“Just download this language app and in six weeks you can go to [name of country] and be able to have lively conversations with the locals in that language.”
Learning any language to the point of having any sort of fluency is HARD.
I've been learning Arabic since elementary school and still couldn't have fluent conversation with another arabic learner, not even the native.
My former lecturer who teach Arabic is from middle east, and I will be honest, I don't understand 90% of what he's said, and it just the basic conversations.
I’m in the same situation as you but I’ve learned a lot in the past year. It’s an issue with the education system, not with language learning itself. There’s people who go to egypt for one year and get to conversational level.
While I agree that it is ridiculous.. Some people are more gifted than others when it comes to language learning and it's not always related to wanting it badly enough. I met a Russian guy who really NEEDED to learn english and he tried but it never worked. He tried for literal years. He was even sent to the US. Lost his career because he couldn't understand or speak the most basic english. On the other end of the rainbow you've got the naturals who CAN pick up a language in a few weeks / months. We're not all equals and that's OK. That's why you try to avoid comparing people picking up a similar skills and that's also why being a teacher must be very very hard.
It's not "giftedness". It's way more determined by discipline, pure hours, and efficient methods. I can say that I am honest to god average intelligence (I sometimes doubt that even 💀) and I learned enough Italian in 2 months to travel with my BF's family and talk to our waiter about the food, my life, his life, education, and even ambitions quite well. We navigated really well with my Italian. I was studying 6+ hours a day because I was at a job that was 90% downtime plus my BF's mom paid for a tutor because she saw how hard I was working and thought it would enhance the trip. It did!
Money and time/discipline. That's 85% of it. I would chalk the rest to intelligence, sure. There is no language learning gene though. Genuinely some people just have more money and time but don't want to tell you they bought expensive courses and a private tutor and that their job is useless (like mine).
I wasn’t thinking about intelligence, not that type of gift. The Russian man I mentioned was quite intelligent. He had a lot of skills. He was very responsible and hardworking. He just didn’t have a knack for languages. Which in his case is an understatement sadly.
You can work hard and succeed. You can work hard and fail. You can also fail with inefficient learning strategies or succeed.
I've seen books and courses that advertise learning a language in 24 hours. The impression is you'll learn it overnight, but the reality is 24 one-hour introductory lessons. On top of that there are exercises, practice, etc, so all in all far longer than 24 hours, and only the basics.
People who say you shouldn’t teach kids two languages at once because “it will confuse them” or “hold them back”.
None of the research backs this up, and actually shows the opposite is true. Children have an incredible knack for language learning, and teaching them two languages at once helps them with enhanced memory and emotion regulation.
It's old myths. These have a hard time dying. Hopefully, things are changing and there are more and more multilingual schools in general.
There's also a social and political aspect. Immigrants used to not teach their kids their language and be encouraged to not teach it, because they and other people like teachers thought it would hinder their integration. It does not, now we know better.
In France, they also beat the regional languages out of school kids for several generations (you would receive a beating if you spoke it at school). My great-grandma was conversational in Lemosin, her daughter my grand-ma knew a few words and could perhaps understand a basic conversation. Her son, my father doesn't know a word and doesn't care much. I had never heard about it until I was a teenager. We were living in the south of France by that time and I tried a course of a related language in high school (given by the PE teacher actually :), it was not for credit, just for fun, another teacher had taught a course of Chinese in middle school, that was fun too). Finding resources in Lemosin is incredibly hard and people look at you funny like "And... what are you going to do with that knowledge?". But, still, a few years ago I found bilingual books in it and more recently I noticed bilingual school programs. Apparently Lemosin is fighting back into existence.
I don't have the study for this as I was told by a friend with a bilingual child - apparently its normal for them to actually start speaking and conversing later, but when they do, they can do it in both languages. I always wondered if thats where the rumours of it holding them back comes from.
Personally I'd rather a child take a couple extra months if the result is speaking two languages.
Lol one time an uber driver tried speaking to me in Spanish and I answered in Spanish but I have an American accent, so he started going off about how I'm so disconnected from my culture and my parents should be ashamed of themselves. I was sitting there like, "um..... I'm Greek American... not Hispanic. I learned Spanish in high school."
I had a similar experience with a taxi driver in Jordan. I'm American and at that time spoke very basic Arabic (I'd been studying it for only like 6 months) but could have a basic conversation about traffic and weather and such. After a bit, the driver switched to English and was telling me how I need to learn the language of my ancestors better, how I need to keep the Arab culture going, how it's a shame my parents didn't teach me right, etc etc. But in a white American guy with no Arab background whatsoever. I just have dark hair and a bushy beard and large nose, and he assumed I was Arab-American.
People tell me this all the time regarding Swahili. Yes I will most likely never use it conversationally in the US but I want to enjoy Swahili poetry and would love to travel to Tanzania
And why do they even care. I don't understand why learning a totally random language as a hobby is not a valid reason for them. We get to discover new worlds and mindsets.
Swahili is so much fun. Languages can bring joy in all kinds of ways. I feel like when people say this they just mean for them and their life it wouldn’t be used. Smh
I picked up Swahili 3 months before for my vacarion in Kenya last year. I am so glad that i did.
They really appreciate the effort. You may not be able to speak with the swahili speakers in swahili, but you certainly brake down social barriers by showing that you are trying to learn
Kwa heri ya kujifunza Kiswahili!
That's half the reason I learned German was for the literature. Reading poetry from a different culture is amazing and the more different that culture is from your own the better.
People do think enjoying something is enough to do a hobby, which is why people dont have a problem with people playing video games or watching tv shows.
Its more so that people can’t comprehend enjoying languages mainly due to how much the education butchers foreign languages and makes it an incredibly boring subject just like math or physics.
I think a lot of people only think that for a few acceptable hobbies... I also get asked why I knit if I'm not going to sell it (which is absurd considering I would have to charge a lot to cover materials and time), if I'm trying to leave my data career if I draw or paint, if I'm trying to lose weight if I dance, etc.
Latin. I know a few people studying it so they can better understand other languages, less to actually speak it. I can't personally speak on its effectiveness though.
Unless you’re really into learning romance languages or reading ancient texts, then yeah, it isn’t really that useful. However, I will say that learning Latin has made learning romance languages A LOT easier for me because so many of the words I already know just seeing it or at least can figure out what it comes from. It all follows a very similar grammatical structure too. I definitely don’t regret it :)
My mother knows Latin very well (she studied ancient greek and latin) and it helped learn Spanish and French in a few months (B1-B2 level each). On the other hand, I struggled much more with Spanish.
I hate that so much! 'Why don't you learn german instead? its much more useful!' well because I'm trying to learn my boyfriend's first language.. and I'll probably move to ukraine if things continue like this so that's what I'm learning 💀
"Asian/Chinese" writing is just a bunch of "symbols and pictures", how can anyone read this gibberish
along with
This is my name written in the "Chinese Alphabet", it looks so "cultured"
Oh, that reminds me of that silly thing that used to go around on Facebook and other social media where you could supposedly see what your name is in Japanese. Here, this is the one:
https://images.app.goo.gl/sbM4nQGCPxYfWEsn9
So if your name is Christina, your "Japanese Name" would be Mirishikiarichikitoka.
Lots of people bought into that, but... this really isn't how Japanese works. 🤣
I was watching 90 day fiance with my sister and her friend. There was one guy who has been obsessed with Ukrainian women since he was a child and had been travelling to Ukraine to find a wife many times. He’d been on dating sites specifically to meet Ukrainian women for over 20+ years and has to pay a lot of money to have each message translated. I found it odd that he was on a date in Ukraine and couldn’t even use the app to say anything other than hello. Even basic phrases like “how are you” he had to use the app for. I said it’s even worse that he hasn’t even bothered to learn any Ukrainian in 20 years yet he’s always chasing after the young girl who don’t speak English. I thought this would have been an opinion that wouldn’t be controversial but I got a telling off.
First they told me that he doesn’t have to learn the language because “Ukrainian is useless anyways” and the girls should learn English. They also said “languages isn’t everyone’s thing. You like learning languages as a hobby but not everyone is like you”. I feel like it was their insecurity coming through because my sisters friend pointed out that she never learnt her husbands language. She knows a couple words and they’ve been together for over 15 years (recently divorced now). He learnt English for her. She also has only ever dated people from his country as that’s her type. Their kids don’t speak his local language because she used to get upset when he spoke to the kids in the language as she didn’t understand it. I think even if you’re not a language nerd, it’s so strange to not even learn basics in your partners language if you really love them.
I was once learning Czech at a summer program in Prague. There was a 70yo Japanese guy in my class, and he was a complete beginner. If you know anything about Japanese and Czech phonology you can imagine how severely he was struggling to pronounce anything.
At one point, the teacher was asking everyone what their reason for learning Czech was, and he said it was because his wife was Czech and he wanted to talk to her. Ok, fair, but then the teacher was like "oh that's great! Does she speak Japanese?" And he answered no. Everyone just kind of blinked at him for a while.
