Language

Edit: I will try to reply to everyone as soon as I can.

For example, the panzer tank is a well known tank or the luftwaffe or wehrmacht are commonly referred to as such as opposed to “The German Airforce” or “The German Army”. On the other hand, we use English to describe basically every other military. The Soviet Army has “The Red Army” but that’s still in English. I would only have heard of the Soviet Air Force never how a Soviet Soldier might have referred to it. From my perspective, it seems to come from a place of fascination with the Nazis and their perceived military prowess. Am I making an accurate observation? Thanks so much for any info.

disclaimer: this is not about critiquing actual culture in any way, don't turn it into that, this is just about the language aspect.

I always find it incredibly awkward how most native english speakers, even strangers, start a conversation with 'Hi, how are you'. It always ends up being the same 'how are you' 'good, how are you' 'good, thank you' conversation and it feels incredibly forced and weird to me. I realized that thats because in my native language, you really only ask such a question if you actually care about the answer, and otherwise you just get into the topic you need to discuss. It doesn't seem like native english speakers find it awkward at all, it's just part of the greeting, but I have a hard time getting over it.

That led me to wonder if there are other language combinations that have clashes like this, where a totally normal thing to say in the target language feels very awkward/uncomfortable to you due to what language background you came from?

I've been with my fiance(27M) for over 3 years now, we are both american and live in America, I've known him to only speak English until last night.

Last night we were walking out of our apartment building and he made a joke and I was laughing and not looking at were I was going and I bumped into a couple and apologized, the male in the couple said something back to me in an Asian language and my fiance lost his his sh*t with the couple and they had an argument on the streets in this language, it was back and fourth and arguing until I managed to calm him down and we walked away.

Me confused I asked my fiance what was going on and what language was that, he told me that the guy had insulated me in Japanese and he was just defending me, I then asked how did he know what the guy was saying and how did he know so much Japanese to have an argument with two people in Japanese, he told me he knew a lot of Japanese he can even read and write in Japanese.

At this point I got angry I told

I really like names of cities in Czechia. For example:

Prague ("Praha" in Czech)

Brno

Ostrava

Pilsen ("Plzeň" in Czech)

Budweis ("České Budějovice" in Czech)

Carlsbad ("Karlovy Vary" in Czech)

Liberec

(Especially the name "Liberec" sounds like liberty)

Do you like names of cities or towns in your country (in your country's language) and do you like it in English?

Hello again Reddit! I'm /u/dedalvs, and I've got several things going right now:

• The season premiere of the final season of The 100 airs tonight on the CW at 8/7C. I created the Trigedasleng language spoken by the Grounders on The 100.
• The season finale of the first season of Motherland: Fort Salem airs tonight on Freeform at 9/8C. I co-created the Méníshè language spoken by the witches with language creator and linguistics professor Jessie Sams (/u/quothalinguist). The show was just picked up for a second season.
• Jessie and I started a YouTube series called LangTime Studio in which we create a language live on the stream step-by-step in two hour chunks. The thirteenth episode airs tomorrow at 2 p.m. PDT.
• I've got a book coming out on June 30th entitled Create Your Own Secret Language: Invent Codes, Ciphers, Hidden Messages, and More—A Beginner's Guide from Odd Dot.
• I'v

I see people saying this all the time and I dont get it. Especially when most native english speakers dont have another language. If u can understand it dont complain. Im not sorry for my bad english you try to speak some finnish to me.

I hear "Norwegian is silly swedish" a lot

So in the last 24 hours, i have finished reading the last 200 pages of "The Great Hunt" from Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, and immidietly continued to read 100 pages into "Warbreaker" by Brandon Sanderson, both in english, which isnt my native language, and im extremely proud. For the last 3 years have read books mainly in english, because my language lacks in translations to a lot of books i wanted to read. But never before have i read so many pages in english and in such a short period of time! Im actually quite amazed at how much i read lol

Its obvious to me that the amount of pages you can read in a day is also set by how flowing the writing of the book is, which is probably what mainly contributed to the amount of pages i read. But even so, im proud of it.

What was a time in which you read so many pages that you ended the day with "Phew, that was intense?" And how many people read in a language which isnt their native one?

So I (26f) have an older sister (28f). When we were very young, our parents (dad is from Spain, mom isn't) divorced and I decided to live with my dad while my sister decided to live with mom. As a result, I grew up fluent in Spanish while my sister did not.

