foreign language meme

[amw]

From annaserene...

1st foreign language learned
German.

1st language you self studied
Arabic.

Language you wished was your native language
I think English is by far the most useful native language and i'm privileged to have it.

Language you wish you studied more
French or Arabic, they would both be useful when traveling in certain parts of the world.

Comments

[spiffikins]

French. It's not as romantic in reality as people who don't speak it think it is.
ahahaha SO true. French poetry? French songs? Just...not lyrical.

[siglinde99]

I really like these question. I am stealing it.

[jenndolari]

Language Meme from Livejournal, cause I'm not feeling well

[king_of_apathy]

Korean is supposedly "Our words are literally the shape your mouth makes when you say it."

It's true. The whole writing system was designed by scribes under King Sejong and finished in 1446. The Hangul alphabet is beautifully simple and easy to pick up, so I can read Korean out loud even if I don't know what the words mean. The Korean language as a whole though is not nearly as easy. I've been in the country for four and a half years and progress has been embarrassingly slow.

[amw]

Another interesting alphabet is the alphabet used by some Canadian indigenous groups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics Like Hangul, it was artifically constructed relatively recently. It uses a cool trick where changing the direction of the character changes the vowel, so < is pa and > is po.

[amw]

Written Chinese sucks so fucking much. I've learned all the vocabulary up to and including HSK5 (pre-2021 version) and a bunch extra, so probably over 2000 characters, and it's still not any easier for me to deduce a word or character that i don't already know. I can often make a guess at pronunciation based on if it looks like another character i already know just with a different radical, but that's just as often wrong as it is right. That's just how the written language works. It's utterly useless for deducing either meaning or pronunciation

[king_of_apathy]

It amused me to see Korean as the language you have no interest in learning. Let's keep it that way! You seem to be a much faster learner with languages, and if you started learning Korean to the point where you knew more than I do it would be too embarrassing!

I never had any interest in K-pop before moving to Korea...and I still don't. Some of the TV shows look interesting, but it's hard finding them with subtitles. Disney Plus has some Korean shows, though oddly enough none of them have English subtitles. I believe Netflix has more, so I may have to try that out.

[amw]

Yeah, i think outside of k-pop the big thing in the west is Korean cinema (specifically the guy who did Snowpiercer and Parasite) and TV (all those Netflix dramas). Never watched any of them and don't really care to either. I don't mind watching shows in other languages in theory, but i do really need to be switched-on to be able to follow the subtitles, and usually when i'm watching a show i am too tired or distracted for that. The only languages i know where i can watch a show just as idly as i would in English are Dutch and German, and i'm not entirely sure why that is. I wanted to write an entry about that after this one.

[anais_pf]

Another question this meme is missing is "What is your native language, i.e., the first language you began learning as a baby?"

[amw]

Yeah, i tried to answer that along with the which native language i'd prefer one, although i do wonder if other people with other languages would answer the same way. Still fun to see the responses :)