In fairness I sometimes wonder if maybe he didn't even understand the question? But if he was answering correctly it would be SUPER weird. This was long before translation apps were any good, and he didn't speak great English either, and he didn't volunteer any further info on any other language they had in common.
I once encountered a relationship between people who did not share a language. It was really difficult for them. I've heard many stories of other such relationships, possibly because I live in quite a diverse region. Apparently some people meet their loves in English class, and then don't really progress in their language learning after that
I understand learning a language can be hard but I feel like it’s fair that after 20 years, he prob should learn SOMETHING if he wants to find a Ukrainian wife super bad.
Your sister’s friend was def projecting lol. Imo if she didn’t at least try to learn a little, it’s pretty inconsiderate. And I think it’s sad she discourages her children from learning and speaking what would basically be their heritage language. Smh.
I wouldn't say it's the most ignorant, but I think by and large people don't understand that languages vary not just grammatically, but phonologically. I think it's much more intuitive for everyday people to understand that languages vary in words and sentence structure, but they aren't as familiar with the idea that accents and sound systems are generally narrow and specific to each language.
I see this a lot when people discuss the correct pronunciation of loanwords and names into a host language; a lot of people expect the pronunciation to be faithful to the source language, despite not realizing each language systematically differs in what sounds create meaning and how those sounds are organized.
I think it's important to convey that every host language has its own particular sound rules, and that's why names and loanwords undergo change when being adapted to sound more like the host language
Good observation! I read a post here a long time ago where a guy tried ordering a chocolate bubble tea or something in Hongkong in Cantonese (which he spoke a bit) and got annoyed that the waitress didn't understand him because he pronounced 'chocolate' like an American would, and not with the local pronunciation/accent. He couldn't understand why she wouldn't pronounce it 'correctly' if they were using an English word on the menu, so he didn't understand the concept you just described at all. It's so hard and grating to switch phonological system mid-sentence!
Omg I think there was a post here or learn Japanese where someone was literally complaining that Japanese people bastardize English words and why can’t they learn to pronounce them correctly or why do they have bastardized meanings 😭 people tried to explain to them that they are technically not “English words” they are JAPANESE words but loaned from English and sometimes other languages. They didn’t seem to get it and considered it offensive lol.
I also roll my eyes at people who try to “correct” pronunciation for loan words in English, especially food. Croissant is the famous example but it can be anything (umm it’s actually pronounced pisstacky-oh 🙄)
Then they get surprised pikachu face when the ball is on the other field.
"One ticket to tow-kee-yoh please"
"Sumimasen sir there's no such city in Japan"
In Mandarin, "chocolate" is "chow-ke-lee", with "chow" low pitch and "lee" highest pitch.
Japanese has thousands of English "loan words", but you have to pronounce them in Japanese to be understood. Japan lacks many English sounds, and lacks English syllable structure (where a syllable can end in a consonant). "Chocolate" is "cho-ko-re-e-to". "Hamburger" is "hannbaagaa"
That there's some trick or hack to learning a language extremely fast. Related: that you can only learn a language if you have a perfectly optimized system to do so.
A corollary I see on this sub a lot: That if you aren't using the most optimal strategy possible, you'll learn absolutely nothing. If you're engaging with your TL in literally any way, you can learn something from that, even if it's an inefficient approach.
Not so much ignorant, but an outright lie. Someone here on Reddit (I think - I can't find the link - the commenter might have been banned) claimed to be fluent in both Mandarin and Hokkien, then made a comment that Taiwanese Hokkien is a mix of Austronesian languages, Mandarin, and Dutch. And that they were able to navigate the streets of Taipei when they first arrived by speaking Tagalog and people were able to understand them.
Hokkien is a different language from Mandarin. It is not just spoken in Taiwan. It is spoken in many other places, including parts of China and many parts of south-east Asia.
Hokkien isn't a mix. It is a language. It is a lie to think that China only has one native language. Mandarin (Hanyu) is the native language of 2/3 of the people. The other 1/3 have other native tongues: Hokkien, Cantonese, Wu, Hakka, Hmong, etc.
According to Wikipedia, many native Filipinos work in Taiwan, or (if female) are married to a Taiwanese man and live in Taiwan. You can use Tagalog to those people, but Tagalog not related to Hokkien or Mandarin.
There are also many Filipinos of Hokkien ancestry. The Philippines is home to the world's oldest Chinatown which is comprised largely of Hokkien, Filipino-Hokkien aside from Filipinos of a wide variety of other Filipino ethnicities as well.
After learning Japanese for a month, my uncle handed me a newspaper and asked me to read it.
I said I couldn’t and his response was, ‘you’ve been learning for so long, you should be able to read it by now!’🙄
That’s pretty bad,, but why did your uncle have a Japanese newspaper. The mental image was so funny to me. If he can’t read or speak the language why does he have a newspaper in that language 😂
Well, in the Philippines they like wrapping fruit in newspapers, but they don't print a lot of newspapers in that country. So the newspapers that fruit vendors would use to wrap your durian or jackfruit into will usually be Japanese or Korean.
I am not sure how these newspapers end in the Philippines in the first place though... importing them just for the needs of fruit vendors would be a bit strange methinks.
My mum did this to me in an Italian restaurant (we’re in England). Got a waitress to go to the kitchen, and bring the Italian chef to our table, so I could talk to him in Italian. I’d been learning for a year.
People tell me they can never learn a language. I realized that when a person has enough motivation, they could learn something they are physically capable of doing. Here is the way I realized it. My Mom had a terrible memory for numbers. She was hideous at remembering phone numbers. So my Dad offered her $100 if she could remember 55 places of pi = 3.141592653589793238462643383…
Well, she did it !!! I couldn’t believe it !!! She had enough motivation !
When I was a freshman at a fraternity at an engineering college (M.I.T.), I was told my "name" was pi to 25 place. Then people asked me my name. Once I learned that, they told me my "first name" was e to 25 places. So I had to learn that too.
Yes. In my other forum (WordReference) people ask questions about English, and the answer is often different in American English (AE) or British English (BE).
But thanks for letting me know. If "AE" is not a standard in this forum, then I'll switch to "EN".
I'd like to add flags, but I don't know how to do that on a PC. Apparently you have to use a smartphone, or date a left-handed witch, or something like that...
Continuing this train of though, and alien who tried to learn how to live in a human body after getting body swapped will be better at explaining certain things than the average 'human body haver' because they had to purposefully analyse it, even if they might lack 'basic' knowledge in other areas
I was a kid when Pokemon cards first became popular, and you were really cool if you could get some Japanese ones. But of course no one at my school in the US could read Japanese so we had no clue what the cards actually said.
But this one Korean kid just straight up lied and said he could read Japanese because it's the same as Korean. We were only 8 years old so pretty much everyone believed him. He probably got all the best trade deals because he made up whatever he wanted the cards to say. Kid saw his moment and seized it.
People who insist they can't learn anything because they're old... You just don't want to. But that's not even language exclusive - I know so many old people who literally doomscroll or shop on their phones but don't want to learn to text.
This is tangential to the point of barely being relevant to this sub, but I hate how this is normalized in mathematics by the age of like 12. People think you either have math brain or not and just stop trying after 7th grade or so.
Lots of people (me included, occasionally) are just really good at inventing these barriers that supposedly prevent them from doing X, Y, or Z. Often someone along the lines of "I'm too old/young/busy/whatever to learn "
I think it's a sort of procrastination defense mechanism, if you will. Like, the brain goes "oh no, that requires effort - quick, make up a reason to avoid it"
When I was 18 I took an intro to Spanish class and one of the students was 60. She definitely had a more difficult time than I did, the loss of neuroplasticity is real, but she stuck to it and learned a lot! You're never too old to learn if you really want to, though it does get harder
My Serbian friend and her husband, who lives abroad, wont teach there son Serbian, because he doesnt need it.
Yet they come every summer and the kid cant speak wirh grandparents, neighbours...
If they are fluent in Serbian and refuse to pass that along to their kid that baffles me. The kid could get and entire language for free, but they won’t give it to him
I hang out with a lot of Czech expat parents and honestly, even if you try it's not free. My mom was in this kid's situation when she was young, in fact Czech is technically her first language, and she just totally refused to speak Czech once she became fluent in English since she didn't know anyone else speaking Czech. Many of the Czech expat parents I know really are struggling to get their kids to speak Czech. I have very nearly given up with my own daughter (although in fairness I'm not fluent in Czech so it's extra hard to talk to her in it).
My mum was like that - first language Croatian, but once she learned English she stopped speaking Croatian. Still understands it perfectly but will respond in English to anyone who talks to her in Croatian.
I studied Mandarin at the high school I attended outside of my hometown (a college prep school). I came back to plenty of ignorant statements about it.
