, but it is nonsense to use too few.

However, they present a challenge. Because do you really think a French, a Czech, and a Romanian native speaker will pronounce the same English loan word similarly? Or even similarly to the original English pronunciation? :-D Think again! No. I struggle much more understanding loan words in French, then their "normal French equivalents". In many cases, I see why the native uses this word and not the originally French one. But I still struggle. And I sometimes feel a bit like Agorima, as if I was investing my time and efforts into a language that is sort of being replaced anyways :-D

And I still don't know, which pronunciation to use. Will the correct English pronunciation make me look snobbish? I certainly cannot use the Czech pronunciation, it would be incomprehensible (and I often avoid it while actually speaking Czech, because it just sounds like butchering two languages at once). Will my attempt at the French pronunciation of the English loan word looks like I am making fun of them? :-D

How do you deal with loan words? Are you more on the purist side, or on the no barriers side? Which pronunciation do you pick?
7 x

Dagane
Orange Belt
Posts: 172
Joined: Wed Apr 13, 2016 6:08 pm
Location: London, UK
Languages: I regularly use:
Spanish (N)
English (C2)
German (C1+)
Hungarian (A2?)

I formerly studied:
Galician (B2?)
Dutch (A1)
Czech (A0)
Portuguese (A2?)
French (A1?)
x 263

Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby Dagane » Sat May 15, 2021 11:08 am

Cavesa wrote:How do you deal with loan words? Are you more on the purist side, or on the no barriers side? Which pronunciation do you pick?

It's a very good question and I don't have an answer for it. If I'm having a long conversation in any given language I tend to go with the flow. That usually involves pronouncing things like a native, but note that "usually" does not mean "always". This is valid for my mother tongue too.

There are memories and experiences attached to certain words and they make me pronounce those words in a particular way regardless of how they sound to the person I'm speaking with. This happens with names of places too and it is partially involuntary. For example, I would pronounce "Maastricht" and "Utrecht" the Dutch way both in English and Spanish, but I wouldn't do the same with Amsterdam (Ámsterdam has a different stress in Spanish). The same goes for names of apps, websites and so many other loanwords: their pronunciation depends on the language I used when I created my most defining (and not always the first) memories of them.
3 x

User avatar
jeff_lindqvist
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3131
Joined: Sun Aug 16, 2015 9:52 pm
Languages: sv, en
de, es
ga, eo
---
fi, yue, ro, tp, cy, kw, pt, sk
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=2773
x 10438

Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sat May 15, 2021 11:36 am

Cavesa wrote:How do you deal with loan words? Are you more on the purist side, or on the no barriers side? Which pronunciation do you pick?


Not really a loan word, but I once found myself pronouncing the first name Mario four ways over the course of a weekend, depending on if I spoke Swedish, English, German or Spanish.
8 x
Leabhair/Greannáin léite as Gaeilge: 9 / 18
Ar an seastán oíche: Oileán an Órchiste
Duolingo - finished trees: sp/ga/de/fr/pt/it
Finnish with extra pain : 100 / 100

Llorg Blog - Wiki - Discord

Language patzer
Yellow Belt
Posts: 90
Joined: Sat Nov 28, 2020 5:48 am
Languages: Greek native, English C2, French B2
x 208

Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby Language patzer » Sat May 15, 2021 2:21 pm

I greece if you pronounce a loan word with a foreign accent, people laugh at you in your face. So that takes care of things :lol: :lol: :lol:

Seriously though what an interesting topic.
1 x
Cours de Langue et de Civilisation Francaises
Book 1, finished

Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4957
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17549

Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby Cavesa » Mon May 17, 2021 10:16 pm

I happened to practice my Italian yesterday. For like two hours, before the table switched to French (my fault, I am not good enough at Italian to explain some very complicated problems with the Belgian bureaucracy). It was good, I think my Italian is improving, and becoming more Italian than hybrid. A friend's comment: "hey, you forgot to tell me you spoke Italian fluently". Well, I didn't know it. And I still have lots and lots of space for improvement. And we were talking about not too hard stuff in Italian. And I know very well my limits, it's really a long road to the level I want.
.......
Thanks for your notes about loan words or other foreign terms. It's a fun subject, I think.

