Racist Countries in the World

[hey]

You know nothing Jon Snow.

Chinese and Japanese are so similar when written, you can communicate with writing fairly well despite the fact that you'd be fucked trying to actually speak to each other.

To some extent, yes, but what does that have to do with what i said?

The two languages use a lot common meanings for kanji/hanzi, which allow them to sometimes get some meaning out of the other language's text, but they both read the characters completely different, so a pair of characters that are homophones in one language rarely are in the other.

It's also quite an exaggeration to say they can communicate fairly well. They may be able to read maps, or menus of the other language relatively well, but actually communicating more than basic ideas would be incredibly difficult.

[Gadritan]

To some extent, yes, but what does that have to do with what i said?

Nothing. I just wanted an excuse to use that phrase plus it's an interesting fact. Also, eff your ninja edit.

[hey]

Oh, well fair enough. It is indeed quite interesting.

[Hyan]

Or written the same and pronounced the same, but mean different things.

I don't think any language comes close to being as bad as Japanese in this regard.

Like what? kakaru/kakeru?

English has a ton of words like this too.
make
run
set

"make" alone has 84 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary.

In addition, Japanese uses pitch accent (quite similarly to Swedish) to distinguish similarly spelled words. It's not represented by the writing system but it's definitely there. ex: hashi (bridge) / hashi (chopsticks) / hashi (edge)

[Kuya]

That's just someone speaking with a bad accent, I assume Kuya was referring to was the lack of consistency in how words are spelled and pronounced.

ie. some come tome

That's what i meant. Lack of consistency in how you pronounce like words. I think it's because you guys don't have accents to tell you where to put the force of pronunciation. Like papa, papá

Or: éste, esté

Or: libro, libró

etc

edit: the accent changes both meaning and sound

[Uzor]

Yeah; we have that a lot in Swedish. é, å, ä, ö...

Ex: Idé, vs ide. The first means idea, second hibernation. åäö is slightly different, though, as they're their own letters, unlike é. Still, there's a big different between pronunciation in hösta and hosta or ande and ände even though you'd probably pronounce them the exact same way, and likely wouldn't hear much of a difference at all in the pronunciation. Also, pitch matters a lot in Swedish, which is why it kind of sounds like we sing in Swedish. Also; space matters a lot in written language. Example:

fryst kyckling lever (frozen chicken is alive)
fryst kycklinglever (frozen chicken liver)
kul glass (fun ice cream)
kulglass (scoop ice cream)
kassa apparater (bad machines)
kassaapparater (cash registers)

[Xno Kappa]

[guartz]

Russia. Kings of racism. /thread

[Jakson]

That's what i meant. Lack of consistency in how you pronounce like words. I think it's because you guys don't have accents to tell you where to put the force of pronunciation. Like papa, papá

Or: éste, esté

Or: libro, libró

etc

edit: the accent changes both meaning and sound

I'm finishing SPAN203, so a bit of a scrub here. I've been reviewing a bit and I'd say accents changing a word's meaning hasn't been as much of a problem as remembering the tenses and the differences between them. For instance, the past subjunctive versus the past perfect subjunctive doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me:

Past subjunctive:
La empresa buscó una bioquímica que viviera en la zona.
The company looked for a biochemist who lived (was living) in the area.

Past perfect subjunctive:
La empresa buscó una bioquímica que hubiera vivido en la zona.
The company looked for a biochemist who had (might have) lived in the area.

This primarily, though irregular verbs are a pain. The other main thing isn't so much about structure but the choice to use words. For instance, when my son was being potty-trained, I'd ask him if he needed "to go pee pee," whereas his mother would say "¿Necessitas hacer pee pee?" While I understand it's along the lines of "making pee," I get it (I think of Arya in GoT "making water"), but it's just something that I've always thought about when trying to communicate and wondering if what I'm saying makes no sense not because I don't know the right word, but that the word I am using just isn't the common way of saying it.

[Plow]

my response to all this language talk:

[Kuya]

I'm finishing SPAN203, so a bit of a scrub here. I've been reviewing a bit and I'd say accents changing a word's meaning hasn't been as much of a problem as remembering the tenses and the differences between them. For instance, the past subjunctive versus the past perfect subjunctive doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me:

Past subjunctive:
La empresa buscó una bioquímica que viviera en la zona.
The company looked for a biochemist who lived (was living) in the area.

