A language learners’ forum

vogeltje wrote:

overscore wrote:Peterhof, don't worry, free talk is more than welcome in my log. Just keep in mind I might post unrelated updates to what's going on.

vogeltje wrote:The Brussels accent is different, and when the Flemish speak French they've got a different accent, so often the French people think of this when they think of belgians, and that we are countryside idiots hahaha.

As Quebecer I can relate well to that. Even here you couldn't speak dialect in official positions until very recently, but it used to be the Clergy had control of virtually everything in society.
So from the outside everything sounds fairly normal and educated, then when French people come over they discover we all speak like medieval lumberjacks with no manners (no Vousvoiement).

I've heard Quebec french and the accent is a bit weird, sorry English speakers refuse to believe or accept it, but french is pluricentric. Anyway, French people (Parisians I mean) don't accept other varieties at all. Bad luck haha. Medieval lumberjack hahahahah

Come. To the dark side of French.

vogeltje wrote:personnaly I don't like the name 'the French community' because we are not French, and French was not the language of all the people until about my grand-parents generation, but they spoke Wallon, Picard etc etc the other historical smaller Oïl languages. And like you said as well, it excludes the German speakers, who are in the Deutschsprachiger Gemeinschaft. But many, or most Belgians don't know that there are German native speakers in Belgium.

I could see how the term "the French Community" would be controversial, but I used it because I was assuming it was official. Now that I've looked into it, apparently the Community refers to itself as la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles these days. My apologies. Although the latter term may also be controversial..

vogeltje wrote:Belgium has 4 ministries, parliaments: Brussels, Flemish, Wallonian, and German -speaking. A lot of people complain that it's too expensive and ridiculous.

According to this, the Community/Federation has its own institutions of power separate from the regional bodies of Wallonia and Brussels (and the German-speaking community, whose territory is apparently in the competence of the Waloon regional authorities), although it does say that the majority of the parliament members come from the Walloon regional parliament.

JP

Reserving spot for Oct 18. Will edit as day goes.

Free vocab from French: サボる (saboru)
This word comes from "sabotage", it means to skip work or loaf around. Now, one of the reason this word is special is that in Japanese (and apparently also Basque, Farsi?!) verbs form a closed class, and so borrowings are very rare indeed, even from Chinese.

Now this is conjecture on my part at this point, but it seems there's a silver lining to studying this fiendishly difficult language: the "moving parts" are finite in number. That seems to include adjectives too, which in Japanese are not really a different class grammatically, but rather sorts of stative verbs.

I'd be interested to know the actual numbers. Of the English language, Wikipedia states: "Over half of these words are nouns, a quarter adjectives and a seventh verbs." English keeps creating from Greek, Latin, Germanic sources, to the point where word formation is so productive it contains more synonyms than any other language on Earth.


This "instruct me! goo" has an answer as to the number adjectivals in the Japanese language.

形容詞 1302個
形容動詞 986個

ーーーーー

Doing some character work. having a bit of trouble with the rightmost in 体験 and 漢検.
Learn the characters for "綺麗". Now I can also write 馬鹿. Revisit 鳥.

Apparently there's a whole industry in Tokyo for plastic food things.
食品サンプル屋

オリジナル小物　← this is read komono, not shoumono.

Golden Kamuy 第2巻 page 14/193.

there's a bit of grammar stuff i'll have to check out tomorrow. 「…〜ヒグマ食わなぎゃ」 I see that ぎゃ business all the time and have no idea what it means.

I don't fully understand the 「決して〜ない」form.. in the book it comes up as 「ヒグマは巣穴に入ってきた人間を決して殺さない」, translation is something like "we ainu say that the brown bear never kills the human who enters the hole". 決めす is "to choose, to decide on something".. is it "choose not to" stretched by analogy to "never", or a fixed form with another meaning to the main verb. confuzzled.

favorite word for this day: 刻んで物. For some reason I've always like the shape of this character, and it's fun discovering the meaning and pronunciation.

overscore wrote:Apparently there's a whole industry in Tokyo for plastic food things.
食品サンプル屋

No doubt! While I have not traveled Japan, plastic food 'models' are everywhere in Korea. So much so that I imagine somewhere there are companies whose sole business is manufacturing these things.

Asian restaurants here in Vancouver use them too so they're no surprise in themselves, but just how pervasive they are overseas surprises me.

vonPeterhof wrote:

vogeltje wrote:personnaly I don't like the name 'the French community' because we are not French, and French was not the language of all the people until about my grand-parents generation, but they spoke Wallon, Picard etc etc the other historical smaller Oïl languages. And like you said as well, it excludes the German speakers, who are in the Deutschsprachiger Gemeinschaft. But many, or most Belgians don't know that there are German native speakers in Belgium.

I could see how the term "the French Community" would be controversial, but I used it because I was assuming it was official. Now that I've looked into it, apparently the Community refers to itself as la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles these days. My apologies. Although the latter term may also be controversial..

You don't have to apologise!!! you were correct, the French Community is the official name, but francophone community would be better in my opinion, like they do for the other language communities: Vlaamse / Deutschsprachiger. I don't know about controversy about it, but I think that it's isn't the best name. The federation can be for the francophone regions, but the Flemish would be furious to hear that Brussels is declared as francophone haha: Flemish when they hear this --> Brussels is officially bilingual French-Dutch.

vonPeterhof wrote:

vogeltje wrote:Belgium has 4 ministries, parliaments: Brussels, Flemish, Wallonian, and German -speaking. A lot of people complain that it's too expensive and ridiculous.

According to this, the Community/Federation has its own institutions of power separate from the regional bodies of Wallonia and Brussels (and the German-speaking community, whose territory is apparently in the competence of the Waloon regional authorities), although it does say that the majority of the parliament members come from the Walloon regional parliament.

Yes, the German speaking community is in Wallonia, but they've got their own ministry in Eupen which is their capital.

Don't worry if you can't understand Belgium. The belgians don't understand it ourselves.

Golden Kamuy 第2巻 page 51/193.

Golden Kamuy 第2巻 complete 193/193.
Golden Kamuy 第3巻 page 7/197.

Today I'm reading Wikipedia: various historical topics about the world wars.
The Japanese* military had a system of alternate currencies for their captured territories, which was imposed by force in order to finance their war efforts. One of the first thing done was of course inflation of the currencies and eventually in the end leading to hyperinflation. Fascinating topic I had no idea about before.

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%BB%8D%E7%94%A8%E6%89%8B%E7%A5%A8
http://www.tanken.com/burma.html

* 大日本帝国, not the modern entity

Here's some more upside-down Japanese language...


... and an Imperial Gulden:

That is a very interesting topic, yeah. I've come across the images of these banknotes on Wikipedia before. It's especially weird for me to see Japanese and Dutch on the same banknote. Now I'm thinking that reading about this topic in Japanese might make for some good reading material. It's definitely a good way to pick up some history-related vocab.