Fopinions February: Language learning joys and hardships

Today'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 is the 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.