Dad moved back to Spain to retire, and sister decided to join him for a while since she didn't spend a lot of time with him growing up. She spent a few months there, got a boyfriend and came back home with him.

She introduced me to him a while ago, and it was very clear he was struggling with English. So I decided, why not strike up a conversation in Spanish? I'm fluent, and it'd give him a break from having to speak English all the time while he's here.

My sister was preoccupied, so I started talking to him. Just general things "how'd you two meet?" and so on. She comes back into the room, and seems put off that I'm not speaking in English with him. After dinner they go back home, but I get a long text from my sister. It basical

I live in England but was born and raised in Southern Sweden. I very rarely meet Swedish people, so it came as a shock to me when I was at the supermarket with my boyfriend and heard a family speaking Swedish. Obviously due to social distancing I didn’t get to have a full blown conversation with them, but we covered the basics. I love speaking Swedish but don’t get to very often unless talking to family.

As I said I was at the supermarket with my boyfriend. When I began chatting to this family, my boyfriend walked off without even giving me a second look. It took me about ten minutes of aimlessly wandering around the shop before I realised he’d gone back to sit in the car.

He gave me the silent treatment the entire way home, we’ve been together 3 years so live together, and almost slammed the door in my face when we arrived home. I asked him what was wrong and he said nothing, so I pushed some more and he said it was disrespectful and made him look like an idiot when I speak Swedis

I may be ignorant on this, but isn't the whole fratboy/college stoner mostly an American thing? If so, how does that skin work in other places like Asia, Korea, etc.

I just can't imagine how his lines; "Broooooooooahh" and "Report me tooo the ladiess!" connect with other cultures lol

Maybe they all have the same thing fratboy thing going on though, I have no idea

I just remembered this scene from X-Men Apocalypse when they had Michael Fassbender speak Polish.

As much as Fassbender is a great actor his Polish (and other’s in that scene too) is just not that great. I sense that he didn’t feel comfortable with the language. It was supposed to be a dramatic scene but with the way they speak it makes it so hard to concentrate on what is happening since the way they are speaking seems so unnatural and awkward. I would prefer them to speak English and the scene would work far better and would be hundred times more emotional.

Also, Polish police using bows in the 20th century is just wow. Like how they even came up with it.

So we have 3 kids, 17, 15, and 10. I’m only a quarter Japanese but spent ~7 years in Japan when I was a teenager living with my parents there. I’m pretty fluent as my job requires a lot of Japanese as well.

My wife doesn’t speak Japanese at all and only speaks English. A few years ago my oldest and second oldest wanted to learn Japanese in school which she initially encouraged. Recently they’ve gotten to the point where they can understand great but still struggle to have the confidence to speak out loud. So sometimes at home I’ll practice with them for short periods of time. Like “how was your day, what did you have for lunch, etc.” They’re not advanced enough to hold long deep convos.

This has increasingly bothered my wife because she doesn’t understand and always assume we are talking about her (we’re not, it’s all very basic stuff). It has gotten to the point where she has instituted a house-wide ban on all Japanese because she thinks its exclusionary to her and our youngest an

Like if you were having a conversation in English and someone was overly zealous with foreign names.

A couple of days ago I asked about what thing people found most frustrating/annoying about their own language, now I'd like to know about the more positive side of things? :)

For Dutch:

• I love our cuss words, they are nice and blunt and are very satisfying to exclaim out of frustration when you stub your toe
• the word "lekker". It's just a very good word. It means tasty/good/nice. Thing is, it's very versatile. Food can be lekker, the weather can be, a person can be.
• the way it sounds. It might not sound as romantic as Italian or French, but it has its own unique charm. Especially that nice harsh g we have.

And because I lived in Sweden for a little while, a bonus round for Swedish:

• the way this language is similar enough to Dutch that a lot of things just make sense to me lol (such as word order and telling the time for example)
• the system for family words. When you say words like "grandma" or "uncle", you have to specify whether it's your dad's or mum's, e.g. grandma

My native language is Dutch, and in some situations where I'm speaking Dutch, there is a word in a different language for the thing I want to express, but none in Dutch. These are just minor nuisances, most often you can still find some different way to express it. But I thought it would be interesting to compare what our native languages can't do.

