My hovercraft is full of eels
September 15, 2021 10:30 AM   Subscribe

How to Say What You Need to Say in Another Language. "You know those language textbook dialogues? Where people seem to talk more about silverware (“the fork, the knife”) and what color things are more than any real person ever does and, having mastered these locutions, you get off the plane in a place where the language is spoken and can barely figure out how to say, “How do I get outside?”"

"Plus you need to be able to get past feeling that actual speakers of the language talk too fast. There are no spaces between words in spoken language, and sentences go by in a stream. But this is no more “too fast” than the sky is too blue. Humans don’t express themselves in carefully paced nuggets of speech. To be able to handle a language means dealing with that reality.

The issue is the intermediate level. What do you do after you’ve done a program that gets you started and takes you through the basic level, like Duolingo or Babbel (or my favorite, less known in the United States, Assimil)? You can take a class, but suppose you want to do it yourself? How do you get past “My cousin has a house” and “I see seven pens”?"
posted by storybored (117 comments total) 49 users marked this as a favorite
 
For optimal utility, the best phrase to learn in any language is "I'm sorry."
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:37 AM on September 15, 2021 [23 favorites]


In the early-90s, while vacationing at a friend of a friend's beautiful villa on the coast north of Puerto Vallarta, I found a mid-60s phrase book on the bookshelf in the back bedroom.

One of the things it taught was how to say, "Aluminum is a very nice metal," in Spanish.

Although I don't remember the Spanish translation, my wife and I still say the phrase to each other from time-to-time.
posted by bz at 10:41 AM on September 15, 2021 [25 favorites]


For optimal utility, the best phrase to learn in any language is "I'm sorry."

Hello, how do you say, and thank you.
posted by aniola at 10:46 AM on September 15, 2021 [9 favorites]


El aluminio es un metal muy agradable?

(arrepentido)
posted by sammyo at 10:53 AM on September 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


"I can eat glass, it doesn't hurt me." It has been translated into 150 languages here.

Why? Use of any phrase from a phrasebook marks you as a tourist, so you will be treated with contempt. Declaring "I can eat glass, it doesn't hurt me" is bizarre, but something a tourist is unlikely to say. The danger here is that you might be taken to be some sort of performance artist, but even that is one rung above tourist.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:54 AM on September 15, 2021 [17 favorites]


And if you need a less useful phrase in a wide variety of languages, the I Can Eat Glass Project (archived) has got your back.

At a previous job, I used its text as test data for user interface internationalization on a touch screen device. Using tom7's fonts. That was fun.

Edit: Looks like justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow beat me to it!
posted by silentbicycle at 10:58 AM on September 15, 2021 [8 favorites]


"I can eat glass, it doesn't hurt me."

"...and that's how I ended up in a Belarusian hospital with a shredded esophagus for 3 months."
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:58 AM on September 15, 2021 [9 favorites]


I've always assumed that a lot of those early dialogues or examples just had multiple uses, or were trying to do multiple things at the same time.

My first year of college, my roommate was taking Intro Russian with no background. I remember they had him memorizing dialogues like "Why are you here? Because this is my house," questions like "Who ate all the candles?", and statements like "He loves jurisprudence."

We were puzzled by these choices but eventually came to the conclusion that these were only tangentially about the dialogues or even the new vocabulary -- jurisprudence not being a common topic of conversation -- but instead were about reinforcing less-used Cyrillic letters or phonemes that English doesn't use or some other secondary purpose.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:03 AM on September 15, 2021 [8 favorites]




Pimsleur. I've taught myself the basics of several foreign languages and I haven't found anything nearly as effective, for speaking and listening at least.

The system admittedly is the same core concept as Anki -- spaced repetition. But as I understand it, Pimsleur was derived from the techniques of the US Army foreign language school in Monterrey, CA (a top rated school).

I also teach English as a foreign language, we could all probably bicker about the alleged benefits of immersion-style teaching endlessly. I'm not a big fan of that for my sort of teaching. But I do often recommend Anki for upper-level students who need to drill a lot of vocabulary, and I try to incorporate similar spaced repetition techniques on my own when teaching younger students.
posted by viborg at 11:05 AM on September 15, 2021 [8 favorites]


Oh yeah I knew I had a joke in there. I can neither confirm nor deny that I actually paid for Pimsleur. It's got quite a steep price tag.
Like a joke, but smaller.
posted by viborg at 11:08 AM on September 15, 2021 [8 favorites]


Sometimes what you think isn't relevant actually is--like, I didn't understand why I needed to know the word for "train compartment" in Germany until I got there.
posted by praemunire at 11:09 AM on September 15, 2021 [6 favorites]


Based on the small amount of experience I have travelling in a country where not everyone speaks English, I found these phrases useful:

- "Do you speak English?" This shows that I at least have the courtesy of attempting to address someone in their own language rather than barging in and speaking English. And, if the person actually speaks English, we can switch to that right away.

- "Where is the restroom?"

- "Please" and "thank you" are good to know

- "Another beer, please" or "Another glass of wine, please"

- "Sorry" is always good (yes, I am Canadian)
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 11:12 AM on September 15, 2021 [7 favorites]


No disrespect intended at all-- this topic is very Relevant To My Interests-- but I'm kind of surprised NYT published this in their opinion section. It reads like almost pure product promotion and I'm wondering what McWhorter's relationship to the company being plugged is.
posted by dusty potato at 11:16 AM on September 15, 2021 [7 favorites]


(I'm actually quite interested in learning more about the product based on his description, but I don't expect major newspapers to print a "this food processor is great" editorial even if the food processor really is great.)
posted by dusty potato at 11:18 AM on September 15, 2021 [5 favorites]


"Excuse me, I don't speak [your language], do you speak [my language]".

This works, even in places supposedly tourist-adverse like Paris.
posted by signal at 11:20 AM on September 15, 2021 [4 favorites]


marks you as a tourist, so you will be treated with contempt.

What's that fable about the traveler who asks what the people are like in this new city, and gets told that they are the same as where the traveler came from? I can't find a link.

Almost universally, my experience as a tourist has been that people are extremely willing to go out of their way, bend over backwards to help me find my way when I'm lost, etc.
posted by aniola at 11:21 AM on September 15, 2021 [11 favorites]


In my travels, I’ve had the idea of making a USEFUL phrase book. Count to ten. Necessary locations. Etc. I have never had to have a dialog about getting my tuxedo dry cleaned. In a lot of cases I just used a dictionary. And yes, make an effort to speak their language first, even if it is Do you speak English. Back in 1800’s, a language scholar created an English text, called English as She is Spoke. This is the best example of a useful phrase book. (Crazy…)
posted by njohnson23 at 11:22 AM on September 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


I once learnt in German:

"I have an idea, let's go to the movies tonight. But, I don't have any money, can you pay for me?".

I used it exactly once*, but whenever people start talking about what they know how to say in other languages I pull this out. If there are any German speakers present, they're always confused about why I know how to say this remarkably useless phrase with apparently decent pronunciation.

* it worked!
posted by signal at 11:26 AM on September 15, 2021 [7 favorites]


When I was in college, one of my colleagues in the work-study job I had started taking a Mandarin language class and was pretty excited about it. The first day he came to work after his first class he walked up to me with a grin and said something to me in Mandarin. "Oh cool, is that from class? Say it again!" I asked. He did, pointing at me as he did. "What did that mean?" I asked.

"It means - 'you are not a Chinese newspaper'."

This is the one and only thing I know how to say in Mandarin as a result.

