#linguistic rant

[navegaremmim]

You know one thing that is funny to me is when people say they can't learn a foreign language but they haven't even immersed in it, all they did was sticking to traditional study

yeah bro if you are only learning the language for like a few hours a week and you get zero immersion you're not gonna get fluent, you need to listen to native speakers speak and I mean for like hundreds to thousands of hours to understand them well

Tired of reading stuff like "oh I'm so bad at German I don't understand the native speakers even though I have been taking German classes for years"

okay but you have probably been taking like three classes per week with 15 other students in the room and what you mostly did was reading and writing or conversing with people with strong foreign accents. No surprise you can't actually understand native speakers

I see mostly Americans saying stuff like that and saying it's because they didn't start in middle school or elementary school like we do in Europe but they don't understand that in a lot of European countries people get a lot of English exposure through media.

The German teenager you met who speaks English really well probably spends three hours a day on tiktok watching English videos

[aeolianblues]

Why tf is diglossia called diglossia, it sounds like a speech impediment?! Bilingualism gets a nice sounding name, why does diglossia get this—it’s a good thing! If you told someone on the streets you had diglossia they’d ask you when the eye operation is! It just means you speak two languages/dialects within a single-language community, doesn’t it?! It’s much better than the standard of “Celtic languages used to be spoken widely along with English but then the Brits killed it lmao”. Give things decent names and people will feel like supporting them.

[annie-thyme]

okay I give up. can someone please explain to me what's with the unnecessary apostrophes??? why would you put an apostrophe to indicate plural. why. it is not supposed to go there. ever. at all. I just had to read a common last name ending with an s with a fucking apostrophe stuck into it like a dueling sword and now I can't unsee it. my eyes are bleeding. send help.

I know the answer to this is probably simple, like it's a new online language thing, similar to smol and u and birb and im. only I think it's not similar, bc with all those other words it's obvious that the incorrect spelling is intentional - surely everyone knows how to write them properly. but with the apostrophe it's not. apostrophes are confusing af as they are, so to me it feels more like 'oh I have no idea if it's supposed to go there but look the word has an s in it and we all know s means an apostrophe right yeah let's do it'.

when I see an apostrophe where it doesn't belong I don't see it as ironic or Aesthetic (tm). to me it just looks dumb and fucking annoying. there are people out there who truly believe the plural of 'house' is 'house's'. how do I know you're not one of them.

[vaenire]

english is comprised of mainly latin and french. like, yeah there are some germanic words still in english, but most words have a latin or french rooot *more you know☆*

actually it's mostly anglo saxon sorry anon 

why would english be a germanic language if it was mostly latin and french. 

even your own sentence is mostly anglo saxon or old norse in etymological origin.  

98 of the 100 most common english words are germanic in origin. 

the=dictionary just says 'old english'

more=proto-germanic

you=proto-germanic

know=came to english from old norse, however similar roots found in latin and greek because common ancestor language indo-european

[trajektoria]

Spanish people, does Spanish have any rules regarding articles or are they just inserted at random before words?

Frickity fuck, why all languages can't be as simple and nice as Polish?

I mean REALLY: no articles, NONE! When a noun ends with "a" = female. When it ends with "o" = neuter. In all other case = male.

The articles were invented in hell and no one will convince me otherwise.

[mildxchild666]

Diary of a Linguist

It's really starting to bug me that people talk shit about English just because some of its words aren't spelled phonetically. What about its incredible lack of verb inflection? It's like, hm, is that word in the present indicative or present subjunctive tense? GEE, I DON'T KNOW BUT LET ME TRY AND LEARN A LANGUAGE THAT HAS IT ANYWAY.

[matt-and-cheez]

THANK YOU. I'm so glad I'm not the only one who cringes when people say "Really?" in a sarcastic way. It's so overused.