Howdy Folks,

From talking with many neurodivergent people throughout life, and finding community among those who have a fascination with linguistics…

Are any of you deeply interested in the subject? If so, what first sparked your curiosity? What abilities did you hope to acquire?

To connect with a wider group of people? To read ancient languages, or perhaps to win your favorite scrabble competition in a tongue you can’t speak?

I’m curious, as it feels like language learners form a spectrum of their own. For me, it helps contextualize so many facets of life, and has widened my world of friends and literacy.

Plus, it’s fun to know what someone may be thinking in their native tongue when speaking your mother language.

Living in a foreign country whose language I spoke for 15+ years from childhood gave me a huge shock, when I realized psychology and phrasing play a larger role in communication than just a daisy chain of words.

Makes me wonder how peculiar my own accent(s) / phrasing sound to their respective natives. One of my favorites it when speaking Spanish, is to accidentally declare that you are pregnant instead of embarrassed… Makes the correction twice as effective! Or when a man in German expressing his love for Hummer cars is not actually professing passion for lobsters 🦞

For those of you whose native language isn’t English… Have you had any mismatched moments like this? What funny things have you heard English learners mismatch?

-G

  • fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    13 days ago

    I absolutely adore it. I think the idea of how diverse the field can be, from chinese’s tones and logography, to Esperanto/Farsi/Finnish’s almost Lego like grammar.

    I also love learning scripts. For example, I felly know about 5: Latin, Arabic (Farsi too), Cyrillic, and Greek.

    What I aim at isn’t fluency, but to be able to read / consume content in that language (including dead ones/conlangs)

    Dont even get me started on conlanging/neography.

    • gronjo45@lemm.eeOP
      0·
      13 days ago

      That’s incredible! Agree with agglutinative languages being amazing. Didn’t know that Farsi had the lego-like structure.

      The Persian script is gorgeous. Hope that I can learn it soon. The letters sieve out of my head quite quickly after seeing them. Usually a movie or series can get me rapt into the language well enough to stick some vocabulary words and along with it the script.

      Korean was my gateway into scripts outside of the European/Eurasian peninsula. Georgian/Armenian are also quite the rabbit hole, considering their ties to so many ancient empires and wacky-looking orthographies.

      • fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        The Persian script is gorgeous. Hope that I can learn it soon. The letters sieve out of my head quite quickly after seeing them. Usually a movie or series can get me rapt into the language well enough to stick some vocabulary words and along with it the script.

        Since i’m a native arabic speaker, the persian script is the exact same + a few letters, and like one new rule. I use the letters for loanwords, sometimes.

        Korean was my gateway into scripts outside of the European/Eurasian peninsula

        Nice, asian scripts are very interesting! I love chinese, due to its interesting logography.

        Georgian/Armenian are also quite the rabbit hole, considering their ties to so many ancient empires and wacky-looking orthographies.

        I knew they were the odd ones out :) They look like they’re based on latin, with a huge mix of other scripts too.