Hola! Ñ...а Ñ...а Ñ...а. Translation: Hi! Ha ha ha.
Welcome to the languages thread! Everything language based and how we communicate using a beautiful language will be talked about here. Grammar of languages, best language, translating between languages, and anything that can somehow be related to a language is welcome here.
Now for a few questions to start off the thread: If you could learn 1 and only 1 language what would it be?*
What language do you believe is the most useful to learn and which will be the most useful in the future?
*In addiction to your first language. If you know more than one language than you can still pick another.
My mom knew a person that spoke fluent Spanish and one that spoke fluent Italian, each not knowing the other ones language. They talked to each other in their native language (Spanish and Italian) and for the most part could understand each other fine.
Yes, it's possible. But more often than not, it won't be.
I've gotten by fine speaking my basic Spanish with non-native Portuguese speakers. My Brazilian neighbors and me however, we don't understand a word of each other.
It is said that beyond this, Egyptian is widely understood owing to its great influence on (popular) culture (the movies, and so TV, etc.), but that it's still not a safe overall bet to get by just anywhere in the Arab world. I can't comment beyond this, as have never learned it yet, regretfully; if anything, I have trouble grasping foreign scripts, indeed.
Ah I would never try to use one form of the African sorts of Arabic in places like Saudi Arabia and such. I understand that there are dialect differences.
Let's talk about African languages, man. Xhosa looks absolutely terrifying to learn. Tonal languages are usually not anyone's friend, but having multiple different clicks as well is just crazy. There are 18 different kinds of clicks. Eighteen. And here I was complaining about 5 measly tones for Chinese. Goodness.
Person umXhosa People amaXhosa Language isiXhosa Country kwaXhosa
[quote=MoonFairy]Tonal languages are usually not anyone's friend[/quote]
Yeh; my only point of reference would be a month's worth of hanging around in Thailand, after which I could just about manage to somewhat half-decently order some food.
I forget the details, but I think it rather famously features a phrase along the lines of "mai mai mai mai mai" (or similar) -- "wet wood doesn't burn very well, does it?" The difference being in how each "mai" is pronounced. Impossible, at least to the likes of me, sure. (Then your different ways of addressing the sexes, as well as different classes of people, and... Help :/ Not that much or any of this is required of the casual visitor, of course.)
And so never to worry btw, if you don't go out of your way and don't have too peculiar dietary habits or wishes, you'll generally get by fine there in just plain English, of course. Don't expect too much by way of intelligent conversation with common folks though, but then isn't it so in most places.
If you want to learn any of these languages, there's no reason not to go directly for them, instead of taking a roundabout way through learning Latin first.
1. With a good understanding of latin, you can do a passable interpretation of these languages without learning all of them from scratch. 2. Latin is a definite boon in the field of biology, especially if you don't want to memorize the location and order of things.
[quote=FishPreferred]1. With a good understanding of latin, you can do a passable interpretation of these languages without learning all of them from scratch.[/quote]
I doubt if much more than if you'd already learned one of them, sans the Latin. In fact I was advised not so, given the choice once.
2. Latin is a definite boon in the field of biology, especially if you don't want to memorize the location and order of things.
Quite possibly. I didn't say there are no reasons to study Latin.
[quote=MoonFairy]What do you know about Thai?[/quote]
Like I said, pretty much zilch :/ It's also some 2 decades ago.
Back then, I learned how to say "I'm a vegetarian" -- much to the confusement of people, if you do eat seafood & love it and so proceed to order some squid, in what is after all a seafood paradise.
So I proceeded to learn stuff like "I don't eat meat." How to visibly discern between fish cake and what looks like pork skin floating in your noodle soup (and what the latter is called. Yummie), and such.
All pretty basic and nothing earth-shattering, innit
@Saldivan i speak castellano i could teach you classes :P ( it is my national language by the way) ^^
Cool! I am actually learning it right now.
Mexican Spanish is the only Spanish.
That's actually a very disrespectful thing to say, haha.
Um, no. I'm not sure what you're thinking of, but castellano (Castilian) and español (Spanish) are (according to Wikipedia) practically mutually interchangeable terms.
There are two different forms of catsellano.
One is the old form of Spanish. In old English there are phrases such as "art thou" that typically aren't used anymore. Old English is to modern English as castellano is to Spanish.
The second is a dialect of Spanish largely influenced by the Moors (somewhat like Muslims I think?), and then later by South American culture.
It goes on to feature a map of what it's called where, which doesn't match my experience however.
Like I said, different forms of castellano in different places.
I so far tend to think of it as "high" Spanish; and in my experience South Americans would readily refer to it as Spanish
Argentina and Venezuela are moving to make castellano, not Spanish, their national languages.
while in Spain people wouldn't be caught dead doing so, but so refer to it as castellano instead
We refer to the common language as Español.
so much so that one needs to unlearn calling it Spanish, if one is to have an unconfused conversation.
Actually, in formal conversation, there isn't much attention paid to who is speaking what, especially in Spain (and surrounding territories). We have Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, Arabic, Asturian, Basque, Aragonese, Occitan, and some variants of such towards the French/Spanish border. Imagine a landmass the size of California with all of these dialects: it's hard and impolite to nitpick.
I hope I cleared it up nicely, although I may have been a little confusing once or twice. I did take a look at the Wikipedia page and I can see why it might have been a little confusing.
? If you have some sources to back up your explanation, I'll be happy to see them. First time I heard of any of this. I'm not here to win an argument, but I do wonder if it isn't you who has some things mixed up. When you mention "we," are you a native speaker of Spanish?
I may well be glancing over some things, what with my limited understanding of Spanish and all, but I don't swiftly find anything to corroborate your view, e.g. here, nor here, here, or here.
nb Wikipedia of course is notoriously made by its users, and so may be full of incoherences and mistakes and outright misinformation. That said, it would be surprising if the Spanish edition had it that wrong, and conversely had nothing to back up anything resembling these notions. It is why I mostly use it for swift reference, and to swiftly check on knowledge gleaned through other means; not as a tool of instruction, as such. That is to say I wouldn't take it as my first source, and it is notoriously silly to use it as "roof" of anything, I'll readily agree.
nnb Portuguese of course isn't a Spanish form or dialect. Any more than, say, modern English is of German.
nnnb Yes the Moors famously is the designation for, roughly speaking, the medieval Muslim invaders of southern Spain and other parts of the European Mediterranean. They were themselves largely western North African peoples, having in turn been Islamicized by Arab peoples, and later mixed in with them.
@MacII First of all, thank you for keeping a sane head, haha. Secondly, I apologize for the rather poor formatting of my current post. You know how phones are and all.
To begin the responses, this is an article delving into the two forms of Castilian (as it seems to be called). Also, though we'll have to wait a few hours for it to open, I could head down to the library and find physical copies because there is (surprisingly) a lack of info online.
As for the Portuguese concern, I generalized it with other languages/dialects of the Iberian Peninsula. I don't think it makes much of a difference to you in the long run (though I may be assuming too much!), as there was no concern over Catalan.
Next, thank you for the clarifications and whatnot.
And yes, I am a native Spanish speaker.
Lastly, I can't seem to leave the page after I begin typing without losing all I wrote, so I'll double post some more references/sources.
