Katawa Shoujo Forums

The Commissar wrote: English words come from about 5 different roots, Latin, Old English, Germanic (Norse, Dane, and German), Norman French, and everything else. None of them follow the same conjugation rules I believe, so yea.

Also, a lot of words I see with weird changes are of English roots, such as man becoming men.

toast wrote:Like I said in IRC, let's just all learn esperanto.

UNIT0918 wrote:I'm planning on making Japanese my minor aside from my filming major. While I haven't been able to take any Japanese classes recently (The classes I need to get into are always so popular that they get taken the moment I try to get in myself.), I'm still immersing myself by playing Japanese video games. I played Persona 3 in English, so I know the story. Now I'm playing Persona 3 Portable in Japanese, so I review the story by reading and listening to the hints I hear in Japanese. I also play at the Japanese servers of Metal Gear Online. Since I'm playing with the Japanese folk, I'm forced to think as well as write in Japanese while at the same time trying to read what they type (Japanese Metal Gear Online players unfortunately don't like using the mic). Playing visual novels with the Japanese voices kinda help too. Not to mention that I try to speak Japanese with my dad now, who helps me along the way if I make some mistakes.

Also, I hear that foreign exchange programs are really valuable. Two of my teachers in high school lived in Japan for a couple of years and came back to America knowing a lot more than they would learn in a classroom. There's nothing better than totally immersing yourself in the language you're trying to learn since you're forced to learn it to get around.

ThreeStep wrote:

The Commissar wrote: English words come from about 5 different roots, Latin, Old English, Germanic (Norse, Dane, and German), Norman French, and everything else. None of them follow the same conjugation rules I believe, so yea.

Also, a lot of words I see with weird changes are of English roots, such as man becoming men.

Some of the weirdness comes from English dropping a lot of changes other languages put words through depending on case. Figuring if a word is the subject or direct object requires a look at context and word order and whatever else. I'll have to dig up my notes from a class I took on English; the professor went over the evolution from Old->Middle->Modern English, it was fascinating.

Gash wrote:I'm not a linguist myself or anything like that but a friend of mine once described the English language in two ways that I think are fairly accurate. It's a language made of bits of the language used by whoever has conquered us at some point or has been conquered by us or both and it expressed hate very well.

Bara wrote:

Gash wrote:I'm not a linguist myself or anything like that but a friend of mine once described the English language in two ways that I think are fairly accurate. It's a language made of bits of the language used by whoever has conquered us at some point or has been conquered by us or both and it expressed hate very well.

Hah, yes I heard that descripion as "Norman men-at-arms trying to pick up Saxon bar maids." I can't say it is too much a suprise that a language whos expansion and growth was left in the hands of GI's and hookers is maybe lacking a little in planning, cohesion and logic.
I once read someone who described Russian as "a good language for thinking paranoid thoughts in."; wether this is true or not I have no idea...

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

The Commissar wrote:I actually heard Russian is balls crazy hard to learn.

ThreeStep wrote:My favorite take on the English language is James Nicoll's:

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

The Commissar wrote:I actually heard Russian is balls crazy hard to learn.

Hahaha oh yes. I took it for a year before giving up.There's two alphabets (print and cursive Cyrillic have a few different letters), some weird sounds (two ways to say "sh" for instance), the grammar is bit different from English and other screwy things (talking about numbers of objects, e.g. "two cats," "five cars" using case endings that don't make sense). I'd give specific examples, but that involves digging through a year's worth of notes from two years ago. We'll see.

Latin's crazy hard too, in a way. There's a structure and only 5 or so irregular verbs which is nice, but the endings. So many endings to learn. So many.

Bara wrote:Hah, yes I heard that descripion as "Norman men-at-arms trying to pick up Saxon bar maids." I can't say it is too much a suprise that a language whos expansion and growth was left in the hands of GI's and hookers is maybe lacking a little in planning, cohesion and logic.
I once read someone who described Russian as "a good language for thinking paranoid thoughts in."; wether this is true or not I have no idea...

The Commissar wrote:the infamous "kh" sound