....I'm a believer in the immersion method for a "next step" as I've had it work for me twice. The first time I went to Paris, I had 3 years of high school French classes - dimly remembered - behind me, and supplemented with some Duolingo practice. I wasn't sure how far that could get me, and just reassured myself that if things got desperate I could apologize and switch to English. But I started out with French, just sort of throwing myself in.

The first few conversations I did have to do that. But after a couple days, I found myself in a conversation, and....the knowledge was just there. I didn't have to consciously ask myself "wait, what's the word for 'scissors' again", I just opened my mouth and "ciseaux" came out. I walked away from that conversation in a daze, having a total Neo-in-the-Matrix "I know kung fu!" moment.

But the real marvel came during a visit to my Irish friend and her family, in college. They all are big into the Irish-language revival movement, so they spoke Irish around the house amongst themselves and continued to do so - switching to English when speaking to me. My friend had taught me a couple casual things over the years (we'd been penpals since we were twelve), but only a couple things - hello, good bye, happy birthday, and that was it.

At one point during my visit we went to some kind of folk dancing event by some club they belonged to. There was a mixed crowd there - some who were also as immersed in Irish language as they, and some not. There were too many people there for me to be introduced around to everyone, we all just got into dancing.

At some point, at a break in the dancing, my friend and her mom were helping to pass around trays of snacks, and I joined in with my own tray. I approached one table with my tray, handing out the packets of chips or whatever - and one guy thanked me in Irish: "Go raibh maith agat!"

And completely instinctively, I said "you're welcome!" and started to turn away from the table as he started to turn back to his friends. And two different realizations then hit us in the same second:

"Wait - I understood that."
"....Wait - she's American and she understood me."

We turned back to give each other a brief, shocked glance, then just nodded and went back to our respective businesses.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:30 AM on September 15, 2021 [7 favorites]


Yeah, that's a strange, un-nuanced promotion for Glossika. I checked it out and the focus on sentences is not too different from DuoLingo or sites like Clozemaster, so what gives?
posted by vacapinta at 11:33 AM on September 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


The first things you should learn in any language are

Hello
Goodbye
Please
Thank you
I'm sorry
I am learning but I'm pretty new so please speak slowly and be patient with me.
posted by nushustu at 11:33 AM on September 15, 2021 [5 favorites]


Years ago I was getting random calls from someone in Ivory Coast - it sure seemed like an elderly person was consistently mis-dialing my phone number. I'm a native Spanish speaker, but memorized the following sentences in French:

I am an American and do not speak French.
I believe you have dialed the wrong number.


Then I waited for weeks/months and when the person finally called again, I got to use my sentences. There was a long pause, and huge laugh on the other end with lots of "OK OK OK" and that was that and I never heard from them again. I hope they eventually got in touch with whoever they were trying to reach.

Another time I was in Shanghai for business and was out sightseeing. I was in the Old Town area looking for a bathroom and happened across a tour group from Chile (Their matching t-shirts all read "Chilean Descendants of Chinese Immigrants" or something along those lines) . The tour guide was, I assume Chinese, but spoke perfect Spanish I was able to find out where the closest bathroom was. It was fantastic. It actually never even occurred to me to find out if she spoke English. I tell that story all the time when someone asks why they should learn Spanish....because YOU JUST NEVER KNOW!
posted by jquinby at 11:35 AM on September 15, 2021 [9 favorites]


Glossika sounds a lot like Language Transfer, which also focuses on listening and speaking (rather than reading) and without grammar lessons. The idea is to understand how the language functions by focusing on parallels between your reference language and the target language. l It's also broken up into small lessons that you can take in 5 to 10 minute chunks. Ooh—and I see they now have an app as well. I might just have to get back to my long-neglected study of Spanish…
posted by fogovonslack at 11:36 AM on September 15, 2021 [4 favorites]


Yes, I came away wondering if John McWhorter has equity in Glossika or is otherwise involved. (I haven't been able to get pitchbook to give me a free educational subscription, otherwise I would look it up. If there's anyone lurking here who has access...you know what to do.) You can definitely advocate for spaced repetition without flogging your startup.

I have fallen off, but the Say Something in Welsh program uses this to teach Welsh fluency in kind of a delightfully low-tech (audio recordings instead of AI) way. Having completed the entire Duolingo Welsh program up through level two I have to say I prefer SSIW.
posted by Tesseractive at 11:38 AM on September 15, 2021


Intermediate **ANYTHING** is difficult, I think because there's no real solid definition of what intermediate means and what should be in an intermediate class/text/etc. If you've got a single program that goes from beginner to advanced the intermediate section is often pretty good, because they know what you've already covered.

But if Text A covers L, M, N, and O in the basics, but Text B only covers M, N, and O but also includes P, then an intermediate that starts at P is boring repetition for Text B students, but new ground for Text A students, and if it it starts at R leaving out P and Q entirely then both A and B students are lost while text C students who covered N, O, and P are OK for that but lack L and M.

Blerg.

Same applies to programming. There's a flood of beginner books, a goodly collection of advanced, but for something more complex than printing a message on the screen 10 times but less complex than writing a game engine from scratch there's not much.

GCU I strongly suspect that was it. I checked out the Duolingo Japanese to try to refresh my Japanese and they picked some kind of odd words for the early lessons which focused on the hiragana and katakana. The katakana especially, since it's often used for foreign words, so they made Cannes a place you referred to and I can't think of any reason to do that other than the use of one of the less common characters.
posted by sotonohito at 11:40 AM on September 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


When I was in junior high, for some reason we all learned to say "I like my boys with whipped cream" in German. ("Ich mag meine Jungs mit Schlagsahne," Google tells me, which is what I remember.) There must have been a precipitating joke, and we clearly went to a lot of trouble to figure out the German (since this was before home internet).

I was over at my best friend's house one day, and we were horsing around, being noisy pre-teen girls, and trying to irritate her two teenaged brothers (it was very easy). So I'm shouting at one of her brothers, "Ich mag meine Jungs mit Schlagsahne!!!!"

Unbeknownst to me, her father, whom I had never met, was working from home that day. ALSO unbeknownst to me, HER FATHER WAS GERMAN. (Moved to the US to take up a professorship at University of Chicago, I believe.) I hear this booming, startled laugh, and a voice asks, "Was ist das?" and her father emerges, says something in German, and when I stare at him blankly, repeats in English, "What did you just say?"

"Ich mag meine Jungs mit Schlagsahne," I whispered.

"What?"

"Ich mag meine Jungs mit Schlagsahne," I repeated, silently dying of shame.

He then proceeded to spend TEN SOLID MINUTES coaching me on my pronunciation until I was pronouncing all the words to his satisfaction, and said, "Now you may tell the boys about whipped cream" and went back into his office.

Anyway, I died on the spot and my ghost has been posting on the internet ever since, RIP me.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:40 AM on September 15, 2021 [128 favorites]


My spouse has really enjoyed Memrise for actual practical language learning. YMMV.
posted by lazaruslong at 11:41 AM on September 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


dusty potato: This article feels like it belongs in the NYT Magazine's "Letter Of Recommendation" column. "Letter Of Recommendation" used to remind me of the 1990s "Inconspicuous Consumption" pieces by Paul Lukas about interesting but uncelebrated products, but has now transformed itself into personal essays about the gravitas of daily life. On the other hand, the NYT Opinions section has gone from being news analysis and important ideas to "anything goes," so maybe McWhorter's celebration of Glossika fits in just fine.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 11:44 AM on September 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


I thought I has hopeless at foreign languages until I did Pimsleur. (And it's free at my library)
It does the repetition thing like Glossika, and it also does this anticipation thing- you are asked to say something that you have not heard yet in the course, but should be able to figure out.

