Howdy Folks,
From talking with many neurodivergent people throughout life, and finding community among those who have a fascination with linguistics…
Are any of you deeply interested in the subject? If so, what first sparked your curiosity? What abilities did you hope to acquire?
To connect with a wider group of people? To read ancient languages, or perhaps to win your favorite scrabble competition in a tongue you can’t speak?
I’m curious, as it feels like language learners form a spectrum of their own. For me, it helps contextualize so many facets of life, and has widened my world of friends and literacy.
Plus, it’s fun to know what someone may be thinking in their native tongue when speaking your mother language.
Living in a foreign country whose language I spoke for 15+ years from childhood gave me a huge shock, when I realized psychology and phrasing play a larger role in communication than just a daisy chain of words.
Makes me wonder how peculiar my own accent(s) / phrasing sound to their respective natives. One of my favorites it when speaking Spanish, is to accidentally declare that you are pregnant instead of embarrassed… Makes the correction twice as effective! Or when a man in German expressing his love for Hummer cars is not actually professing passion for lobsters 🦞
For those of you whose native language isn’t English… Have you had any mismatched moments like this? What funny things have you heard English learners mismatch?
-G
Native English speaker.
I started trying to learn German from a book in second grade (not very successfully.) I took Mandarin and French in high school (for some reason, my brain translates 鸟 as « oiseau ») and some Spanish in middle school + working in a predominantly Latin American immigrant community. (You have to be careful with words like “chaqueta”)
Continued Mandarin study in college - I can read at maybe a second grade level. Took an online Turkish class when I was trapped during COVID, and a Sumerian one later. Dabbled in Korean, but realized the class was being run by a literal cult. Some formal Ancient Greek studies, some work in Wheelock’s Latin.
I can’t speak any of these languages - my brain/anxiety stops me from making words in other languages. But I can read French and Spanish literature (have a copy of Don Quixote I plan to work through one day), and enough Chinese to read children’s literature and menus.
Turkish though - agglutinative languages break my brain. Same with Sumerian, but it’s not like anyone finds it easy to read, barring maybe some U of Chicago professors.
I’d love to be a high level DND monk and be able to read everything. There’s so much stuff that isn’t accessible if you are stuck with English.