ILE foreign languages represent

Ed otm

i'm pretty good in french but still find it difficult to watch a tv show w/o at least french subtitles. i would really like to get to the point where i could see some theatre in france, or a new movie, without feeling like i was wasting my money.

xxp

out of those three korean is the easiest/quickest to master with the only difficulty being a few pronunciation issues (that even some koreans have trouble with)

japanese is the second easiest/hardest and mandarin would be definitely hard with canto being like the hardest (because as you say, tones)

also i never understood why people think japanese grammar is hard? especially spoken japanese

spoken french sounds very different than written so it makes things harder, i studied it for 6 years and still can't understand a lot of it (too many dialects too)

my friend is from switzerland and he learnt swiss french (but swiss german is his native language). he was driving around in rural quebec and the lady at a gas station sees his first and last name are french so starts talking to him in french. he understood none of it. he tried talking to her in swiss french and the lady didn't understand any of it either. so they ended up talking in english with the quebecer giving him the stink eye

Québécois French, especially joual, is as impenetrable to European French speakers as a thick Scottish accent is to North American anglophones. That said, many francophone Montrealers will unconsciously 'tone down' their accent in order to make themselves more easily understood by foreigners. There's also an insufferably prescriptivist bias – particularly in France – that makes some people unwilling to even entertain the possibility that other varieties of French are equally valid, which partly explains why these stories are so common.

yeah, the idea that the only correct way to speak French is to speak the way they speak in France annoys a lot of people in Quebec. Particularly because French French tends to borrow a lot more words from English ("weekend", "parking", etc.) than Québécois French

That's a common Québécois misconception, though. Just because the anglicisms used in France are different, doesn't mean there's more of them.

I don't know, there definitely seems to be a conscious effort to avoid anglicisms in Quebec (which is why we get words like "courriel" (a great word!) for email). I don't get the impression that this is as much of concern in France.

Québécois French is rife with anglicisms for obvious historical reasons, so we need to actively combat them. France doesn't really have that problem – we're projecting it onto them.

An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-Cw9ywW-TU

People use courriel here only for official stuff, normally you just say mél

Once I went to a talk (academic) by a Quebecer in Paris; after a couple minutes they asked her to switch to English

I have a student from Ottawa right now, his French accent sounds like a Spanish accent to me

On the metro last week a lady I was talking to asked me if I was Canadian. Previously I was asked if I was Belgian. Everyone can tell I have an accent but evidently it’s not readily place able. I’m just glad they don’t think I’m American! No one switches to English with me anymore.

i was taught courriel in english speaking canada

every so often you'd get someone who went to france or was told that "mail" was okay (before the world wide web was the defacto knowledge base) and the instructor would i guess begrudgingly accept it

Courriel is too long, spoken French approches the minimum number sounds possible.

YES

yeah, most Québécois will just say "mail" or "email" (English pronounciation rather than "mél") but will write "courriel".

ya in spanish people say mail as well and i recall some italians doing this

pretty universal i guess? as with most tech/internet things

I mean, if there is some linguistic shortcut you can take that allows you to say what you want to say in a comprehensible manner with fewer syllables, people will do that. I'm pretty sure that's universal across all languages.

Except for Germany

Ha!

My parents are Swiss so I speak Swiss German. Once I tried to explain to someone what the difference between Swiss German and regular German was and mostly what I came up with was that Swiss German is regular German spoken faster without a lot of unnecessary extra words and syllables.

sounds gut to me

it's so weird (swiss) german is one language i never really studied (four month reading knowledge course doesn't count) even though half of my family speaks it

The dialect of Spanish I speak, Bolivian, is regarded as the slowest spoken Spanish, which makes it hard for me amongst Spanish speakers from elsewhere.

Once I went to a talk (academic) by a Quebecer in Paris; after a couple minutes they asked her to switch to English

― droit au butt (Euler), Friday, November 17

That just makes my blood boil (I say this as someone who speaks French with a standard French accent). And it's hardly an isolated incident.

I felt terrible for her, she's a friend and French is her first language: her English has a pretty strong accent too.

My friends from the provinces get picked on too, for having e.g. Auvergnate accents.

This is mostly a Paris thing, though, and even here it's getting better, I think, as the city becomes more and more diverse. And maybe this reflects an increasing sense that the French are not going to bother getting very good English.