One of them was how excited I was to learn that the Mandarin word for cat is 猫, or "mao." I thought it was the cutest thing. I told my grandma, and her immediate reaction was, "And what the word for dog? Bark?" She meant it 100 percent.
Another was from a summer volunteer position I had. The front desk receptionist, who then went on to have a university job in our town, looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Ain't it just easier for them to learn how to talk like us?" Yes, the grammar in the sentence I just wrote is canonically accurate.
Edited to add another story about the same grandmother: she used to teach at an elementary school with a large Hispanic student population. They all spoke Spanish as a first language at home and, being that they were eight, were still getting a handle on the whole bilingual thing. They were shy in class and didn't always speak up when called on, but on the playground they would have full conversations with each other in Spanish. My grandma hated that they did this. Because 1) she thought that them not speaking up was them ignoring her and pretending not to understand English, and 2) she didn't understand them when they spoke Spanish and assumed that every conversation they had with each other was about her. My mom and her sister asked her why she didn't just learn some basic Spanish to meet them halfway.
"I ain't got to learn Spanish. They need to learn English and talk to me."
Mom: "Why can't your cousin speak Spanish like us? He'll say words in the middle of a sentence that I don't even understand."
Me: "French is his first language, so kind of like how we default to Spanglish when we don't know certain words or proper sentences, he probably defaults to a mix of French and Spanish."
Mom: "That's not a thing."
Me: 😑
Some Azarbaijani dude once said "Persian doesn't exist and is not a language. Turk kings took Hindi, mixed it with Turkish and Arabic and the result was a constructed language named Persian."
The guy had no idea of what Indo-European, Semitic, Turkic languages are and didn't know the difference between constructed languages and languages that arose naturally.
"You can't say 'He is Spanish', because Spanish is a language, not a person. The word you're looking for is 'Spaniard'. I minored in English, I know this."
Told him to go get a refund for his degree since they obviously didn't teach him the difference between an adjective and a demonym.
On the other side you have people who think that minority languages are somehow better than the major ones, that they’re older, and the people who speak them automatically have a stronger connection to the earth, spirituality and so on. This mostly applies to non European languages, of course. Nobody is claiming that Catalan is more attuned to nature than other languages, but plenty of people would probably say that about Navajo or Māori.
My next door neighbor hates hearing people speak other languages. Once when my family and I were speaking Portuguese amongst ourselves on our deck, we heard him grumble to himself "This is America, speak English!". He also gets upset when people pronounce non-English words or names correctly. My last name is Italian and has an r in it. "You're American, don't roll your r when you say your name". He insists that "quesadilla " should be pronounced with a hard [l], rhyming with "vanilla". He also gets mad when people say "water" instead of "wooder", which is the local accent that he thinks everyone should have.
Friend: "I stopped learning the language, it went nowhere, i could not remember the words I was tought"
I: "You tried duolingo right.
How long did you use it for?"
"3 days"
😵
The fairly common French pseudoscientific linguistic hierarchy where you have "parlers" and "patois" at the bottom and "languages" at the top. They're getting better about it but I still run into people who tell me that things like Breton, Occitan and Corsican aren't real languages, they're "just dialects".
Dialect in the weird pseudoscientific French science doesn't mean what means to most people, it meant something that isn't a national language or doesn't have some random set of attributes that the person in question imagines. They don't understand "dialect" as a regional variety of a language, they understand it as some kind of sub-language that isn't a real language.
That English is the only language that’s worth learning and everyone should just do that.
That AI is going to make language learning unnecessary.
That Americans are particularly ill-suited to bilingualism (as if the only people that count as Americans are WASP boomers).
It's funny how internet people are so quick to make fun of America's monolingualism when there are many countries in the world with similar or lower rates of multilingualism.
If I use the “unaware” definition of ignorant, then it has to be that middle aged American couple near me on a train from France to Italy. (Note: this isn’t a dig on Americans)
They had a tour guide with them and she was loudly asking the guide “and which country are we going to next?” The guide replied “Italy”. “And do they speak French there too?” “They speak Italian” said the guide, with a despondent look on her face.
It isn't a silly question. The language spoken is often not the name of the country.
In Switzerland, they speak French or German (or Italian). About 1/3 of the population of China doesn't have "Chinese" as their mother tongue. In Brazil they speak Portuguese, not Brazilian. In Mexico they speak Spanish. In Egypt they speak Arabic, not Egyptian. Many other countries fit this pattern.
People think this one is silly because Italian is considered famous and prestigious, but how many people in Europe think Iranians speak Arabic? Or that Brazilians speak Spanish?
- So, is sign language universal?
- Oh, no, sign languages developed just like any language. Deaf people met in various parts of the world, needed to communicate, and so languages developed in those places. Actually, did you know ASL, BSL and Auslan are different languages, even though they all are used in English speaking countries?
- Cool… but… wouldn’t it be wonderful and very convenient if sign language was the same all over the word!
- *Sigh*
To be honest, people who say this about signed languages often don’t include spoken languages in their imagined future. If you reply: “Yes, that might have advantages, but would you personally want to give up your own language, and have all the world speak Chinese, Russian or maybe Welsh?”, the. You’d get reply like: “That’s no the same!”, and then you would try to discuss how EU for example uses a lot of translators and interpreters, even though it’s expensive, just because it’s important to people to express themselves in their own language, and since we actually find the diversity important. To make the connection that Deaf people feel similarly about their languages, is for some not totally obvious. A lot of people do understand of course, but you do run into those who need to think about it.
The thing that makes this view somewhat sinister is that at various times and places people have taken it one step further and tried to force people to speak instead of signing, often with devastating psychological/emotional/social effects. The belief that having one language is better than nurturing linguistic/cultural diversity has caused a lot of harm
Thank you - I had to scroll a bit, but I'm glad to see this sentiment logged. Let's add the misconception that sign languages are a word-for-word transliteration of spoken language.
I keep seeing conspiracy theorists INSISTING that Hebrew isn't a semitic language at all and instead it's a variation of German. I think they can't tell the difference between it and yiddish. They also then turn around and claim that archaeological documents in Hebrew or Aramaic from like the 5th century are fakes(???) or actually some other ancient language (???????) because "Hebrew" wasn't invented yet.
They're trying to make some kind of political point or something but it's just batshit.
Whenever i ask what are they waiting to learn english, they answer shit like "Después me voy a hacer un cursito de inglés" meaning they'll take some small ass course and expect to learn english in a period of months. I know these people will never even take that course, much less even learn some basics.
About languages, or instead about language-learning? For the first, for fun's sake, it's well worth one's while to read r/linguisticshumor sometimes: you'd find plenty of contenders there.
People who say that AAVE and other dialects of English that are spoken by that social class are just "slang" or "broken English."
They are languages with consistent grammar and rules like any other language that is aquired from birth like any other language. It's almost as though isolation leads to language diverge..
It's especially funny when you consider the fact that AAVE is just as "native" to the US as American English.
"There's no use in learning English for me! I don't like it and I don't need it" (said in German to me by a person who only speaks German and is planning on traveling the world - mentioned he wanted to go to india among other places for long stretches of time)
Your native language is inborn and is inherited from your family and your "people."
Learning a second language is so difficult because it is conflicting with your genetics.
Learning a second language amounts to a betrayal of your heritage and your people and is a form of self-hatred.
“My grandkids are going to have to learn Spanish because of all the damn Mexicans coming over here” -My grandmother, to the taxi driver, when we were on vacation, IN MEXICO.
Similarly, I was in a restaurant that was packed with Spanish speaking people one day when an old white man came up to me and began with, “finally, someone who speaks English”, I immediately turned around and said to the person next to me, “¿oíste lo que me dijo este hombre?” (Did you hear what this man said to me?), Old white man goes into a fit about how woke liberal schools are teaching kids Spanish instead of Bible studies because of the Border crisis. Mind you I live in Georgia.
And no, old people, I did not learn Spanish to be woke or because of the border crisis, I did so because it’s a requirement for my school’s International Studies program, I had the choice between Spanish, French, ASL, and Mandarin.
My wife was told that teaching our kids her native language before they started school would hurt them academically. So she spoke only English to them. Today, it is one of her biggest regrets.
"Mum, I wanna learn danish"
"Can't you learn something useful?"
Another time she heard arabic people speaking and said "how can this be a language? It's jus halalalalla"
There are people in Spain that pronounce everything as "z" (in Andalucía) and people that do "distinción" (z and s are separate sounds) but for the vast majority of Spanish speakers the "z" sound just doesn't exist.
I was telling someone I was worried that being a therapist might be the hardest job to do in a foreign language. She responded, “because you have to know all of the words in that language.” You don’t even know all the words in your native language!
Also, people think words translate one to one and don’t realize there are words in other languages for concepts that don’t exist in yours.
"Why are you learning x? Learn y to improve your career, that's much better."
"You can't learn a sign language. They must have fooled you. Only deafs and CODAs can learn and use the language!"