And it is a wonderful thing when you reply in your new language and realize you didn't 'translate' it.
posted by MtDewd at 11:47 AM on September 15, 2021


There are a series of paperback phrase books by Howard Tomb called "Wicked Spanish, "Wicked French," and the like, intended as joke gifts...I think.

They are...well, they're comedy products of the late 1970s/1980s/early 1990s, so they rely on stereotypes and humor of "cheesy pick-up lines" school. However, they also contain some phrases that I still use, like "No me siento bien. Por favor, presteme su sombrero." ("I do not feel well. Please lend me your hat.")

Each book has very few truly useful bits, but they did sort of lay out the notion that traditional phrase books really only suited the most completely square, safe tourist experiences.
posted by wenestvedt at 11:48 AM on September 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


There are a series of paperback phrase books by Howard Tomb called "Wicked Spanish, "Wicked French," and the like, intended as joke gifts...I think. They are...well, they're comedy products of the late 1970s/1980s/early 1990s, so they rely on stereotypes and humor of "cheesy pick-up lines" school.

You've reminded me of Bill Murray's story he told about when he was filming Lost in Translation, and would amuse himself by taking a copy of the book Making out In Japanese to sushi bars and randomly asking the sushi chefs "Do you want to get in the back seat?" or "do you have a curfew?"
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:58 AM on September 15, 2021 [4 favorites]


I just signed up for a Glossika trial and ugh, can't say it's impressive out of the box. Repeating the same five sentences a bajillion times, each of which requires repeated mouse button presses. It feels clunky as hell and oh so very boring. I can imagine once you get more variety of 'learned' sentences, it's less repetitive and aggravating but I am not imagining being willing to stick around that long.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:59 AM on September 15, 2021


Eyebrows McGee: Unbeknownst to me, her father, whom I had never met, was working from home that day. ALSO unbeknownst to me, HER FATHER WAS GERMAN.

I went to a high school soccer game when my older brothers were playing, when I was like ten years old.

At one point, the ref blew his whistle, and a spectator, silent up until then, began shouting at him from the sidelines in very angry German. We studied German in my grade school (yay, the Midwest!); I didn't understand very much of the yelling, or the ref's response, thankfully, but the tone was unmistakeable.

Most of ten years later I attended the same school, and I am pretty sure that my German teacher there -- a placid Canadian named Frank Sawatsky -- was that same...passionate soccer fan. In the mean time, none of my teachers ever taught me the things I had heard at that game.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:04 PM on September 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


wenestvedt Back when I was first studying Japanese someone gifted me Wicked Japanese. And yup, not exactly useful for day to day use but it was mildly amusing.

And I did learn several Japanese swear words I hadn't known before, so it wasn't totally worthless.

The LGBT slang it introduced was doubtless both laughably out of date even when it was published **AND** horrifically offensive so... yeah.

It was a weird one, in that rather than being a usual phrase book it introduced its language by following a group of friends out for a night on the town and telling a story about how they went to various bars, one almost got into a fight, and then two of them hooked up to introduce the sex slang.
posted by sotonohito at 12:15 PM on September 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


Bugger. I was thinking of another book someone gifted me, can't recall the title offhand.

I did also get Wicked Japanese, which included only one phrase that really stood out in my memory:

"Yes I'd like some green tea. I had a cup when I first arrived, I haven't slept since, I have many wicked thoughts. In short I love green tea, do you know where I can get a dime bag?"
posted by sotonohito at 12:20 PM on September 15, 2021 [5 favorites]


"And I did learn several Japanese swear words"

I was under the (mis?)impression that the Japanese language did not include swear words. I found it difficult to believe, so I'd love to get some clarity on that. Examples even?
posted by mikeand1 at 12:30 PM on September 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


Back in University a bunch of us decided that we we needed to learn three phrases in every language.

- I'll have one beer please
- Where is the Toilet
- Help me, I've been terribly mangled in a train accident

The last came from figuring out the oddest phrase we could put together with our first year German textbook.
posted by cirhosis at 12:32 PM on September 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


I put your name on the Montgomery Ward's mailing list.
posted by Ickster at 12:32 PM on September 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


Somewhere around here I have an early-eighties edition of "Lass uns mal 'ne Schecke angraben", which was supposed to be an intro to German youth slang of the time. It included such great phrases as "Er ist ein echter Travolta."
posted by gimonca at 12:34 PM on September 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


I'm intrigued. It's not totally clear to me exactly what's different about this particular method. But, I'll keep it in mind. I'd be curious if others here have actually used that service.

I both love and despise a language textbook that I tried very hard to learn from as a kid. It was a Soviet publication designed to teach Russian to a UK audience, fished out of a give-away bin. It included all sorts of really obscure philosophical stuff along with the usual material. Somewhere early in the book, one had to translate a long paragraph that began, "isn't it true that in many ways the animals are superior to man?" Which isn't something I've ever used - or remember any of - but was a lot more interesting than learning how to ask whether Anna likes to dance at a disco.

My crutch in romance languages is usually to try to find tricks that let me avoid conjugating verbs. Before I actually spoke Spanish with any facility, I spent a lot of time saying things like, "I cannot speak well. I am looking for the subway. We will be eating at the restaurant at 9." Even now, as someone who speaks Spanish well enough to volunteer for a panel discussion without panicking, I often stumble across everyday things that just never come up. Pharmacies and hardware stores always leave me saying, "like this," and performing mime. (Without looking it up, I couldn't even tell you have to say "screwdriver" in Spanish. I've spent many hours using screwdrivers in Spanish speaking places.) I usually try those tricks in Italian, which I don't actually speak at all, and sometimes it works. In French I just feel good if I can say a single noun or an unconjugated verb and have it be understood the first time.
posted by eotvos at 12:43 PM on September 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


cirhosis: The last came from figuring out the oddest phrase we could put together with our first year German textbook.

Our textbook contained "Einfach Platt gefahren," translated as "simply ran over it and squashed it [flat, like a record album]."

Still haven't used that handy phrase yet, three dozen years later. Still hopeful, though!
posted by wenestvedt at 12:46 PM on September 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


Where is the Toilet

My high school German teacher used to say that there were four words you should learn in any new language: push, pull, men and women -- to avoid embarrassment when opening a restroom door.
posted by gimonca at 12:48 PM on September 15, 2021 [4 favorites]


I did a lot of Duolingo back in the day (a while back, I broke my extremely long streak, and after being deeply disappointed, I found it utterly liberating to rededicate myself to all the OTHER language-learning resources I have, including my own personal Anki decks).

After a while, I started keeping two lists: favorite Duolingo sentences, and Duolingo sentences that I thought could be good poetry prompts.

