• HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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    19 days ago

    I watch one season of some show in a language I don’t understand

    I wish my brain worked that way; I’d be watching Finnish television and movies all day, every day.

    I watch a fair number of shows in Swedish or Norwegian, and I’ve never picked up anything from what they’re saying. I always have to have subtitles.

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
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      19 days ago

      I have to admit that this doesn’t work nearly as well when I’m watching anything Asian. I mean I’ve got a tiny tiny tiny understanding of the things Japanese people put at the end of words and I can now hear those a little after watching the samurai show that came out what was it. Absolutely amazing.

      Uh… “Shōgun”, yeah.

      Anyway, it works much better for PIE-languages, and obviously the easiest ones are Nordic/Germanic, seeing as they’re coursing languages to English and I know Swedish.

      I think having a native non-PIE language really helped, as once I learned English properly (and had some Swedish) the others just started making sense more or less. Eastern European languages are harder, but I haven’t watched any shows in Polish yet…

      Finnish must be a fucking nightmare, seeing how many grammatical cases we have and those are applied to all words in a sentence basically. So just modifying the verb will mean that you probably have to conjugate every other word differently.

      Like one simple example “I want a car” “haluan auton” but do you want your car (you not thee, so plural second person) would be “haluatteko autonne” but if you want to say “would you like to have your car” it’s “haluaisitteko autonne”, and in the singular second person it’s “haluatko auton”, but also in informal Finnish you can sometimes drop the conjugations and indeed using them might seem too formal, and also you’d use some sort of dialect so in reality second person singular informal would be “haluaks auton”, but you can also put in the word for you “sinä”, (which informally is mostly “sä”) and its the same thing “haluaks sä auton”, but if you change it to “haluaks sun auton” it becomes “do you want your car”.

      Whops rant. I’ve had a glög. My point being Finnish must be crazy hard to learn. I’d need to learn an Asian language to get into that whole market of languages better.

      I’ve always been into languages though, and didn’t even need to be taught to read, as I picked it up myself from newspapers, as I was annoyed my older brother had a skill I did not.

      When I watched the latest season of Babylon Berlin, I dreamt in German for a few times. And I do not speak it enough to have a conversation. Enough to order in a restaurant, sure, but not enough to chat like in my dreams.

      I understand the chorus from that song, and some of the Lyrics. I just wish I was in a position to go live abroad for a few years, I’d like to see how fast I become fluent in some of these European languages I’m somewhat primed for. Plus they legalised weed in Germany, so that’s another good reason as well.

      • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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        19 days ago

        It’s been years since I had glög; I should make that again since it’s starting to get chilly.

        Unfortunately, part of living in the US is that most people aren’t exposed to other languages to any significant degree. If you are a native American English speaker, and grow up in a large city, you might hear enough Spanish to learn it, but that’s about it. I learned Spanish in school, but there was no opportunity to practice until I moved to a large city close to the Mexican border.

      • boonhet@lemm.ee
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        19 days ago

        Finnish must be a fucking nightmare

        It is. I’m Estonian, it’s the closest related language to Finnish, and I’ve found nearly any other language easier to pick up on than Finnish.