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Languages

  • Them: Japanese is such a hard language!
  • Me: Bitch please, stop spewing such lies.
  • Them: German is such an ugly language!
  • Me: I'mma slap yo ugly face, bitch.
  • Them: French is the most beautiful language in the world!
  • Me: ... Have you ever actually heard French spoken?
  • Them: I wanna take Spanish because it's the easiest language to learn.
  • Me: Stop talking.
  • Them: Japanese and Chinese are the same.
  • Me: Bitch what are you on.
  • Them: English is a romance language!
  • Me: Who the fuck taught you school.
  • Them: All languages are based in Latin.
  • Me: How do you history.
  • Them: Portuguese is pretty much just Spanish, but Brazilian.
  • Me: Please. Stop breathing.
  • Them: Languages are just boring and useless. Why bother if everyone can speak English?
  • Me: I will MAKE you stop breathing.

A gato is a cat.
A gatto is also a cat.

A gâteau however, is not. 

  • Spanish: Salir means "to go out"
  • Portuguese: Sair means "to go out"
  • Asturian: Salir means "to go out"
  • Italian: Salire means "to go up"
  • Spanish:
  • Portuguese:
  • Asturian:
  • Spanish: Italian you are drunk

I wonder if I'll ever be able to read Arabic script as easily as I can read Euro-Roman script.

I still have to sound out everything, so reading a paragraph for me is like pulling teeth.

It’s like being three years old again, except now my brain is less malleable.

#polyglot problems

Language Learning Difficulty For Native English Speakers

Easiest Languages for Native English Speakers To Learn:

- Afrikaans
- Catalan
- Danish
- Dutch
- French
- Galician
- Italian
- Norwegian
- Portuguese
- Romanian
- Spanish
- Swedish

Moderately Harder Languages for Native English Speakers To Learn:

- German
- Indonesian
- Jumieka
- Malay
- Swahili

Hard Languages for Native English Speakers To Learn:

- Albanian
- Armenian
- Azerbaijani
- Belarusian
- Bengali
- Bulgarian
- Croatian
- Czech
- Estonian
- Finnish
- Georgian
- Greek
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Hungarian
- Icelandic
- Irish
- Kannada
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Macedonian
- Marathi
- Mongolian
- Nepali
- Pashto
- Polish
- Punjabi
- Russian
- Serbian
- Slovenian
- Tagalog 
- Tamil
- Telugu
- Tetum
- Thai
- Turkish
- Turkmen
- Ukrainian
- Urdu
- Uzbek 
- Vietnamese
- Zulu 

Hardest Languages for Native English Speakers To Learn:

- Arabic
- Cantonese
- Japanese
- Korean
- Mandarin
- Taiwanese
- Wu 

*** I didn’t include all languages due to laziness. :p 

408 flashcards later, my brain is mush and I still have a report on a Celtic language to write. At this point, I'm thinking so much in Irish that I'm going to be really surprised if I manage to complete the paper in a single language

  • Me: I just found this new Tumblr called Polyglot Problems and it's like my life and I love it.
  • Boyfriend: Is that another diabetic thing?
  • (For those of you who don't know, a polyglot is someone who speaks multiple languages.)

internal monologues

  • me: [watching foreign film]
  • me: what is this
  • me: oh it's Italian
  • me: no it's Spanish
  • me: this is a weirdass dialect
  • me: this is no Spanish or Italian I've ever heard
  • me: [confusion]
  • me:
  • me: OH GODDAMMIT IT'S PORTUGUESE

Trying to decide which language to learn is the worst. Along with figuring out how to fit it into your schedule.

Linguaphile problems

Being so excited to start a new language that you neglect the ones to which you’ve actually committed.

Walking to the library

  • Me: *can't think of the word shirt* ...camisa
  • R: what the hell, did you just put chemise and القميص together and call it a word?
  • Me: no, it's spanish, i couldn't think of 'shirt'
  • D: see, the funny thing here is that even though you didn't know what language she was speaking, you correctly associated it with the same word in two other languages.
  • R & I: ...
  • D: polyglot problems.

Occasionally bumped into a friend in the city centre today. She was waiting for a -French speaking- friend of hers, who then arrived.

Him: Hi! Tu parles français?

Me: Oui.

Him: Très bien! Un plaisir de te connaître!

Me: Igualmente, un placer.

Him:

Me:

image

I love having foreign professors

Because my inner linguistic nerd likes picking out the linguistic/accent roots in what they say in english. 

For example, my mexican professor pronounces “Möbius strip” as “Mueybius strip” because the umlat in spanish makes the “uey” sound. Or how my hungarian professor pronounces “beta” as “beeta” or “start” as “stort”. I LOVE it lol

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