I've mislaid my poetry prompts list, but here is an excerpt from my favorite sentences list, all ripped straight from Duolingo:

2015-12-17 Spanish Yo la habría abierto con mis dientes. I would have opened it with my teeth.
2015-12-21 Spanish Es algo que yo jamás habría elegido, pero gracias. It's something that I never would have chosen, but thank you.
2015-12-31 German Der Himmel fällt! The sky is falling!
2016-01-03 French Je vais garder ce gâteau pour moi. I'm going to keep that cake for myself.
2016-01-11 French I like to touch the hat. J'aime bien toucher le chapeau.
2016-02-13 German Es ist vielleicht ein Bär. It might be a bear.
2016-05-11 German Sind zwei Halbbrüder ein Bruder? Are two half brothers one brother?
2016-05-14 French Je ne peux pas décrire cette lampe. I cannot describe this lamp.
2016-06-05 German Ich esse zweiunddreißig Erdbeeren. I eat 32 strawberries.
2016-06-22 Italian Abbiamo ancora diciassette panini. We still have 17 sandwiches.
2016-06-29 German Das ist meine vierte Banane. This is my fourth banana.
2016-07-04 Italian Io ho zero pantaloni. I have zero pants.
2016-07-15 German Mein Kopf ist nicht aus Beton! My head is not made of concrete!
2016-07-25 Spanish No pagues por ese emparedado! Don't pay for that sandwich!
2016-07-31 German Bist du aus Stahl? Are you made of steel?
2016-09-11 Spanish Necesito un gran emparedado. I need a big sandwich.
2016-09-11 Spanish La naranja es enorme. The orange is huge. (reminds me of a favorite poem)
2016-10-07 German Gemeinsam sind wir stärker. We are stronger together.
2016-10-07 German Ich bin ausgezeichnet! I am great!
2016-10-10 French Ce spectacle ne finira jamais. This spectacle will never end.
2016-10-14 French Il veut la moitié du gâteau. He wants half the cake
2016-10-15 German Katzen schlafen überall. Cats sleep everywhere.
2016-10-19 German Ich kann viel essen, obwohl ich klein bin. I can eat a lot, even though I'm small.
2016-11-12 German Er wird sie immer lieben. He will always love her.
2016-11-12 German Ich werde dich immer lieben. I will always love you.
2016-11-16 German Der grüne Bär ist unsichtbar. The green bear is invisible.
2016-11-30 Spanish Una habitación sin libros es como un cuerpo sin alma. A room without books is like a body without a soul.
2017-01-24 Italian Quella è la mia cipolla. That is my onion.
2017-02-09 Italian Non sappiamo chi è umano. We don’t know who is human.
2017-02-09 Italian Ti amo più di chiunque altro. I love you more than any other.
2017-02-23 French Je ne suis pas un oiseau, mais j'aimerais en être un. I am not a bird, but I would like to be one.
2017-04-27 Spanish Este oso come fresas. This bear eats strawberries.
2017-05-05 Spanish Quiero un gran elefante. I want a big elephant.
2017-05-26 Italian Quando ero piccolo, non mi mettevo i pantaloni. When I was small, I didn't wear pants.
2017-05-31 German Nachts sind alle Katzen grau. At night all cats are grey.
2017-06-09 Italian Dammi un bacio! Give me a kiss!
2017-06-09 Italian Un bacio o due baci? One kiss or two?
2017-06-20 Italian Noi mangiamo molti tipi di formaggio. We eat many types of cheese.
2017-07-05 French Je suis un ours. I am a bear.
2017-07-05 French Le singe mange une orange. The monkey eats an orange.
2017-08-28 French Ton cochon est énorme. Your pig is enormous.
2017-10-05 Italian Ti amo asattamente come sei. I love you exactly as you are.
2017-11-09 German Meine Kuh braucht einen neuen Hut. My cow needs a new hat.
2017-11-19 Spanish Es seguramente mi elefante. It's surely my elephant.
posted by kristi at 12:51 PM on September 15, 2021 [12 favorites]


One memorable summer back in undergrad, my two roommates both worked at a wax museum selling tickets, cleaning, etc. They were required to learn the spiel in both English and Spanish, and as a result I used to know how to say "The bathroom is behind The Planet of the Apes" in Spanish.
posted by telophase at 12:56 PM on September 15, 2021 [6 favorites]


Seems to me the easiest way to move from repeating sentences to saying new ones is to do just that. When I am studying a language and there is a sentence to learn such as "Où est les toilettes?" I repeat it, pause to think about it and then make up a new related sentence: "Où est ma tête ?" and another "Où sont les chats?" and another "Où sont mes livres?"

You don't need to be talking to anyone to practice, and of course you won't improve your accent that way but what you will do is get the retrieval down so that when you want to try to say something in that language you don't draw a blank. You'll have lots of practice creating unique sentences.

Screw around with your language exercises and deliberately create sentences that subvert your expectations. If your gloves are on the table, "Où sont mes gants" can be answered "Mes gants sont sur la chaise." My golves are on the chair. "Sur la chaise? Non! Ils sont sur la table!"

Every sentence or phrase you learn is a building block to play with. Playing with them is amusing and is a way of drilling the vocabulary and the grammar. It's much more effective than merely reading and chanting what is on your screen or in your book. - And of course any time you hear a phrase, repeat it yourself out loud. Just clicking the answer and getting it right makes you think you are fluent but locks you into only knowing the answer when it is right in front of you. It's like with multiple choice. Before looking at the answers try to come up with the right words. Then check if the app you are doing has a choice that agrees with you. You want to be analyzing why your answer was or was not correct. "Oops! It was a plural. I should have used sont instead of est."


The other thing I find really helpful is to practice using the language in different locations. Memory is really heavily location linked for biological reasons. It's much easier to recall where the languages section in your library is if you are in the library, whereas if you try to remember if it is the fourth row of bookshelves or the fifth one when you are at home it's much harder to figure out. This fact about memory means that if you do all your language practice either in your classroom or at your computer at home you may find that you can't remember a durn thing unless you are in one of those two locations. You need to make sure that you can find the words when you are out and about.

It even helps if you walk out of your classroom and say some of the lesson you just took in the hall. Sometimes you can still remember it ten steps out the door, but not if you go as far as the bus stop and then try to recall. As little as that can wipe your memory completely. Use whatever cues you need to trigger the words.

If you have Duolingo or some other language app on your phone pull the thing out at different times of day, look around and then do a lesson. Six lessons done in six different places will train your fluency way better than seven lessons done in the same old spot.

So wander around and recite your verb conjugations, look at the produce at your grocery store and try to remember how to say the things you are seeing - "Les cerises, la pomme, le chariot, mes gants, la couleure bleue... Où sont les pommes de terre? Ils sont la." Say the words in your target language out loud, under your breath so people don't move away nervously, but loud enough you can hear your words yourself.

The more locations you do this the more fluent you will become because you'll have created multiple different memories of using the language and that will turn into multiple different paths to retrieve the words.
posted by Jane the Brown at 1:05 PM on September 15, 2021 [12 favorites]


mikeand1 To the best of my knowledge every language has swear words.

One of the more common in Japanese is kuso, which means shit.

If you want to get into technicalities, there is no actual, literal, translation of a word like "fuck" into Japanese. There's crude and crass ways to refer to sex but they don't actually mean what we mean by fuck.

But that doesn't mean there aren't words that convey the same meaning and have the same social impact. If you say zakennayo it means the same as fuck. It is, literally, a shortening of a phrase meaning "stop joking around". But a) it's a new word not that phrase, and b) regardless of literalism it **MEANS** fuck you.

Baka yaro doesn't, actually, literally, translate as asshole. It literally translates as "stupid peasant", but trust me, ain't no one saying "yaro" to mean "fieldhand" in modern Japan, it's just an insult.

If you want to get super technical, "baka" means "horse deer" not "stupid" and is a shortening of a Chinese saying from the 1200's about someone calling a deer a horse to trick someone else. But it means "stupid" in the insulting and derogatory sense and I'd be surprised if even one in twenty Japanese knew about the ancient Chinese phrase it came from and why it's written with the characters for deer and horse.