Languages that I have studied reasonably seriously and have visited countries in which they are spoken and can communicate in on a good day: German, French, Spanish
Language that I have studied somewhat and have been to the country where it is spoken and feel I could improve in quickly with proper study and conditions: Italian
Language that bedevils me because it is similar to languages I know, which I understand pretty well based on listening to songs and cultural connection with a lot of native speakers. For which I have never visited a country where it is spoken and can't seem to get the ball rolling: Portuguese
Languages I have studied at some basic level, either taking an intro course or using Teach Yourself,Routledge Colloquial, Pimsleur, Duolingo or some other self study method and can exchange greetings in: Not going to list them all here right now

I hadn’t thought about people in Montreal toning down their accent and kind of previously unconsciously chalked it up to an urban/rural divide.

I overheard some tourists from Quebec speaking when I was in northern Vermont a few years back and it took me a minute to untangle what was going on

People in France preferring English to differently-accented French might be the most stereotypical French thing I have ever heard

Used to be fluent in "official Irish", i.e. the version that has nothing to do with what native speakers speak. Have gone from fluent to passable in German through lack of use. Also passable in French - I can watch a movie without subtitles but at best I catch 80% of what's happening. I have a degree in Sanskrit but at this point could not read or produce a single sentence.

I've got a question: What, linguistically, could be deemed the most efficient world language? The one that's pronounced how it's spelled. The one that has the fewest exceptions to the rule. Is there such a thing?

I’m going to guess that it’s not one using the Latin Alphabet or a least if it does they’ll be a lot of diacritics.

But then what about regional variation? If spelling will reflect some form of standardised pronunciation then regional differences will break the relationship.

Standard Italian is follows the spelling very closely if you are Milanese but not if you are Sicilian.

Spanish is pretty good on the whole "pronounced like it's spelled" front

i've got a new strat for my French. Les Pieds Sur Terre from France Culture. a new 30-minute podcast episode every day. if i can get to the point where I'm enjoying it and not having to pause and go back etc then I'll be v happy.

Ed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographia_bohemica ?

That was interesting and led to this

Languages with a high grapheme-to-phoneme and phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence (excluding exceptions due to loan words and assimilation) include Maltese, Finnish, Albanian, Georgian, Turkish (apart from ğ and various palatal and vowel allophones), Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian), Bulgarian, Macedonian (if the apostrophe denoting schwa is counted, though slight inconsistencies may be found), Eastern Armenian (apart from o, v), Basque (apart from palatalized l, n), Haitian Creole, Castilian Spanish (apart from h, x, b/v, and sometimes k, c, g, j, z), Czech (apart from ě, ů, y, ý), Polish (apart from ó, h, rz), Romanian (apart from distinguishing semivowels from vowels), Ukrainian (mainly phonemic with some other historical/morphological rules, as well as palatalization), Belarusian (phonemic for vowels but morphophonemic for consonants except ў written phonetically), Swahili (missing aspirated consonants, which do not occur in all varieties and anyway are sparsely used), Mongolian (apart from letters representing multiple sounds depending on front or back vowels, the soft and hard sign, silent letters to indicate /ŋ/ from /n/ and voiced versus voiceless consonants) Azerbaijani (apart from k), and Kazakh (apart from и, у, х, щ, ю).

"apart from"

(apart from h, x, b/v, and sometimes k, c, g, j, z)

not what you're looking for but making use of the fewest sounds is kind of efficient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotokas_language

Russian is pretty much pronounced as spelled - Polish probably as far in the other direction as any language I can think of.

I need create own polish alphabet, it will be gut pic.twitter.com/XYqcRZbtXZ

— ⭐Jag. Thornproof♠ (@SanJaguar) October 10, 2017

presumably thanks to this?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthography#The_post-revolution_reform

my dad's parents* were reds in the 30s: my dad told to me once that he could remember his mum teaching herself russian in the bath, adding that she was learning from a tsarist-era guidebook so it probably would have done more harm than good come the worldwide bolshevik revolution

*one of them ended up very reactionary, the other stayed secretly red till the end in her 90s, i don't really know how they negotiated this personally

adding: my dad was naturally good at languages, picking up the useable basics very quickly -- he taught himself serbo-croat in order to read an untranslated paper abt karst landscapes* and once (in lapland) held a halting conversation with the woman running a post office in esperanto lol

might learn Volapuk one day so I can curse the Esperanto-speaking masses

starting scottish gaelic classes on saturday, something I've been meaning to do for about a decade. procrastination is bad news.

Ashamed to say as a Scot that pretty much the only words I know in Gaelic are a song about porridge

i know next to nothing apart from the words that are similar/the same to the bit of Irish I learned on Duolingo.

I don't think it's incumbent of Scots to know any gaelic - as long as they don't have that tiresome anti-gaelic road sign attitude - I just have always been interested in threatened languages in general and it seems like it makes sense to learn the one that's closest to your home. I was inspired by walking past a classroom at the university I work at here in Vancouver and hearing young indigenous people learning the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh) language

kinda neat

https://localingual.com/