Here are a few for Dutch:

- There is no verb for 'to like'. The closest equivalent are 'leuk vinden', which translates to 'to think something is fun/nice', and 'goed vinden', which translates to 'to think something is good'.

- It's harder to express wishes in Dutch than in some other languages, like Latin or Ancient Greek, where you could just put the verb in the subjunctive or optative mood respectively to create a wish. There's only a very archaic sounding formula with 'moge'.

- Like in many other European languages, it's hard to be gender-neutral, which creates problems for non-binary people, or in situations where you want to ta

So, I am an educator working in foster care for female migrants who are victims (for example: sex trafficking, forced prostitution, forced marriage etc.). Our age range is 17-31 and I live with these women in an aparment. Two of them are pregnant, the woman I am talking about lives OVER one year in Germany and I swear to god, she cannot speak one sentence in German. On top of that she can also not speak any English. I just started this job in february so I asked my boss about it and she told me that this woman flat out REFUSES to learn German or English. I taught German and English to refugees before in other jobs so, especially with schools being closed due to Corona, I taught English, German and Maths several times a week on top of my normal work. She never participated ones. She is 39 weeks pregnant and I had to bring her to the hospital. Not only did she complain the whole 20 minutes in french (I understood her but my french is not good enough that I could answer properly) that I d

Say I write a book in which two characters speak another language than ours. How should I translate their interaction while making it clear that they're speaking in another tongue?

Hello everyone, I am 13 years old and I have already been programming python for almost 1.5 years. I really like to do it and I hope to make my job out of this eventually. I also really like traveling and so I started thinking of what I could do in the future.

I have been searching and the closest I could find was a freelancer. My ideal job is to be independent so that I can finish the programs I am supposed to finish no matter where I am.

Is there in this subreddit anyone who has does this kind of job and who could tell me their experience and how they started?

Edit: Thank you all very much, I really appreciate all your positive and motivating comments. I will keep on learning programming in order to reach my goal. Which is to combine programming with traveling.

There was a fun thread yesterday about features of natural languages that you couldn't believe weren't from a conlang. What about the reverse? What natural languages would make you say "no, that's implausible" if someone presented them as a conlang?

I always thought the Japanese writing system was insane, and it still kind of blows my mind that people can read it. Two completely separate syllabaries, one used for loanwords and one for native words, and a set of ideographic characters that can be pronounced either as polysyllabic native words or single-syllable loanwords, with up to seven pronunciations for each character depending on how the pronunciation of the character changed as it was borrowed, and the syllabary can have different pronunciation when you write the character smaller?

I think it's good to remember that natural languages can have truly bizarre features, and your conlang probably isn't pushing the boundaries of human thought too much. Are there any aspects of a

If today's definition of racism doesn't include treating people differently based on their skin colour then the definition has changed 180 degrees since what it was when I was a kid.

What word are we supposed to use for race based preferential treatment since we aren't allowed to call that racism anymore? Is this a way they control people's thoughts, by dismantling language so nothing means anything anymore?

How can I express my thoughts without the words to do so? When I make a point of expressing my intent and I'm still accused of something that is the opposite of what I'm saying, what do you do then?

It is a truth that truth can always seem stranger than fiction. And that's always true with the world's languages. Every world language always seems to have this unique way of expressing what you wanna say. Sometimes they sound so strange that you think they're conlangs. But they're not.

So I respecfully ask you my refined gentlemen...

Are there any feature in a real language that you have seen, read about, heard, (tried to) learn yourself or even speak yourself that has some feature that made you go "I can't believe it's not a conlang!"? And does your conlang use it? Have you ever seen other conlangs use that feature?

Hi all, my native languages are English and Irish. Sadly, the Irish language is dying out. We have fewer than 10,000 daily speakers now. There is a semi revival taking place in some primary schools where the language of instruction is Irish, and lots of parents are keen to send their children to these schools as they are invariably better than those teaching through English. However, our Irish language TV station generally puts out only a small number of Irish language programmes, and outside of this there are few opportunities for adults to use what they know unless they happen to be visiting the few areas - mostly around the coast - where Irish is the first language.

These areas are rural, and of course young people are leaving for opportunities. What can be done to help save the language? Creating local businesses is one, but what can I as one person do to have as big an impact as possible?

UPDATE to say thank you all for your wondering suggestions and encouragement. It means a lo