Past perfect subjunctive:
La empresa buscó una bioquímica que hubiera vivido en la zona.
The company looked for a biochemist who had (might have) lived in the area.

This primarily, though irregular verbs are a pain. The other main thing isn't so much about structure but the choice to use words. For instance, when my son was being potty-trained, I'd ask him if he needed "to go pee pee," whereas his mother would say "¿Necessitas hacer pee pee?" While I understand it's along the lines of "making pee," I get it (I think of Arya in GoT "making water"), but it's just something that I've always thought about when trying to communicate and wondering if what I'm saying makes no sense not because I don't know the right word, but that the word I am using just isn't the common way of saying it.

Speaking with people on the streets, you'll rarely use stuff like past perfect because we find it just as confusing as you. Past perfect is most often used in hypotheticals.

I think the last thing you mentioned is something any person that is trying to learn another language goes through. Sometimes you make literal translations that sound odd in the language you're trying to speak in. Other times you might use the correct words but native speakers rarely use them. So yea, somethings you just can't learn from a book, and you'll only pick up on living and speaking with native speakers.

Saying "necesitas ir hacer pipi?" is also acceptable.

[Uzor]

I have that problem with English. I speak and write excellent English, but I just can't figure out "was" and "were". I know the rules for it, but in everyday speech it just sounds wrong to use was instead of were as a swede, so I often get them wrong, even when writing if I don't stop to think. Most swedes (including me) occasionally get strange phrases since we'd phrase it a different way in Swedish, so we translate it word-by-word in our head. We also like to use a lot of filler words since we don't like silence, so when speaking to a swede you can get phrases like:

Do you know... If... Maybe, later today... Uhm, we could, maybe, go eat something, because I might be hungry, like, around 8 maybe?

since they say "Maybe" or another word while thinking of the next word to say. We do it even in Swedish, albeit not to the same extent.

It's not anywhere near that bad for me, but it's not completely unheard of for Swedes to make phrases lie that -- especially if they're not used to speaking English.

I also tend to use a lot of words most English leakers don't use in everyday speech, like aghast, keen, thwart, sate, ambivalent, beneficiary, ghastly, tantalize etc.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of native English speakers use them, and most know what they mean. But I've found most native English speakers I speak to don't commonly use them... I blame the advanced English and CAE extra curriculars I took.

[Niiro]

"Like" is the go-to filler word for most young English speakers nowadays.

[Uzor]

In Swedish it's "liksom", typ, and "ba". The third one isn't even a word, the first one is rarely ever used, and is roughly equivalent to "in a way" or "as well as", and the third one means "like". It makes phrases sound very strange.

"Last day I (as well as) went to (as well as) the cinema with (like) Per and Sven."
"I (like) met a girl yesterday, and she (ba) said 'I love you' and I (ba) 'I don't love you'. So we (like) fought for a while, and then we (like) had sex. So I was (as well) 'Damn, girl, you (as well) rocked my world!'"

It's just retarded. I weened my sister off of it by walking away whenever she used filler words like that. It makes phrases incomprehensible.

[Niiro]

Whenever someone asks a question in class and every other word out of their mouth is "like" it drives me insane. You're interrupting a class of possibly 100+ students and speaking to a college professor, learn to form a comprehendible sentence.

It's sad when so many of our professors speak English as a second language and wind up confused because "like, people, like, sort of, you know speak, like, they have no goddamn clue how to, like, take a moment and just, like, collect their thoughts before, like, sort of, opening their mouths and, like, spewing whatever comes to mind without, you know, like" thinking.

("like", "sort of", and "you know" are the big three I think)

[Uzor]

Yeah, it's why I refuse to speak to people that does that. At first I tell them to slow down because I can't understand them (and when they talk more slowly they usually stop with "like" etc.), and if they keep doing it I tell them to stop using hose words because I can't understand them. If they still don't I just walk away, because I'm not going to deal with it.

[Xno Kappa]

It annoys the hell out of me, you know what I'm saying?

[Niiro]

That's a single phrase tacked on at the end of a sentence or complete thought, rather than interspersed frivolously throughout.

Acceptable.

[Jakson]

I have a professor who said uh or um 103 times in 35 minutes before I stopped counting.

[Eurell]

It annoys the hell out of me, you know what I'm saying?