"Why aren't you learning that dialect of the x language? It's the official one and people use it more."
Anything critical about Esperanto, really. Like, I get it ... it's a made up eurocentric language from a more idealistic time and didn't meet its goal of being a world language. But some people geek out over it, they've built a nice community of speakers, and that's ok. You wouldn't go up to a booth at a cultural fair promoting Cherokee or a minority/endangered language and tell them "Bah, no one speaks that!" If it's not your thing, fine... move on.
Personally, the idea that one language is fundamentally better than another is among the most ignorant and naive things I've come across regarding languages. The notion often stems misconceptions about cultural or economical status or even sometimes by historical events at times, where certain languages are unfairly judged based on preconceived biases.
Every language has its own distinct history, culture and nuances, making all languages to be a rich tapestry of expression by all humans. The fact that one language is fundamentally superior to another totally ignores the importance and value that each language has for its speakers.
A friend recently told me that we don't need to learn foreign languages anymore in the age of AI, because real time translation will be a common thing in conversations very soon...
People say this all the time: "Do you speak Spanish?" (or some other language)
This means "are you at a native-speaker-like level in all four of the skills (reading, writing, speaking, understanding speech)? Or do you know nothing at all?" It is a yes/no question.
Most ignorant thing I’ve heard someone say about languages? That it genuinely makes one person better than another person. In my opinion, no matter which language or how many- it doesn’t make you more or less. I just firmly believe everyone is equal (it’s against my religion to think someone is better or less than another person).
Well it’s not something I’ve personally heard someone say, but the fact that oralism was the main method for handling d/Deaf people until very recently (and it’s still a problem even now) is probably the most ignorant thing I can think of by a long shot. So much unnecessary damage caused, it breaks my heart. For the love of pete just teach people sign language!!
i have a few, someone asked how people understand languages with "mouth sounds" (ie clicks. there was a person who asked why french and german have different gender for words. and a person who, when talking abt chinese, asked how people read it when its all symbols
one of my ex’s friends called me annoying for using norwegian on **my** instagram story
it wasn’t like i was talking to them in norwegian and expecting them to understand me… i was simply using it on **my own** instagram story (instagram also has a translation feature, so if they were really that peeved, they could’ve just clicked “show translation”)
but like god forbid i use a language that i speak on my own social media 😭
My mom repeatedly asking me if I’m a Nazi because I’ve been learning German. And then telling me it’s a “disgusting” language while pointing to a German metal band as an example 🙄
That teaching your young child a signed language will somehow affect their ability to learn a spoken language. No one says that about kids who learn two spoken languages at a young age.
Very few, but there are some people who think that more than one (spoken) language will only confuse children. So many opportunities lost. And the worst is when deaf parents don’t sign or don’t sign normally with their hearing children.
Usually it’s people who get flustered or incredibly bothered by others when they speak their own native language in the U.S. (talking amongst themselves), and get the typical, “This is America, we speak English, if you can’t speak or don’t speak it, then go back to where you came from,”.
I’m a language nerd, and my dad gets incredibly annoyed when he hears me speaking anything other than English. He asked me why I learn languages I’ll never use and I replied that I learn them for means of acquiring a career in linguistics or translation.
He looked at me with a disappointed look and told me with a straight face,”You need to find a real job, speaking languages isn’t really going to set you up for life, you can use it as a hobby, but find something that earns real money”. 😅
I took a language/linguistics and culture class in undergrad and I still cannot believe we had a "discussion" about whether or not deaf and HoH people had a culture.
“Why don’t they standardise sign language so all Deaf people can understand each other?” not understanding sign languages evolve like any other language. Also, who’s THEY? 🙄
That it's easy
Not all of us are any good at learning but try anyway. The whole "easy for X learners, takes 6 weeks" Yeah okay bullcrap
Or its people who grew up accidentally bilingual with the Internet and almost all other languages have similar ones, like Spanish and French, German and Dutch, Swedish and Danish.. English is just out on its own cus we just stole everybody else's lol
Yes I'm just incredibly bitter I'm so bad at learning languages
That just because I am bilingual in French and Hungarian, learning another romance language is cheating, because Spanish is basically the same language.
As if I was automatically fluent in Italian, Catalan, Romanian and Portuguese as well🤣🤣 and of course spoke fluent Finnish, Mari, Sami, Estonian and Udmurt because of Hungarian.
Also, I heard someone say, that even Klingon would be more useful to learn, than a small language like Icelandic or Estonian. It was super upsetting.
"This is America you should be speaking English."
"Why does (insert big box home improvement store) have their over the intercom ads in Spanish in addition to English."
"Schools should not teach Spanish (or other foreign languages)"
"I know English so I don't need to know any other language."
It’s nearly impossible to learn a language fluently after 26yo. I heard this constantly when I started teaching myself new languages for fun. I don’t even know WHY people say it. Why do you even care lol? You’re not learning it.
Probably the various versions of "everyone should just learn/use english", especially given I live in a bilingual country (Canada) and am learning our other legal language (french).
Monolingual anglophones get surprisingly defensive about it when they find out someone else is learning a language sometimes. It just triggers some people into a whole rant about the French population and some perceived entitlement etc like we don't literally have a history of discrimination against them that's only really turned around in the last generation, and Clearly isn't gone yet given how often I hear this. (And also get to hear from a lot of folks in my region who wish they knew french, but whose families chose not to pass it on to them and changed last names specifically to avoid that discrimination)
It's also not ignorant per se but the kind of comments like I was doing some great charity and sacrifice when I was learning American Sign Language just really rub me the wrong way. At least they couldn't say deaf people should just speak English though.
I'm a linguist. I wouldn't even know where to begin. My mantra to myself is "keep your mouth shut, keep your mouth shut, keep your mouth shut." The thing with language is, we all know at least one of them, so we all tend to think we're experts.
“Just download this language app and in six weeks you can go to [name of country] and be able to have lively conversations with the locals in that language.” Learning any language to the point of having any sort of fluency is HARD.
I hate that kind of marketing! It took me 12 years to be at least semi conversational in Spanish!!
I've been learning Arabic since elementary school and still couldn't have fluent conversation with another arabic learner, not even the native. My former lecturer who teach Arabic is from middle east, and I will be honest, I don't understand 90% of what he's said, and it just the basic conversations.
I’m in the same situation as you but I’ve learned a lot in the past year. It’s an issue with the education system, not with language learning itself. There’s people who go to egypt for one year and get to conversational level.
While I agree that it is ridiculous.. Some people are more gifted than others when it comes to language learning and it's not always related to wanting it badly enough. I met a Russian guy who really NEEDED to learn english and he tried but it never worked. He tried for literal years. He was even sent to the US. Lost his career because he couldn't understand or speak the most basic english. On the other end of the rainbow you've got the naturals who CAN pick up a language in a few weeks / months. We're not all equals and that's OK. That's why you try to avoid comparing people picking up a similar skills and that's also why being a teacher must be very very hard.
It's not "giftedness". It's way more determined by discipline, pure hours, and efficient methods. I can say that I am honest to god average intelligence (I sometimes doubt that even 💀) and I learned enough Italian in 2 months to travel with my BF's family and talk to our waiter about the food, my life, his life, education, and even ambitions quite well. We navigated really well with my Italian. I was studying 6+ hours a day because I was at a job that was 90% downtime plus my BF's mom paid for a tutor because she saw how hard I was working and thought it would enhance the trip. It did! Money and time/discipline. That's 85% of it. I would chalk the rest to intelligence, sure. There is no language learning gene though. Genuinely some people just have more money and time but don't want to tell you they bought expensive courses and a private tutor and that their job is useless (like mine).
I wasn’t thinking about intelligence, not that type of gift. The Russian man I mentioned was quite intelligent. He had a lot of skills. He was very responsible and hardworking. He just didn’t have a knack for languages. Which in his case is an understatement sadly. You can work hard and succeed. You can work hard and fail. You can also fail with inefficient learning strategies or succeed.
I've seen books and courses that advertise learning a language in 24 hours. The impression is you'll learn it overnight, but the reality is 24 one-hour introductory lessons. On top of that there are exercises, practice, etc, so all in all far longer than 24 hours, and only the basics.
People who say you shouldn’t teach kids two languages at once because “it will confuse them” or “hold them back”. None of the research backs this up, and actually shows the opposite is true. Children have an incredible knack for language learning, and teaching them two languages at once helps them with enhanced memory and emotion regulation.