There is really no universal right way to go about this. Just like Dagane, I often tend to associate the word with the language I learnt it in, but not always. It depends. Also there are differences between just loanwords and geography words (really, I think cities, countries, rivers, and mountains should keep one name. But even that won't be that easy to pick in many cases). The town I live in has at least 4 names that I know of. I didn't even understand it on the signs by one half of the highway, before it switched.

I need to be more like jeff_lindquist, to pronounce the same thing differently. To fit the conversation.

Yeah, the Greeks are not that different from a part of the Czechs. A part of the Czechs will say the English loanwords more or less correctly, but they will unfortunately often try to apply their knowledge of English even on other loanwords or foreign names, which I find extremely annoying and dumb (the logical wrong pronunciation picked by a Czech should be Czech, no? :-D ). But a part of the Czechs really sees the foreign pronunciations as pretentious, or snobbish and will either laugh at you like the Greeks, or act annoyed.

The funniest word with many wrong pronunciations: "cheesecake". :-D You wouldn't believe all the creations. Not sure you can imagine "chesekake" (starting with a good Czech/German "ch", and all vowels like in Czech or German). But the most hilarious was the person (on tv!!!) who clearly thought it was something like the vienna coffee, and said "čízský dort", like "cake from a city called Cheese". :-D
5 x

Nogon
Green Belt
Posts: 305
Joined: Sat May 13, 2017 6:21 pm
Languages: German (N), Swedish (C), English (?), French (A2), Esperanto (A2). Reading Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Afrikaans. Wanting to learn Polish, Yiddish
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=16039
x 1068

Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby Nogon » Tue May 18, 2021 7:25 am

Cavesa wrote:The funniest word with many wrong pronunciations: "cheesecake". :-D You wouldn't believe all the creations. Not sure you can imagine "chesekake" (starting with a good Czech/German "ch", and all vowels like in Czech or German).

I love that! :lol: Regarding foreign words in a language - if you absolutely feel the need to use them - I believe in either "pronounce it as it's written" (like the "chesekake" example) or "write it as you pronounce it" (which would be something like "Tschieskeik" in my native German).
1 x
Assimil French : 65 / 113
Active wave : 15 / 113

User avatar
Ogrim
Brown Belt
Posts: 1009
Joined: Mon Jul 27, 2015 10:29 am
Location: Alsace, France
Languages: Norwegian (N) English (C2), French (C2), Spanish (C2), German (B2), Romansh (B2), Italian (B2), Catalan (B2), Russian (B1), Latin (B2), Dutch (B1), Croatian (A2), Arabic (on hold), Ancient Greek (learning), Romanian (on hold)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?t=873
x 4168

Re: Back to the roots and water them with coffee

Postby Ogrim » Tue May 18, 2021 2:10 pm

Cavesa wrote:And I still don't know, which pronunciation to use. Will the correct English pronunciation make me look snobbish? I certainly cannot use the Czech pronunciation, it would be incomprehensible (and I often avoid it while actually speaking Czech, because it just sounds like butchering two languages at once). Will my attempt at the French pronunciation of the English loan word looks like I am making fun of them? :-D

How do you deal with loan words? Are you more on the purist side, or on the no barriers side? Which pronunciation do you pick?


When in France, do as the French (or the Wallons) ;) . Knowing how good your French is, I don't think anybody will think that you are making fun of them if you use French pronunciation. To the contrary, using real English pronunciation may be seen as you trying to correct them, which is far worse.

Some English loan words are really common, especially in "corporate speak". At work I hear French speakers talk about "management", "challenge", "benchmarking" all the time. Sometimes the pronunciation is a mix of English and French. For example, the -nt in management is sometimes pronounced, but the -ge- usually has the "French" quality, sounding like -ge- in "manger". The ending of "challenge" is pronounced like -che in "blanche", etc.

I am not a purist, but when there is a perfectly good equivalent in the language I don't see the use for a loan word. I also think too often English words are used in French by people (and companies) who want to look "cool" and modern, you see it a lot in advertisements for certain products, particularly if aimed at young people.

I take the liberty of posting this short video, "Anglicismes en management - nécessité, snobisme ou paresse?" It gives a lot of good examples of this phenomenon.

5 x
Ich grolle nicht


Return to “Language logs”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests