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extrapenguinToday's Fopinions February is for sewn, on the joys and hardships of learning languages. Icon meme will happen tomorrow.
(Despite the forethought, I don't think I really have much to say about language learning beyond the resources pile I gathered for Chinese. This is misc blather.)
Joys and hardships are really two different things, I think – so I shall start with the hardships. The difficulty of learning a language isn't about the "ease" of the langage as its own thing, but rather about the learner's motivation. The more one wants to learn, the more appealing it is, so the easier it becomes, and vice versa. The greatest hardship of mine in language-learning has been having to learn Swedish. It's mandatory for all Finns, despite only being spoken by a small and highly regional minority in Finland; I have never in my life lived anywhere it'd be useful, or where signs would be given in Swedish as well as Finnish. (It also ranks that the Swedish-speaking minority is much better-off on average than the Finns; that the Swedish is a remnant of quasicolonial overlords, just like Russian might've been, but no-one objects to Swedish like they object to Russian; and that it is very hard to study any of Finland's indigenous Saami languages in not-Northern Finland.) Having to sit through two+ hours a week of something one knows one will never use (oh, and we're also taught a BS mixture of Rikssvenska and Finländssvenska, so it's not like we can use it to properly communicate with anyone...) and listen to the lies of "oh of course you will use it! it's Super Useful!!!" was very goddamn annoying. Nevertheless, it was easy, because I already spoke English at a high enough level to be useful in "cheating", and had studied French, which was also a source of loanwords. I merely had zero motivation, so studying the language was a hardship.
Other candidates for hardships include my not yet figuring out how to install a Chinese input method on top of my Finnish keyboard layout in Linux. Also the Russian genetive plural, but that I could've solved had I been able to throw a bit more time into the language.
With the grumpy grumpness out of the way, let me talk about the joys! For me, the greatest joy isthe grammar figuring out how something works, and also the "why" of it! I enjoy noticing little things and figuring out the grammar of how they work, such as e.g. the Guardian subs translating Ye Zun's 问得好！ as "Good question!" and noticing that this uses 得 and the literal translation would be more along the lines of "asked well". My deepest joy is the joy of understanding; figuring out grammar is but one way of making the unknown known.
On a deeper level, there's also noticing how different languages chop up the concept field of existence differently – I fairly often get blocked when writing English because I want to use a very specific Finnish word for which there is no real translation. I love the new approach to thinking about things, and the joy of understanding from that.
As for language study, well. 业精于勤。 Oh, and the ability to grasp stuff written in more languages is neat.As would be the ability to tell people they mistagged their fic's language using their native tongue.
sewn, on the joys and hardships of learning languages. Icon meme will happen tomorrow.(Despite the forethought, I don't think I really have much to say about language learning beyond the resources pile I gathered for Chinese. This is misc blather.)
Joys and hardships are really two different things, I think – so I shall start with the hardships. The difficulty of learning a language isn't about the "ease" of the langage as its own thing, but rather about the learner's motivation. The more one wants to learn, the more appealing it is, so the easier it becomes, and vice versa. The greatest hardship of mine in language-learning has been having to learn Swedish. It's mandatory for all Finns, despite only being spoken by a small and highly regional minority in Finland; I have never in my life lived anywhere it'd be useful, or where signs would be given in Swedish as well as Finnish. (It also ranks that the Swedish-speaking minority is much better-off on average than the Finns; that the Swedish is a remnant of quasicolonial overlords, just like Russian might've been, but no-one objects to Swedish like they object to Russian; and that it is very hard to study any of Finland's indigenous Saami languages in not-Northern Finland.) Having to sit through two+ hours a week of something one knows one will never use (oh, and we're also taught a BS mixture of Rikssvenska and Finländssvenska, so it's not like we can use it to properly communicate with anyone...) and listen to the lies of "oh of course you will use it! it's Super Useful!!!" was very goddamn annoying. Nevertheless, it was easy, because I already spoke English at a high enough level to be useful in "cheating", and had studied French, which was also a source of loanwords. I merely had zero motivation, so studying the language was a hardship.
Other candidates for hardships include my not yet figuring out how to install a Chinese input method on top of my Finnish keyboard layout in Linux. Also the Russian genetive plural, but that I could've solved had I been able to throw a bit more time into the language.
With the grumpy grumpness out of the way, let me talk about the joys! For me, the greatest joy is
On a deeper level, there's also noticing how different languages chop up the concept field of existence differently – I fairly often get blocked when writing English because I want to use a very specific Finnish word for which there is no real translation. I love the new approach to thinking about things, and the joy of understanding from that.
As for language study, well. 业精于勤。 Oh, and the ability to grasp stuff written in more languages is neat.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-06 19:49 (UTC)I have taken zero linguistics courses ever in my life; all my knowledge is from the internet. Do other places teach linguistics differently?
no subject
Date: 2019-02-07 12:34 (UTC)Linguistics as a discipline is pretty broad these days, yeah. It doesn't divide into specialized fields or separate schools of thought neatly, either. My knowledge is mainly of fennistics, and I've only quite recently realized how different the Finnish departments around the country are. I've been taught in a highly theory-oriented environment; some departments are more practically-oriented, or focused on "traditional" (from my pov) linguistic analysis. (There has, historically, been a lot of... I don't want to say animosity, but there are definitely tensions between departments.)
Fennistics divides into specialized fields such as variation studies (study of dialects and idolects, mostly), conversation studies, comparative linguistics, onomastics, cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics and interactional linguistics... Something like kielenhuolto (which has no direct equivalent in English! but overlaps with areas such as language planning, language policy-making and language standardization) is also a field of its own, but obviously it isn't an academic discipline as such. All of these fields interact with each other, and other disciplines; in practice, a lot of the linguistic work that is done defies neat categorization. And this is just in Finland; the international differences between universities can be huge. As much as American scholars have contributed to "our" academic tradition, many of the US schools come off as rather old-fashioned and rigid in their thinking when compared to fennistics. Again, I'm biased, but frankly reading some of their stuff is just funny.
Uhhh apologies for these long comments. I could blather on about this a lot. The point is: different places do teach different kinds of linguistics; and so do different individuals; humanities ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
no subject
Date: 2019-02-07 20:12 (UTC)Nodnod! This definitely sounds like reality. (And to take it further, I think learning about stuff like maths and music and art etc also opens up new ways of conceptualizing the world.)
Huh, I didn't realize that kielenhuolto didn't exist in English! This is interesting. It's also interesting to see how humanities divides into things based on ... approach, I guess, when my field divides into subfields based on what we're studying.
Huh, this is interesting! Has the US suffered from having a critical mass of people so that the subfields could segregate completely, or was there something else going on?
Also, no need to apologize; this is one of the things I'm a sort-of hobbyist in, and I always like learning new things!
no subject
Date: 2019-02-08 11:36 (UTC)As far as I understand, the segregation of fields is exactly what has contributed to the occasional, um, humour value US scholars' work holds for me. Obviously there are many departments which do work that I tend to think of as "European-style" -- interdisciplinary and porous. However, there are pockets who are still affected by the legacy of Noam Chomsky. His work was instrumental in the historical development of modern linguistics, but he unfortunately popularized the idea of universal grammar (the theory that humans are born with an innate knowledge of grammar), which is obviously just... not true. It's frustrating (and funny) reading literature that begins with an apologetic critique of Chomsky. It's something I'd never considered was needed.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-09 20:43 (UTC)Egads, Chomsky. I'm not even really a linguist proper, but ... no. One would've thought that grammar not being universal* would have been obvious, but apparently not!
* Should we ever discover aliens, no doubt the grammar of their language(s), should they have something that we recognize as a language, would be utterly alien to us, but even human languages have considerable variation.