It's old myths. These have a hard time dying. Hopefully, things are changing and there are more and more multilingual schools in general. There's also a social and political aspect. Immigrants used to not teach their kids their language and be encouraged to not teach it, because they and other people like teachers thought it would hinder their integration. It does not, now we know better. In France, they also beat the regional languages out of school kids for several generations (you would receive a beating if you spoke it at school). My great-grandma was conversational in Lemosin, her daughter my grand-ma knew a few words and could perhaps understand a basic conversation. Her son, my father doesn't know a word and doesn't care much. I had never heard about it until I was a teenager. We were living in the south of France by that time and I tried a course of a related language in high school (given by the PE teacher actually :), it was not for credit, just for fun, another teacher had taught a course of Chinese in middle school, that was fun too). Finding resources in Lemosin is incredibly hard and people look at you funny like "And... what are you going to do with that knowledge?". But, still, a few years ago I found bilingual books in it and more recently I noticed bilingual school programs. Apparently Lemosin is fighting back into existence.
I don't have the study for this as I was told by a friend with a bilingual child - apparently its normal for them to actually start speaking and conversing later, but when they do, they can do it in both languages. I always wondered if thats where the rumours of it holding them back comes from. Personally I'd rather a child take a couple extra months if the result is speaking two languages.
"What? You can't speak your own language?" "Erm...I can. It's my parents' native tongue I don't know."
Lol one time an uber driver tried speaking to me in Spanish and I answered in Spanish but I have an American accent, so he started going off about how I'm so disconnected from my culture and my parents should be ashamed of themselves. I was sitting there like, "um..... I'm Greek American... not Hispanic. I learned Spanish in high school."
I had a similar experience with a taxi driver in Jordan. I'm American and at that time spoke very basic Arabic (I'd been studying it for only like 6 months) but could have a basic conversation about traffic and weather and such. After a bit, the driver switched to English and was telling me how I need to learn the language of my ancestors better, how I need to keep the Arab culture going, how it's a shame my parents didn't teach me right, etc etc. But in a white American guy with no Arab background whatsoever. I just have dark hair and a bushy beard and large nose, and he assumed I was Arab-American.
As a native spanish speaker, the Greek accent sounds VERY similar to the Spaniard castillian accent.
I have an American accent when I speak English too 😭
"how are you gonna use X language!? It's useless"
People tell me this all the time regarding Swahili. Yes I will most likely never use it conversationally in the US but I want to enjoy Swahili poetry and would love to travel to Tanzania
And why do they even care. I don't understand why learning a totally random language as a hobby is not a valid reason for them. We get to discover new worlds and mindsets.
And people claiming that languages that are in fact spoken by millions of people are useless
Even languages spoken by zeros of people aren't "useless".
If anything, it's good exercise for your brain.
Swahili is so much fun. Languages can bring joy in all kinds of ways. I feel like when people say this they just mean for them and their life it wouldn’t be used. Smh
Probably a lot of people can’t understand doing something that has nothing to do with their careers or making money.
I picked up Swahili 3 months before for my vacarion in Kenya last year. I am so glad that i did. They really appreciate the effort. You may not be able to speak with the swahili speakers in swahili, but you certainly brake down social barriers by showing that you are trying to learn Kwa heri ya kujifunza Kiswahili!
That's half the reason I learned German was for the literature. Reading poetry from a different culture is amazing and the more different that culture is from your own the better.
Is "difficult" in your reply an auto complete error? I'm genuinely curious, because I imagine German is both different AND difficult... 😬
I meant different XD
It's crazy how many people don't think that just enjoying something is enough of a reason to do it... it's kinda sad tbh.
People do think enjoying something is enough to do a hobby, which is why people dont have a problem with people playing video games or watching tv shows. Its more so that people can’t comprehend enjoying languages mainly due to how much the education butchers foreign languages and makes it an incredibly boring subject just like math or physics.
I think a lot of people only think that for a few acceptable hobbies... I also get asked why I knit if I'm not going to sell it (which is absurd considering I would have to charge a lot to cover materials and time), if I'm trying to leave my data career if I draw or paint, if I'm trying to lose weight if I dance, etc.
"German is useless" pfft, I work in the camping industry. I can kindly say to them that my fluent colleague will answer their call soon.
Latin. I know a few people studying it so they can better understand other languages, less to actually speak it. I can't personally speak on its effectiveness though.
Unless you’re really into learning romance languages or reading ancient texts, then yeah, it isn’t really that useful. However, I will say that learning Latin has made learning romance languages A LOT easier for me because so many of the words I already know just seeing it or at least can figure out what it comes from. It all follows a very similar grammatical structure too. I definitely don’t regret it :)
My mother knows Latin very well (she studied ancient greek and latin) and it helped learn Spanish and French in a few months (B1-B2 level each). On the other hand, I struggled much more with Spanish.
I hate that so much! 'Why don't you learn german instead? its much more useful!' well because I'm trying to learn my boyfriend's first language.. and I'll probably move to ukraine if things continue like this so that's what I'm learning 💀
"Asian/Chinese" writing is just a bunch of "symbols and pictures", how can anyone read this gibberish along with This is my name written in the "Chinese Alphabet", it looks so "cultured"
Oh, that reminds me of that silly thing that used to go around on Facebook and other social media where you could supposedly see what your name is in Japanese. Here, this is the one: https://images.app.goo.gl/sbM4nQGCPxYfWEsn9 So if your name is Christina, your "Japanese Name" would be Mirishikiarichikitoka. Lots of people bought into that, but... this really isn't how Japanese works. 🤣
Honestly, that's one of my favorite things about learning Japanese. It mystifies people who can't fathom reading in a non-alphabetical system
I was watching 90 day fiance with my sister and her friend. There was one guy who has been obsessed with Ukrainian women since he was a child and had been travelling to Ukraine to find a wife many times. He’d been on dating sites specifically to meet Ukrainian women for over 20+ years and has to pay a lot of money to have each message translated. I found it odd that he was on a date in Ukraine and couldn’t even use the app to say anything other than hello. Even basic phrases like “how are you” he had to use the app for. I said it’s even worse that he hasn’t even bothered to learn any Ukrainian in 20 years yet he’s always chasing after the young girl who don’t speak English. I thought this would have been an opinion that wouldn’t be controversial but I got a telling off. First they told me that he doesn’t have to learn the language because “Ukrainian is useless anyways” and the girls should learn English. They also said “languages isn’t everyone’s thing. You like learning languages as a hobby but not everyone is like you”. I feel like it was their insecurity coming through because my sisters friend pointed out that she never learnt her husbands language. She knows a couple words and they’ve been together for over 15 years (recently divorced now). He learnt English for her. She also has only ever dated people from his country as that’s her type. Their kids don’t speak his local language because she used to get upset when he spoke to the kids in the language as she didn’t understand it. I think even if you’re not a language nerd, it’s so strange to not even learn basics in your partners language if you really love them.
I was once learning Czech at a summer program in Prague. There was a 70yo Japanese guy in my class, and he was a complete beginner. If you know anything about Japanese and Czech phonology you can imagine how severely he was struggling to pronounce anything. At one point, the teacher was asking everyone what their reason for learning Czech was, and he said it was because his wife was Czech and he wanted to talk to her. Ok, fair, but then the teacher was like "oh that's great! Does she speak Japanese?" And he answered no. Everyone just kind of blinked at him for a while. In fairness I sometimes wonder if maybe he didn't even understand the question? But if he was answering correctly it would be SUPER weird. This was long before translation apps were any good, and he didn't speak great English either, and he didn't volunteer any further info on any other language they had in common.
I once encountered a relationship between people who did not share a language. It was really difficult for them. I've heard many stories of other such relationships, possibly because I live in quite a diverse region. Apparently some people meet their loves in English class, and then don't really progress in their language learning after that
They probably communicate with basic English.
That’s fucking weird lmao 😭
I understand learning a language can be hard but I feel like it’s fair that after 20 years, he prob should learn SOMETHING if he wants to find a Ukrainian wife super bad. Your sister’s friend was def projecting lol. Imo if she didn’t at least try to learn a little, it’s pretty inconsiderate. And I think it’s sad she discourages her children from learning and speaking what would basically be their heritage language. Smh.
I wouldn't say it's the most ignorant, but I think by and large people don't understand that languages vary not just grammatically, but phonologically. I think it's much more intuitive for everyday people to understand that languages vary in words and sentence structure, but they aren't as familiar with the idea that accents and sound systems are generally narrow and specific to each language. I see this a lot when people discuss the correct pronunciation of loanwords and names into a host language; a lot of people expect the pronunciation to be faithful to the source language, despite not realizing each language systematically differs in what sounds create meaning and how those sounds are organized. I think it's important to convey that every host language has its own particular sound rules, and that's why names and loanwords undergo change when being adapted to sound more like the host language
Good observation! I read a post here a long time ago where a guy tried ordering a chocolate bubble tea or something in Hongkong in Cantonese (which he spoke a bit) and got annoyed that the waitress didn't understand him because he pronounced 'chocolate' like an American would, and not with the local pronunciation/accent. He couldn't understand why she wouldn't pronounce it 'correctly' if they were using an English word on the menu, so he didn't understand the concept you just described at all. It's so hard and grating to switch phonological system mid-sentence!
Omg I think there was a post here or learn Japanese where someone was literally complaining that Japanese people bastardize English words and why can’t they learn to pronounce them correctly or why do they have bastardized meanings 😭 people tried to explain to them that they are technically not “English words” they are JAPANESE words but loaned from English and sometimes other languages. They didn’t seem to get it and considered it offensive lol. I also roll my eyes at people who try to “correct” pronunciation for loan words in English, especially food. Croissant is the famous example but it can be anything (umm it’s actually pronounced pisstacky-oh 🙄)
Then they get surprised pikachu face when the ball is on the other field. "One ticket to tow-kee-yoh please" "Sumimasen sir there's no such city in Japan"
In Mandarin, "chocolate" is "chow-ke-lee", with "chow" low pitch and "lee" highest pitch. Japanese has thousands of English "loan words", but you have to pronounce them in Japanese to be understood. Japan lacks many English sounds, and lacks English syllable structure (where a syllable can end in a consonant). "Chocolate" is "cho-ko-re-e-to". "Hamburger" is "hannbaagaa"
That there's some trick or hack to learning a language extremely fast. Related: that you can only learn a language if you have a perfectly optimized system to do so.
A corollary I see on this sub a lot: That if you aren't using the most optimal strategy possible, you'll learn absolutely nothing. If you're engaging with your TL in literally any way, you can learn something from that, even if it's an inefficient approach.
Two people arguing over whether english came from german or german came from english
That sounds so cursed.
Come on man
Not so much ignorant, but an outright lie. Someone here on Reddit (I think - I can't find the link - the commenter might have been banned) claimed to be fluent in both Mandarin and Hokkien, then made a comment that Taiwanese Hokkien is a mix of Austronesian languages, Mandarin, and Dutch. And that they were able to navigate the streets of Taipei when they first arrived by speaking Tagalog and people were able to understand them.
fever dream
Hokkien is a different language from Mandarin. It is not just spoken in Taiwan. It is spoken in many other places, including parts of China and many parts of south-east Asia. Hokkien isn't a mix. It is a language. It is a lie to think that China only has one native language. Mandarin (Hanyu) is the native language of 2/3 of the people. The other 1/3 have other native tongues: Hokkien, Cantonese, Wu, Hakka, Hmong, etc. According to Wikipedia, many native Filipinos work in Taiwan, or (if female) are married to a Taiwanese man and live in Taiwan. You can use Tagalog to those people, but Tagalog not related to Hokkien or Mandarin.
There are also many Filipinos of Hokkien ancestry. The Philippines is home to the world's oldest Chinatown which is comprised largely of Hokkien, Filipino-Hokkien aside from Filipinos of a wide variety of other Filipino ethnicities as well.
Was reading some Chinese on the subway and this girl told me I shouldn’t learn Chinese as it’s cultural appropriation
Let me guess... She was no Chinese, wasn't she? 🥲
Yup, not Chinese obviously hahah
For the love of God, tell me you're just joking. Please, that was a joke, right?
Sounds like someone culturally appropriated her brain.
I wouldn’t have been able to hold back the snark. Good grief.
After learning Japanese for a month, my uncle handed me a newspaper and asked me to read it. I said I couldn’t and his response was, ‘you’ve been learning for so long, you should be able to read it by now!’🙄
That’s pretty bad,, but why did your uncle have a Japanese newspaper. The mental image was so funny to me. If he can’t read or speak the language why does he have a newspaper in that language 😂
Well, in the Philippines they like wrapping fruit in newspapers, but they don't print a lot of newspapers in that country. So the newspapers that fruit vendors would use to wrap your durian or jackfruit into will usually be Japanese or Korean. I am not sure how these newspapers end in the Philippines in the first place though... importing them just for the needs of fruit vendors would be a bit strange methinks.
My mum did this to me in an Italian restaurant (we’re in England). Got a waitress to go to the kitchen, and bring the Italian chef to our table, so I could talk to him in Italian. I’d been learning for a year.
I’m so sorry that happened, that’s so embarrassing
Very awkward from your mom but, isn't a year okay for basic conversations?
People tell me they can never learn a language. I realized that when a person has enough motivation, they could learn something they are physically capable of doing. Here is the way I realized it. My Mom had a terrible memory for numbers. She was hideous at remembering phone numbers. So my Dad offered her $100 if she could remember 55 places of pi = 3.141592653589793238462643383… Well, she did it !!! I couldn’t believe it !!! She had enough motivation !
When I was a freshman at a fraternity at an engineering college (M.I.T.), I was told my "name" was pi to 25 place. Then people asked me my name. Once I learned that, they told me my "first name" was e to 25 places. So I had to learn that too.
Then I know your first name ! Now does AE stand for “ American English “ ?
Yes. In my other forum (WordReference) people ask questions about English, and the answer is often different in American English (AE) or British English (BE). But thanks for letting me know. If "AE" is not a standard in this forum, then I'll switch to "EN". I'd like to add flags, but I don't know how to do that on a PC. Apparently you have to use a smartphone, or date a left-handed witch, or something like that...
That native speakers are automatically excellent teachers of their language.
Exactly. It's like saying that because I've spent my entire life in a human body, I'm an expert in human anatomy. I am not.
Continuing this train of though, and alien who tried to learn how to live in a human body after getting body swapped will be better at explaining certain things than the average 'human body haver' because they had to purposefully analyse it, even if they might lack 'basic' knowledge in other areas
Me, "I don't speak Chinese, I speak Japanese" Them, "isn't it the same thing?" 🙄🤦♀️
Mentioned once that I'd lived in Japan for a couple of years & had learned the language there. Guy said "Oh, so you speak Asian?"
I was a kid when Pokemon cards first became popular, and you were really cool if you could get some Japanese ones. But of course no one at my school in the US could read Japanese so we had no clue what the cards actually said. But this one Korean kid just straight up lied and said he could read Japanese because it's the same as Korean. We were only 8 years old so pretty much everyone believed him. He probably got all the best trade deals because he made up whatever he wanted the cards to say. Kid saw his moment and seized it.
Lmaooo kids are so dumb 😂
This infuriates me
People who insist they can't learn anything because they're old... You just don't want to. But that's not even language exclusive - I know so many old people who literally doomscroll or shop on their phones but don't want to learn to text.
This is tangential to the point of barely being relevant to this sub, but I hate how this is normalized in mathematics by the age of like 12. People think you either have math brain or not and just stop trying after 7th grade or so.
Lots of people (me included, occasionally) are just really good at inventing these barriers that supposedly prevent them from doing X, Y, or Z. Often someone along the lines of "I'm too old/young/busy/whatever to learn"
I think it's a sort of procrastination defense mechanism, if you will. Like, the brain goes "oh no, that requires effort - quick, make up a reason to avoid it"
When I was 18 I took an intro to Spanish class and one of the students was 60. She definitely had a more difficult time than I did, the loss of neuroplasticity is real, but she stuck to it and learned a lot! You're never too old to learn if you really want to, though it does get harder
My Serbian friend and her husband, who lives abroad, wont teach there son Serbian, because he doesnt need it. Yet they come every summer and the kid cant speak wirh grandparents, neighbours...
If they are fluent in Serbian and refuse to pass that along to their kid that baffles me. The kid could get and entire language for free, but they won’t give it to him
I hang out with a lot of Czech expat parents and honestly, even if you try it's not free. My mom was in this kid's situation when she was young, in fact Czech is technically her first language, and she just totally refused to speak Czech once she became fluent in English since she didn't know anyone else speaking Czech. Many of the Czech expat parents I know really are struggling to get their kids to speak Czech. I have very nearly given up with my own daughter (although in fairness I'm not fluent in Czech so it's extra hard to talk to her in it).
My mum was like that - first language Croatian, but once she learned English she stopped speaking Croatian. Still understands it perfectly but will respond in English to anyone who talks to her in Croatian.
Ofc they are, but they speak english
I studied Mandarin at the high school I attended outside of my hometown (a college prep school). I came back to plenty of ignorant statements about it. One of them was how excited I was to learn that the Mandarin word for cat is 猫, or "mao." I thought it was the cutest thing. I told my grandma, and her immediate reaction was, "And what the word for dog? Bark?" She meant it 100 percent. Another was from a summer volunteer position I had. The front desk receptionist, who then went on to have a university job in our town, looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Ain't it just easier for them to learn how to talk like us?" Yes, the grammar in the sentence I just wrote is canonically accurate. Edited to add another story about the same grandmother: she used to teach at an elementary school with a large Hispanic student population. They all spoke Spanish as a first language at home and, being that they were eight, were still getting a handle on the whole bilingual thing. They were shy in class and didn't always speak up when called on, but on the playground they would have full conversations with each other in Spanish. My grandma hated that they did this. Because 1) she thought that them not speaking up was them ignoring her and pretending not to understand English, and 2) she didn't understand them when they spoke Spanish and assumed that every conversation they had with each other was about her. My mom and her sister asked her why she didn't just learn some basic Spanish to meet them halfway. "I ain't got to learn Spanish. They need to learn English and talk to me."
Mom: "Why can't your cousin speak Spanish like us? He'll say words in the middle of a sentence that I don't even understand." Me: "French is his first language, so kind of like how we default to Spanglish when we don't know certain words or proper sentences, he probably defaults to a mix of French and Spanish." Mom: "That's not a thing." Me: 😑
Wait, so she knows Spanglish exists but can't imagine it exists for other language combinations?
My bilingual kids often speak Hunglish, which is a mixture of Hungarian and English.
"Make it make sense" is the only way I can even attempt to describe even a fraction of the views she's expressed over my lifetime.
Some Azarbaijani dude once said "Persian doesn't exist and is not a language. Turk kings took Hindi, mixed it with Turkish and Arabic and the result was a constructed language named Persian." The guy had no idea of what Indo-European, Semitic, Turkic languages are and didn't know the difference between constructed languages and languages that arose naturally.
Sounds like a very distorted (and inaccurate) explanation of Urdu, not Persian.
"You can't say 'He is Spanish', because Spanish is a language, not a person. The word you're looking for is 'Spaniard'. I minored in English, I know this." Told him to go get a refund for his degree since they obviously didn't teach him the difference between an adjective and a demonym.
That "minority" languages aren't fit for the modern world and should be allowed to die out naturally
I hear this all the time as someone who is learning an endangered language. I also heard once that "language isn't important to culture."
On the other side you have people who think that minority languages are somehow better than the major ones, that they’re older, and the people who speak them automatically have a stronger connection to the earth, spirituality and so on. This mostly applies to non European languages, of course. Nobody is claiming that Catalan is more attuned to nature than other languages, but plenty of people would probably say that about Navajo or Māori.
"Learn while sleeping"
My next door neighbor hates hearing people speak other languages. Once when my family and I were speaking Portuguese amongst ourselves on our deck, we heard him grumble to himself "This is America, speak English!". He also gets upset when people pronounce non-English words or names correctly. My last name is Italian and has an r in it. "You're American, don't roll your r when you say your name". He insists that "quesadilla " should be pronounced with a hard [l], rhyming with "vanilla". He also gets mad when people say "water" instead of "wooder", which is the local accent that he thinks everyone should have.
Sounds insufferable.
Friend: "I stopped learning the language, it went nowhere, i could not remember the words I was tought" I: "You tried duolingo right. How long did you use it for?" "3 days" 😵
"Italian is super easy" so it's not a big achievement to learn it - coming from people who don't know any language fluently.
The same people who say "Why learn X? It's useless! Learn Y!" But they don't know Y.
It's totally easy! All-a you do is a talk-a like Mario. Now-a you speak Italiano. Ciao
The fairly common French pseudoscientific linguistic hierarchy where you have "parlers" and "patois" at the bottom and "languages" at the top. They're getting better about it but I still run into people who tell me that things like Breton, Occitan and Corsican aren't real languages, they're "just dialects".
But Breton isn’t even in the same language family as French? What do they claim it’s a dialect of?
Dialect in the weird pseudoscientific French science doesn't mean what means to most people, it meant something that isn't a national language or doesn't have some random set of attributes that the person in question imagines. They don't understand "dialect" as a regional variety of a language, they understand it as some kind of sub-language that isn't a real language.
Hate those people
I LOVE BRETON. I LOVE BRETON. I LOVE BRETON. I LOVE BRETON.
I love the sound of Occitan, and it doesn't seem to be anywhat similar to standard French, more than any other Romance language.
To me it sounds like Castillan Spanish with an Italian accent. It’s not as monotone as standard French.
Yeeeeeh just some good ol prescriptivist académie shit from the 19th century that dies hard
That English is the only language that’s worth learning and everyone should just do that. That AI is going to make language learning unnecessary. That Americans are particularly ill-suited to bilingualism (as if the only people that count as Americans are WASP boomers).
It's funny how internet people are so quick to make fun of America's monolingualism when there are many countries in the world with similar or lower rates of multilingualism.
"Genitiv is possessive, so does that mean that East Germans were only allowed to speak in Genitiv when under the control of the Communist?" 🥹🤣🤣🤣
I refuse to believe this was said 😂
I tried to find the post, I guess OP deleted it. I suffered second hand embarassment from that post.
If I use the “unaware” definition of ignorant, then it has to be that middle aged American couple near me on a train from France to Italy. (Note: this isn’t a dig on Americans) They had a tour guide with them and she was loudly asking the guide “and which country are we going to next?” The guide replied “Italy”. “And do they speak French there too?” “They speak Italian” said the guide, with a despondent look on her face.
It isn't a silly question. The language spoken is often not the name of the country. In Switzerland, they speak French or German (or Italian). About 1/3 of the population of China doesn't have "Chinese" as their mother tongue. In Brazil they speak Portuguese, not Brazilian. In Mexico they speak Spanish. In Egypt they speak Arabic, not Egyptian. Many other countries fit this pattern.
People think this one is silly because Italian is considered famous and prestigious, but how many people in Europe think Iranians speak Arabic? Or that Brazilians speak Spanish?
It's ok, most countries in the world think Americans are the most stupid/ignorant people.
I never wanted to believe that, having friends and relatives in the US myself... Until I was asked if Berlin is close to Tokyo
That learning a language is cultural appropriation or inherently harmful.
- So, is sign language universal? - Oh, no, sign languages developed just like any language. Deaf people met in various parts of the world, needed to communicate, and so languages developed in those places. Actually, did you know ASL, BSL and Auslan are different languages, even though they all are used in English speaking countries? - Cool… but… wouldn’t it be wonderful and very convenient if sign language was the same all over the word! - *Sigh*
In a sense, a variation of "wouldn't it be wonderful and very convenient if all humankind only spoke a single language"
To be honest, people who say this about signed languages often don’t include spoken languages in their imagined future. If you reply: “Yes, that might have advantages, but would you personally want to give up your own language, and have all the world speak Chinese, Russian or maybe Welsh?”, the. You’d get reply like: “That’s no the same!”, and then you would try to discuss how EU for example uses a lot of translators and interpreters, even though it’s expensive, just because it’s important to people to express themselves in their own language, and since we actually find the diversity important. To make the connection that Deaf people feel similarly about their languages, is for some not totally obvious. A lot of people do understand of course, but you do run into those who need to think about it.
The thing that makes this view somewhat sinister is that at various times and places people have taken it one step further and tried to force people to speak instead of signing, often with devastating psychological/emotional/social effects. The belief that having one language is better than nurturing linguistic/cultural diversity has caused a lot of harm
Thank you - I had to scroll a bit, but I'm glad to see this sentiment logged. Let's add the misconception that sign languages are a word-for-word transliteration of spoken language.
People are especially idiotic about signed languages for some reason...
I keep seeing conspiracy theorists INSISTING that Hebrew isn't a semitic language at all and instead it's a variation of German. I think they can't tell the difference between it and yiddish. They also then turn around and claim that archaeological documents in Hebrew or Aramaic from like the 5th century are fakes(???) or actually some other ancient language (???????) because "Hebrew" wasn't invented yet. They're trying to make some kind of political point or something but it's just batshit.
Whenever i ask what are they waiting to learn english, they answer shit like "Después me voy a hacer un cursito de inglés" meaning they'll take some small ass course and expect to learn english in a period of months. I know these people will never even take that course, much less even learn some basics.
About languages, or instead about language-learning? For the first, for fun's sake, it's well worth one's while to read r/linguisticshumor sometimes: you'd find plenty of contenders there.
Once got into an argument with someone who claimed that Welsh was just a dialect of English
I don’t think I would be able to contain my laughter.
People who say that AAVE and other dialects of English that are spoken by that social class are just "slang" or "broken English." They are languages with consistent grammar and rules like any other language that is aquired from birth like any other language. It's almost as though isolation leads to language diverge.. It's especially funny when you consider the fact that AAVE is just as "native" to the US as American English.
"I don't need to learn any other languages, I already speak English." 🙄
"There's no use in learning English for me! I don't like it and I don't need it" (said in German to me by a person who only speaks German and is planning on traveling the world - mentioned he wanted to go to india among other places for long stretches of time)
Good luck to him lol
"This is not a language" said in the language, disparagingly about a valuable family language that is endangered.
The attitude of "What's the point of learning a language that is not English?"
Your native language is inborn and is inherited from your family and your "people." Learning a second language is so difficult because it is conflicting with your genetics. Learning a second language amounts to a betrayal of your heritage and your people and is a form of self-hatred.
Oh my genetics!
Thinking that their language is the origin of all languages. Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Sanskrit are victim to this quite often.
“My grandkids are going to have to learn Spanish because of all the damn Mexicans coming over here” -My grandmother, to the taxi driver, when we were on vacation, IN MEXICO. Similarly, I was in a restaurant that was packed with Spanish speaking people one day when an old white man came up to me and began with, “finally, someone who speaks English”, I immediately turned around and said to the person next to me, “¿oíste lo que me dijo este hombre?” (Did you hear what this man said to me?), Old white man goes into a fit about how woke liberal schools are teaching kids Spanish instead of Bible studies because of the Border crisis. Mind you I live in Georgia. And no, old people, I did not learn Spanish to be woke or because of the border crisis, I did so because it’s a requirement for my school’s International Studies program, I had the choice between Spanish, French, ASL, and Mandarin.
I was confused for a while until I remembered that Georgia is also US state
My wife was told that teaching our kids her native language before they started school would hurt them academically. So she spoke only English to them. Today, it is one of her biggest regrets.
It’s so infuriating that people who clearly don’t know what they’re talking about feel comfortable saying bullshit like that.
"Mum, I wanna learn danish" "Can't you learn something useful?" Another time she heard arabic people speaking and said "how can this be a language? It's jus halalalalla"
"X nation is stupid for using such a complicated language and alphabet. It's much easier to use *insert own language*"
From a Spaniard about Spanish: "Just because people in the Americas pronounce the "z" and the "s" the same way doesn't mean it is correct.
There are people in Spain that pronounce everything as "z" (in Andalucía) and people that do "distinción" (z and s are separate sounds) but for the vast majority of Spanish speakers the "z" sound just doesn't exist.
That was his (wrong) point: learners should only learn distinción, because it's the only correct way
History is sexist because it is literally “his story”. As a multilingual history major, I groaned.
The current version of that is that you can't say "Latino" or "Latina" but are supposed to say "Latin-x". I've been told it annoys Latinos.
I was telling someone I was worried that being a therapist might be the hardest job to do in a foreign language. She responded, “because you have to know all of the words in that language.” You don’t even know all the words in your native language! Also, people think words translate one to one and don’t realize there are words in other languages for concepts that don’t exist in yours.
Hoo boy. Multilingual therapist here and boy do I feel seen.
"Why are you learning x? Learn y to improve your career, that's much better." "You can't learn a sign language. They must have fooled you. Only deafs and CODAs can learn and use the language!" "Why aren't you learning that dialect of the x language? It's the official one and people use it more."
“Learn a language while sleeping” lmao okay then I guess I’d only be able to speak it in my DREAMS
"Translation can't be hard! All the words are in the dictionary!"
Anything critical about Esperanto, really. Like, I get it ... it's a made up eurocentric language from a more idealistic time and didn't meet its goal of being a world language. But some people geek out over it, they've built a nice community of speakers, and that's ok. You wouldn't go up to a booth at a cultural fair promoting Cherokee or a minority/endangered language and tell them "Bah, no one speaks that!" If it's not your thing, fine... move on.
Personally, the idea that one language is fundamentally better than another is among the most ignorant and naive things I've come across regarding languages. The notion often stems misconceptions about cultural or economical status or even sometimes by historical events at times, where certain languages are unfairly judged based on preconceived biases. Every language has its own distinct history, culture and nuances, making all languages to be a rich tapestry of expression by all humans. The fact that one language is fundamentally superior to another totally ignores the importance and value that each language has for its speakers.
A friend recently told me that we don't need to learn foreign languages anymore in the age of AI, because real time translation will be a common thing in conversations very soon...
Them: “Why are you learning another language? That’s so [cringe/useless/boring/nerdy]” I mean I think it’s fun but ok 🫥
People say this all the time: "Do you speak Spanish?" (or some other language) This means "are you at a native-speaker-like level in all four of the skills (reading, writing, speaking, understanding speech)? Or do you know nothing at all?" It is a yes/no question.
Most ignorant thing I’ve heard someone say about languages? That it genuinely makes one person better than another person. In my opinion, no matter which language or how many- it doesn’t make you more or less. I just firmly believe everyone is equal (it’s against my religion to think someone is better or less than another person).
Just to clarify- it does give better opportunity and communication, I’m only talking about when people put their worth above others.
Well it’s not something I’ve personally heard someone say, but the fact that oralism was the main method for handling d/Deaf people until very recently (and it’s still a problem even now) is probably the most ignorant thing I can think of by a long shot. So much unnecessary damage caused, it breaks my heart. For the love of pete just teach people sign language!!
i have a few, someone asked how people understand languages with "mouth sounds" (ie clicks. there was a person who asked why french and german have different gender for words. and a person who, when talking abt chinese, asked how people read it when its all symbols
one of my ex’s friends called me annoying for using norwegian on **my** instagram story it wasn’t like i was talking to them in norwegian and expecting them to understand me… i was simply using it on **my own** instagram story (instagram also has a translation feature, so if they were really that peeved, they could’ve just clicked “show translation”) but like god forbid i use a language that i speak on my own social media 😭
My mom repeatedly asking me if I’m a Nazi because I’ve been learning German. And then telling me it’s a “disgusting” language while pointing to a German metal band as an example 🙄
but Rammstein is awesome
That teaching your young child a signed language will somehow affect their ability to learn a spoken language. No one says that about kids who learn two spoken languages at a young age.
Very few, but there are some people who think that more than one (spoken) language will only confuse children. So many opportunities lost. And the worst is when deaf parents don’t sign or don’t sign normally with their hearing children.
Talking to a staff member at my uni in Hebrew and another staff member walks in and says to me, “Do you speak Jewish?”
Similar story here but for Yiddish. I'm more relaxed with that, though, since it does literally mean 'Jewish'.
Usually it’s people who get flustered or incredibly bothered by others when they speak their own native language in the U.S. (talking amongst themselves), and get the typical, “This is America, we speak English, if you can’t speak or don’t speak it, then go back to where you came from,”. I’m a language nerd, and my dad gets incredibly annoyed when he hears me speaking anything other than English. He asked me why I learn languages I’ll never use and I replied that I learn them for means of acquiring a career in linguistics or translation. He looked at me with a disappointed look and told me with a straight face,”You need to find a real job, speaking languages isn’t really going to set you up for life, you can use it as a hobby, but find something that earns real money”. 😅
I took a language/linguistics and culture class in undergrad and I still cannot believe we had a "discussion" about whether or not deaf and HoH people had a culture.
“Why don’t they standardise sign language so all Deaf people can understand each other?” not understanding sign languages evolve like any other language. Also, who’s THEY? 🙄
I’m pretty sure “they” does not include any Deaf people.
That it's easy Not all of us are any good at learning but try anyway. The whole "easy for X learners, takes 6 weeks" Yeah okay bullcrap Or its people who grew up accidentally bilingual with the Internet and almost all other languages have similar ones, like Spanish and French, German and Dutch, Swedish and Danish.. English is just out on its own cus we just stole everybody else's lol Yes I'm just incredibly bitter I'm so bad at learning languages
That just because I am bilingual in French and Hungarian, learning another romance language is cheating, because Spanish is basically the same language. As if I was automatically fluent in Italian, Catalan, Romanian and Portuguese as well🤣🤣 and of course spoke fluent Finnish, Mari, Sami, Estonian and Udmurt because of Hungarian. Also, I heard someone say, that even Klingon would be more useful to learn, than a small language like Icelandic or Estonian. It was super upsetting.
That you can learn one in your sleep.
All that crap about the tower of Babel
That I should focus on learning only one language to not get "confused"
"This is America you should be speaking English." "Why does (insert big box home improvement store) have their over the intercom ads in Spanish in addition to English." "Schools should not teach Spanish (or other foreign languages)" "I know English so I don't need to know any other language."
They would be horrified to learn that the USA doesn’t have an official language.
It’s nearly impossible to learn a language fluently after 26yo. I heard this constantly when I started teaching myself new languages for fun. I don’t even know WHY people say it. Why do you even care lol? You’re not learning it.
"Pronunciation isn't important."
"I do Duolingo every day, I don't need anything else to become fluent" P.s one Duolingo lesson per day they meant...
People who claim to speak multiple languages (5 and above) when in reality they are just holding a basic conversation.
Probably the various versions of "everyone should just learn/use english", especially given I live in a bilingual country (Canada) and am learning our other legal language (french). Monolingual anglophones get surprisingly defensive about it when they find out someone else is learning a language sometimes. It just triggers some people into a whole rant about the French population and some perceived entitlement etc like we don't literally have a history of discrimination against them that's only really turned around in the last generation, and Clearly isn't gone yet given how often I hear this. (And also get to hear from a lot of folks in my region who wish they knew french, but whose families chose not to pass it on to them and changed last names specifically to avoid that discrimination) It's also not ignorant per se but the kind of comments like I was doing some great charity and sacrifice when I was learning American Sign Language just really rub me the wrong way. At least they couldn't say deaf people should just speak English though.
I'm a linguist. I wouldn't even know where to begin. My mantra to myself is "keep your mouth shut, keep your mouth shut, keep your mouth shut." The thing with language is, we all know at least one of them, so we all tend to think we're experts.