The whole "well acktuallllllyyyy Japanese doesn't have swear words" is just getting into legalistic technicalities about literal translation.

You an argue that it might technically be true, but you can do the same with English cussing. In English "bastard" means "illegitimate child of" not "wicked person" or "bad person" so that's not a bad word inherently right? Shit is just a normal healthy bodily function so that's not a swear word right? Fuck just refers to sexual intercourse and surely no one would argue that's bad right? Bitch just means female dog, so that's not a swear word right? Damn just refers to God condemning the wicked to hell, nothing God does can be wrong so clearly that's not a swear word.

See? English doesn't have any swear words!

So yes, Japanese definitely has swear words. Not in the sense that they literally translate on a one to one basis with any English swear words but that's true of a lot of things in translating any language.
posted by sotonohito at 1:16 PM on September 15, 2021 [16 favorites]


Amazed to see only one mention of bathroom. An old college prof of mine once told me, "I'm fairly fluent in 3 languages, but I can ask, 'Where is the bathroom?' in a dozen."

I am trying to find a site I once read that had different advice for learning a language. It suggested learning a few basic phrases and then learning a completely obscure phrase, like "Is that some kind of Frog?" in Japanese. When you use such a phrase, people immediately assume you have a more advanced grasp of the language than you do, and will engage you for longer attempts at conversation. I tried this once: some friends brought a visitor from Norway to my house, and I asked him something like, ""Do you like hedgehogs?" in Norwegian when he walked through the door. He stopped, looked at me strangely, and said, "Do..... I ... like pine-cone pigs?" If I remember the occasion correctly, that was how he understood my 'hedgehog'.

The rest of the day was quite fun after that.
posted by grimjeer at 1:23 PM on September 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


Yeah, as Jane the Brown writes, there's really no substitute for practice, no matter how poorly.

In high school, my circle of friends took German, French, and Spanish. We regularly used phrases from class -- as only ironic teens can -- in ordinary conversation. But I actually picked up some rudimentary skills! Especially fun was re-mixing the few phrases each of us learned from the kids in different language classes.

(Somehow, no one wanted to learn German from me & Sheila & John, but we all had to know their French stuff...)
posted by wenestvedt at 1:37 PM on September 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


Related: The Pronunciation Paradox

"People see you as more fluent if you have great pronunciation but sub-par grammar as opposed to the inverse situation (sub-par pronunciation but stellar grammar)."
posted by storybored at 1:37 PM on September 15, 2021 [10 favorites]


"We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language." --Mark Twain
posted by gimonca at 1:38 PM on September 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


at a very basic level of Italian Duolingo taught me how to say (I kid you not) "the knife is in the boot" um, ok, Mercutio...my Italian friends got quite a laugh out of it.
posted by supermedusa at 1:41 PM on September 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


Japanese is also a bit more like the actual rudeness is more at the end in the politeness level you end with. My native Japanese chat buddy loved playing the game of follow the politeness. You're suppose to with familiarity and other factors go from generic-nice-speech into the more relaxed casual speech. But keep in mind who's talking to whom. It's much easier to be rude that way.

(A decade and a half ago I was the backend geek and root power moderator of I think the first internet site for learning Japanese. At least it was the only Google result in those days.)
posted by zengargoyle at 1:43 PM on September 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


For optimal utility, the best phrase to learn in any language is "I'm sorry."

Every last one of my bakerʻs-dozen solo excursions into deepest Tokyo has been rife with me saying "sumimasen" and "shitsurei shimasu" countless times.
----------------------------
In my undergrad Linguistics class, our prof used a phrase in Korean --" nunsalam mandilja" ("letʻs make a snowman") -- to illustrate some grammatical point. Came in handy a few decades later when the phrase cracked up a cute, talented bassist fresh out of Seoul I had just met, helping form a deep jokey musical friendship that lasts to this day.

We played together for a year in a Honolulu Korean bar bearing the strangely appropriate name of Cheetah 2000. Early during my tenure there, a traveling Seoul comedian was playing a one-nighter to a very appreciative, raucously laughing crowd. He seemed to be getting some of the largest laughs while gesturing at the American band members. I asked my new bassist friend what he was saying. She said "he is very funny," and quickly turned her attention back to the jokes.
posted by Droll Lord at 1:51 PM on September 15, 2021 [4 favorites]


zengargoyle That too!

While I've had some teachers who said it would be more appropriate to refer to the two common modes as distal and familiar rather than polite and informal, there's no denying that there's also rude/condescending forms and pronouns and that mode of speech covers a lot of the ground we use special cuss words for in English.

While technically anata and temee both translate as "you" I definitely wouldn't address anyone I wasn't trying to piss off with temee.

Of course we kind of got that into English as well. Villain means farmer after all and hick was originally just a country way to shorten the name Richard.

But yeah, the fact that Japanese has a formal and official way of addressing someone as an inferior as opposed to us English speakers who must rely on tone of voice and body language does mean a lot of what is cussing in Japanese tends to translate literally just as addressing a person.

And, on that note, I just remembered that the title of the book dealing with Japanese slang and cussing via the story of some people out for a night on the town was "Zakennayo!" which was pretty appropriate given the subject.
posted by sotonohito at 2:21 PM on September 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


Memories of Italian class, being instructed how to ask, 'Waiter, may I have a glass of red wine please?'.

We were eleven.
posted by brushtailedphascogale at 2:42 PM on September 15, 2021 [6 favorites]


David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day came out when I was in high school and in a gesture to the parts about learning French, my mom got me a book of Spanish medical terms. (I had been studying the language since elementary school at that point.)

One Wednesday me and a couple of my friends got hopelessly, deliriously lost trying to find our way to a quiz bowl match at another school (before ubiquitous cell phones and GPS, this would have been 2000 or 2001) and I spent most of the ride keeping our spirits up by dramatically reading out of my phrase book to the rest of the car. I still remember: Voy a palpar tus nodos. I am going to palpate your nodes.

My mom, on the other hand, studied Russian in college and at some point she acquired a book called "English for New Americans: A Russian-English Conversational Manual," which was basically a phrasebook for Soviet defectors. It includes gems like "Please close the porthole," "Have you seen the new Goldie Hawn movie?" and "Can you tell me more about the benefits for retired people who emigrated from the USSR?" All the phrases are also written phonetically in Cyrillic, so if you can read Cyrillic and say them out loud, you can ape a really impressive Russian accent.
posted by Tesseractive at 2:50 PM on September 15, 2021 [9 favorites]


There are a series of paperback phrase books by Howard Tomb called "Wicked Spanish, "Wicked French," and the like, intended as joke gifts...I think.

With the aid of a book like this (but not one of these), I helped prepare a Canadian friend of mine to move to Germany. She spoke rudimentary German and had tried Goethe-Institut and some courses but it didn't take. She asked her dad for help; he was Scottish but spoke some, because he had interrogated prisoners during the war. Most of what he remembered was things like Schätzen Sie Ihre Freiheit? ("Do you value your freedom?").

She knew I spoke some, but with mere weeks to go before her departure, I said we had to triage. "What specifically do you need the vocab for? We can focus our efforts."

She said, "To meet German boys." Okay then.

By the time she departed, she had a command of a bunch of cheesy pickup lines. This was someone who could not order a sandwich or ask directions to the train station, but she was deft with Es tut mir so leid, ich dachte, das wäre die Armlehne. ("I am so sorry, I thought that was the armrest") and Wissen Sie, in Kanada gilt das Reiben der Knie als ein Zeichen der Höflichkeit. ("You know, in Canada rubbing knees is considered to be a sign of courtesy.")

It worked. She married a German guy.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:06 PM on September 15, 2021 [25 favorites]


I've been trying to lean Korean with Duolingo since April, and I feel it would go more successfully if I had someone else who spoke Korean to practice with - and also if I knew how to get my laptop's keyboard to map to the Hangul keyboard. That would definitely help, because then I would have half a chance of making Korean-speaking friends online.

I hear Lingodeer is better for Asian languages, but I'm going to finish Duolingo, then try the Learn Korean With BTS course I bought at the start of the year, and try Lingodeer AS WELL. Did I mention I'm stubborn as hell?
posted by HypotheticalWoman at 3:11 PM on September 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


je voudrais un tasse du caffe.

everything else is irrelevant.
posted by kaibutsu at 3:26 PM on September 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


ano furoshiki o misete kudasai.
(Please show me that scarf.)
posted by dum spiro spero at 3:54 PM on September 15, 2021


I can teach you Portuguese in one minute:
Just learn to say "pois." (Pronounced: "poisz").
Then just nod your head and say it while other people are talking.
Occasionally say, "pois pois".
You'll fit right in.
posted by chavenet at 4:36 PM on September 15, 2021 [6 favorites]


For optimal utility, the best phrase to learn in any language is "I'm sorry."

This reminds me of something I remember reading (so likely not true, but also maybe kinda true) about Japanese people dealing with English speakers: they don't mind it when people don't know the language but could everyone PLEASE stop saying gomen nasai and sumimasen all the time for absolutely everything.

(gomenne)
posted by chrominance at 4:45 PM on September 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


My university French teacher, a native Francophone who had studied English back when he was in university in France, told us that one day he had a bit of trouble over here: "I had written essays in English analyzing books. But now my sink was broken, and I realized I didn't know how to say sink."
posted by sebastienbailard at 4:46 PM on September 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


Same thing with classical singers. We're versed in opera libretti and poetry from about the 1500s-early 1900s (or earlier if you do medieval music). I remember realising in Salzburg, Austria that I could talk at length about dragons, magic swords and lost love... but could not for the life of me navigate a laundromat.
posted by Pallas Athena at 4:57 PM on September 15, 2021 [5 favorites]


MetaFilter: Meine Kuh braucht einen neuen Hut
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:06 PM on September 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


Related: The Pronunciation Paradox

"People see you as more fluent if you have great pronunciation but sub-par grammar as opposed to the inverse situation (sub-par pronunciation but stellar grammar)."


Cf Paul Taylor.

I have this problem with French. My French is really not all that good - I can stumble through a conversation and make it work, but it's not great. But my parents worked regularly in France when I was a kid, so I spent months to weeks there every year for most of my childhood. So as a result I speak very bad French with a perfect Breton accent. Apparently I don't sound like an English person Doing Their Best, I sound like a French person who doesn't speak French very well.
I'm told it's disconcerting.
posted by BlueNorther at 5:12 PM on September 15, 2021 [20 favorites]


A terrible first date, courtesy of Duolingo:

"My personal life is a real nightmare" (Ma vie personnelle est un vrai cauchemar)
"I don't get dressed anymore; it's a waste of time" (Je ne m'habille plus; c'est une perte de temps)
"Tell me what you think of my poems, Anna" (Dis-moi ce que tu penses de mes poèmes, Anna)

Then there was "S'il était un dessert, il serait une tarte à la crème," which I just—
posted by wreckingball at 5:32 PM on September 15, 2021 [6 favorites]


Then there was "S'il était un dessert, il serait une tarte à la crème," which I just—

Allo, oui. Oui, la police. Oui, c'est un urgence.
posted by mhoye at 5:37 PM on September 15, 2021 [9 favorites]


For optimal utility, the best phrase to learn in any language is "I'm sorry."

My summer-school Russian teacher taught us to say, "I do not speak Russian."

Then he taught us to say, "I do not speak English."

I think he regretted taking that gig.
posted by wenestvedt at 5:37 PM on September 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


I’ve picked up random phrases in various languages: “The hallway’s on fire” in Russian, “Oh ny god I’m dying” in Farsi … and I still remember the very first lesson from my very first French book: “Where is Sylvie? Sylvie is at the pool.” A friend used to make his Berlitz students learn, “What time is it?” “What do I look like? Big Ben?”

In Italy I bought a dictionary that - the writer must have been paid by the word, because there were at least 3 made-up words on each page. There were random conversations in the back, including one with a barber that happened to describe exactly the haircut my boyfriend wanted (so that was useful).

As for learning a language for real: Some words never seem to stick, and it’s easier to remember bad language. In Kyoto years ago I picked up some Japanese gangster slang so fast that my roommate was astonished (“Why can’t you remember anything else I try to teach you?”) The trouble with acquiring a good accent before you can speak is that people will rapid-fire back at you. I agree that there is no one-size-fits-all intermediate. I’ve never done well with duolingo & the like. And finally, I recommend the Coffee Break Spanish podcast (& probably any other language they produce).
posted by anshuman at 5:50 PM on September 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


Also yeah, that article does read like an advertisement.
posted by anshuman at 5:53 PM on September 15, 2021


I have studied Italian for 1166 days straight on Duolingo. When Supermedusa said, "the knife is in the boot" I actually shouted aloud, "Il coltello è nello stivale!" While I'm almost at the end of the course, deep in the complicated tenses, this simple recognition made me smile. It sounds like we all feel that delight of immediately recognizing even the basic foreign phrases, whether useful or not.

When I went to Italy in 2018, I'd only had a few months of study under my belt (la mia cintura), but I could say please and thank you, but not ask how how much something cost or where the bathroom was. But I could (and did) entertain bellboys in stuffy hotels by telling them that I could say a little in Italian, like "My mother's toothbrush is green and white" and "My monkey is hungry" and then when they'd look at me agog, I'd pretend (for a second) I was a monkey in pose and vocalizations. For the rest of any hotel stay, bellboys would quietly greet me with monkey sounds or pretend to brush their teeth, puzzling everyone else on my tour. It was lovely.

2017-06-20 Italian Noi mangiamo molti tipi di formaggio. We eat many types of cheese.

As you can imagine, kristi, this and the other cheese-related Duo sentences give me bonus joy.
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 6:08 PM on September 15, 2021 [10 favorites]


Apparently I don't sound like an English person Doing Their Best, I sound like a French person who doesn't speak French very well.

I am an anglophone who learned French in West Africa. One delightful result of the accent that I developed is the consternation of some Parisians* as they hear me and immediately want to try to shift the conversation into another language so I'll stop butchering their beloved French - only they have absolutely no damn clue what my native language could be.

*It's always Parisians, but certainly not all, not even most of them. Most people are lovely anywhere you go in the world.
posted by solotoro at 6:39 PM on September 15, 2021 [7 favorites]


It's that point in learning a language when you first CAN say something you would say in real life that's such a joy. I took a bit of Russian at a community college (the teacher was GREAT), and after learning "to understand" and "to live" and a few prepositions, I could say "My father doesn't understand why I want to live with my boyfriend," which makes me smile to this day.
posted by kristi at 6:59 PM on September 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


In Berlin, I learnt to say ” how much does that cost?" in passable German, but not how to understand what they answered me.
This is not a useful approach.
posted by signal at 7:02 PM on September 15, 2021 [7 favorites]


It's that point in learning a language when you first CAN say something you would say in real life that's such a joy.

You're not wrong. Oddly, this is pertinent to both the previous comments.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:03 PM on September 15, 2021


Help! My postillion has been struck by lightning!
posted by y2karl at 7:23 PM on September 15, 2021 [4 favorites]


I’ve forgotten more Russian than I ever learned, but dammit, if I ever get stranded in Moscow I’ll be able to announce my intentions to go to the post office and mail a letter.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:05 PM on September 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


I am an anglophone who learned French in West Africa. One delightful result of the accent that I developed is the consternation of some Parisians* as they hear me and immediately want to try to shift the conversation into another language so I'll stop butchering their beloved French - only they have absolutely no damn clue what my native language could be.

I was in Paris once with a Canadian who'd (unsurprisingly) learned her French in Canada, and apparently her Quebec accent was either charming or enraging to half the locals.
posted by praemunire at 8:20 PM on September 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


Before travelling to Italy many years ago, my now-spouse informed me that if I wanted to buy cigarettes there I would have to do it on my own. This was because A)Smoking is bad and I won't support it and B)You've been listening to those Italian lesson CDs, so you'd better use it. We were in a fairly rural area, so I couldn't expect what I had seen in the cities - where a frequent response to my attempting to speak Italian got "Is English better for you?"
So I practiced in the car on the way to the store: "Due pacchetti di Camel Lights" over and over and over. When I got up to the counter, I do what I always do in these situations. I froze up. I had the words, but they just wouldn't come out. Eventually I got the point across with gestures, grunts and mumbled half-Italian.


My favorite phrase I ever got in Duolingo was: Что думает твоя лошадь? - "What does your horse think?" Very useful.
posted by onehalfjunco at 8:24 PM on September 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


I worked on a farm in Israel, where I had acquired the job through a supposed and assumed skill in French (the family who owned the farm were Moroccans; they spoke French and Arabic and Hebrew, but no English to speak of). I was — and indeed am — Canadian, so if a French or Swiss backpacker had been in the placement office that day, I’m sure they would have got the spot.

My French was pretty rusty at the time so I was a little at a loss occasionally, but I muddied my way through. To this day there are agricultural terms I know in one to three of [French or Arabic or Hebrew] that I have no idea of in my native English.

When I arrived on the farm, the only other temporary worker there was a monoglot Londoner named Dave. I don’t know how got by before I arrived but he was glad I could communicate better than he. Every day the farmer asked us what we wanted in the way of foods from the marketplace. One day Dave and I had a mind to have a salad or two, so I tried to ask for lettuce. However, I had forgotten the word in French (laitue) and I didn’t know it in either Arabic or Hebrew.

Accordingly, I described it to the farmer in French: “it’s green, it comes in heads about this big, you can peel off big leaves like this.” He signalled that he understood. That afternoon, he brought us two cabbages.

Not quite the same.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:48 PM on September 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


I used to watch Russian language lessons on tv every saturday morning as a teenager. (We only had, like, two tv networks in the olde times).

I can still say "I don't understand you", which has the bonus of being factually accurate.
posted by Omnomnom at 12:07 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


four words you should learn in any new language: push, pull, men and women -- to avoid embarrassment when opening a restroom door

The latter two are pretty important in Ireland - some public toilets are labelled only in Irish ("Mná" and "Fir". )
posted by scorbet at 6:49 AM on September 16, 2021


Boy, if I had to guess which one of those meant "men", I would have guessed wrong.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:26 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


Languages are like musical instruments in that the more you have at least some skill with, the easier the next one is. Through a misspent youth, I have a toehold in a few of each.

More than once I have made the point to monoglots and non-musicians that I speak Japanese the way I play banjo: if you speak no Japanese or play no banjo, I might sound pretty good to you. If you have any skill at all with one or the other, you will probably say, "Okay, I see what you were trying to do there, but that was really clumsy. What we need here is practice and lots of it.”

And really, it’s just a question of seeing the patterns and similarities. There was a headline maybe a decade back in, I think, the Tyrolisch Tage-Gazett. I think you don’t have to count yourself a fluent German speaker to search out the gist of “SELFIE MIT KROKODIL ENDETE NICHT GUT.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:09 AM on September 16, 2021 [8 favorites]


I like how Glossika's mascot is also an owl, but more realistic and stern-looking than cartoon Duo.
posted by Apocryphon at 10:21 AM on September 16, 2021


Spanish is the first language I've tried to learn where my "intermediate" experience has been "talking with actual Spanish speakers on the regular" instead of "classroom and academic text usage." My SIL is natively bilingual (as are mis sobrinos), her mom is a native Spanish speaker, and her nanny is a monolingual Spanish speaker. So when I'm over there, we mostly speak in Spanish. It's astonishing how much more useful my intermediate vocabulary is, since I can talk about my kids, and scraped knees, and parks, and food -- everyday sorts of things for everyday conversation. I struggle a bit to find the right verb, but all these useful, everyday nouns are pretty locked in, and I pretty easily manage low-key small talk at parks or school events or in stores.

On the other hand, I know basically NO past tense and if I want to talk about things I did last week, I'm reduced to "I am shopping for baby presents, LAST WEEK." That's apparently going to require me to buckle down and actually practice some verbs. :) My sentence constructions are really simple and childish.

Aaaaaaaand I've learned that understanding a toddler learning to talk in a foreign language is nigh on impossible. When my niece says something to me in Spanish, I constantly have to turn to her mom and ask, "Que?" because wowwwwwww do I have no intuition that the toddler version of "leche" could be "way-ay."
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:33 AM on September 16, 2021 [4 favorites]


I was once in Prague, alone and a bit lonely.
I'm walking along, and a young woman smiles at me from across the street.
Being lonely, I cross the street and say "Hi, do you speak English?". She shakes her head.
"¿Español?". Nope.
"Parlez-vous français ?" No.
"Sprichst du Deutsch?" "Ja, ein bisschen".
Stretching my command of the German language to its absolute limit, I ask her her name.
She answers and then says: "Willst du Sex machen?".
I understand this from context.
I'm not so pretty that people ask me to have sex within minutes of knowing me, so I ask: "Wie viel kostet es?", ("how much does it cost?"), the other thing I know how to say in German, not because I wanted to hire her services, but because I didn't know any other way to ask if she was a sex worker in German.
She gave me a price (much higher than I expected).
I finish my polyglot adventure with "Nein danke" and walk away a bit sheepishly.
posted by signal at 11:58 AM on September 16, 2021 [7 favorites]


A million or so years ago I was overseeing a bunch of workers who came from various corners of the Spanish diaspora. (I've always felt bad about not speaking Spanish because it's the US' second language, it's the world's second language (or maybe third), I already speak French, and lastly at that time in life I employed a lot of Spanish speaking people.) One day I was telling them to do something (something simple: lift those things there and bring them here) and I turned to the guy who had the best English and asked him to translate for any one who hadn't understood. A good five minutes of conversation among the crew followed. It was obvious they were just trying to understand each other and later I asked him what happened. Basically, the Ecuadorians couldn't understand the Mexican guy who was translating the Dominican guy's instructions and they were trying to bridge all their different dialects. I'm not sure I would have believed him if I hadn't seen it.

Related: The Pronunciation Paradox

A friend of mine here, in Germany, has a terrible accent. This is playing it down, I can't convey how bad it is. It is shocking. It draws stares. Open-mouthed stares and on the part of his spouse, shame. The real tragedy of it is that, grammatically his German is very ok. But the noises he makes are so elaborate most people find reasons not to engage. (The only worse accent I've heard was in a German class when I first got here. Among the students was a guy in his 40's who was prompt and attentive and considerate and all around what any teacher would want in a student. Except when he spoke. He was a doctor, from China, to work at hospital/research X and when he wrote things down they were perfect - sophisticated, even, well past 'intermediate,' but when he opened his mouth: I imagine to us it sounded as off as we would have sounded trying to speak Mandarin. The teacher was a real asshole about this too, as I recall. Oh, and in the "Man From UNCLE" movie the woman/love interest is supposed to be German and has a conversation in German which when I heard it I thought I had mis-understood: as in, was she supposed to be unintelligible? )
posted by From Bklyn at 12:19 PM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


"Say you want to be able to connect with an in-law who doesn’t speak English well or with people you supervise who don’t or you just want to be able to enjoy films and TV shows in the language."

I don't really disagree with his basic idea (basic language apps are inadequate for more than tourist use), but these three scenarios seem pretty different from one another? I'm not sure what the benefit of an app that gives you "real language" is over the real people you're actually talking to, and surely if you're watching media in your target language you're "used to just hearing the language"--unless you mute the audio and only read the subtitles, I guess.

Plus it's really expensive: $300 if you pay ahead for a year. It makes the $44 I spent on a year of Memrise seem like a bargain. Plus that app does include grammar hints, so I'm not at risk of saying 안녕 to someone's granny or 안녕하습니까 to a new friend.

Also this "The chance that many of these languages, such as Native American ones of the Pacific Northwest and indigenous ones of Taiwan, will survive as spoken languages is small. However, having them recorded in the Glossika format will be an invaluable way to at least preserve them for posterity" is so cringe, I'm embarrassed for having read it.
posted by radiogreentea at 12:25 PM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


It’s also ignorant because Taiwanese refers to the variant of Hokkien, itself a dialect of Chinese, spoken on Taiwan, which is what Glossika offers a course on. Not to native Taiwanese aboriginal languages, of which there are many and don’t really have any online courses.
posted by Apocryphon at 1:26 PM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


praemunire: I was in Paris once with a Canadian who'd (unsurprisingly) learned her French in Canada, and apparently her Quebec accent was either charming or enraging to half the locals.

My in-laws are from northern Rhode island, which has a big populations of Acadians -- who came from Canada like 100-200 years ago for jobs in the textile mills along the Blackstone River.

They grew up speaking French at home, and even at elementary school -- but it was a Canadian rural French that kind of froze in amber over a century ago, itself already removed from French-from-France another century or two before that.

They went to Paris some time ago, and -- quelle surprise -- couldn't reliably make themselves understood to the Parisians. Can't imagine why....
posted by wenestvedt at 1:47 PM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]


She gave me a price (much higher than I expected).
I finish my polyglot adventure with "Nein danke" and walk away a bit sheepishly.


I think once we reach the penultimate line of the tale, it can only end on a high note: either as it did, or with signal making the acquaintance of a surprisingly affordable prostitute in Prague. And who among us can honestly say they have not done this?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:46 PM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]


Aaaaaaaand I've learned that understanding a toddler learning to talk in a foreign language is nigh on impossible. When my niece says something to me in Spanish, I constantly have to turn to her mom and ask, "Que?"

My nephew grew up bilingual, with one English-Canadian parent and one Chilean. I noticed when he was learning to speak he seemed to intuitively go for the easier word with no regard for which language the other words in the sentence might be: keys was easier to say than llaves, but agua was easier than water.

This meant monoglots or even those with an uncertain command of one of the two languages *raises hand* were often puzzled trying to follow his dialogues. You were never sure if it was a word you didn’t recognize because of toddler inflection or because it was an entirely different language he had dropped into and was actually pronouncing decently well.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:49 PM on September 16, 2021 [6 favorites]


Signal, you've shaken loose another memory from that Irish visit - I was at the same dance/house party where I understood the guy who thanked me in Irish. It was another point in the evening, when my friend and I were at a table with a jumble of other college-age people - some other women, and some dudes, people my friend knew in passing. Them I was introduced to, as a visiting American. One small cluster of guys chatted with me and my friend a while, and at one point after my friend excused herself to the ladies', one of them asked me, "So....just wondering, C hasn't taught you Irish, has she?"

"Well....I mean, like, 'Hello' and 'thank you' and stuff like that, that's it."

"Ah, okay." He nodded, and then after a few seconds, got into a quiet conversation in Irish with the other guys. I just kind of let it roll on - but then my ears pricked up when I heard him use the word poitín, glancing at me as he did.

I interrupted him with a raised eyebrow and said, "uh, I do know what that word means." He stopped, and excused himself from the table quite quickly after that.

I was in Paris once with a Canadian who'd (unsurprisingly) learned her French in Canada, and apparently her Quebec accent was either charming or enraging to half the locals.

So the band Great Big Sea did a cover of the traditional Quebecois song "Le Bon Vin". However, Great Big Sea is not from Quebec - they are from Newfoundland, and none of the band spoke any form of French. They still wanted to do something for the Francophone fans - so they got a French-speaking buddy from New Brunswick (which also has an Acadian region) to teach them the song phonetically over a phone or something. So this is a Quebecois French song as taught by a New Brunswick guy to a Newfoundland guy - with the unavoidable linguistic and phonetic decay that would come about as a result.

I had a French-speaking roommate for a while, and worked with one woman from Paris and one woman from French-speaking Switzerland. I played this song for each of them, and ALL THREE burst out laughing within the first ten seconds.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:38 PM on September 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


There should be a universal set of emergency words that everyone learns. I don't mean learning a whole language like Esperanto, just a few very basic universal words. Please, thank you, sorry, yes, no, I need help, where's the toilet, that sort of thing.

"OK" is kind of universal, I think, and I've read that "kaput" is widely understood; there should be a few dozen more like that that everybody learns worldwide.
posted by bink at 8:18 AM on September 17, 2021 [2 favorites]


bink, this is only kind of tangentially relevant, but you've reminded me of a thing that still amuses me; in the small town where my parents' work was based, my dad was universally known as M'sieur Okay, because a lot of what he did was surveying, which from the outside is just two guys wandering the landscape a hundred yards apart, holding big sticks and periodically yelling "Okay!" at each other.
And yes, he worked with team members from all over the world with varying levels of French and English ability, and 'Okay' was universally understood.

More to your point, I think the idea of a Universal Basic Vocabulary is brilliant, and it's not like we'd have to start from scratch, there are a handful of words we already sort of use that way...
posted by BlueNorther at 8:38 AM on September 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


EmpressCallipygos: ""Ah, okay." He nodded, and then after a few seconds, got into a quiet conversation in Irish with the other guys. I just kind of let it roll on - but then my ears pricked up when I heard him use the word poitín, glancing at me as he did.

I interrupted him with a raised eyebrow and said, "uh, I do know what that word means." He stopped, and excused himself from the table quite quickly after that.
"

I was in Bolivia many years ago. I was at the birthday party of a young Argentinian woman, about 15 years old. There were 5 or 6 also young Bolivian kids from a military school, maybe 16 years old. They were wearing uniforms and speaking bad English between themselves, obviously proud of what little they knew of the language.
They start talking about our hostess, in fairly crude terms about her body, apparently assuming nobody else in the room understood them.
I'm with a Bolivian friend, we're a bit older.
We stand up and let them have it, how inappropriate it is to talk about her body like this, especially as she's underage, etc. Really pissed and loud and in their faces. In actual English.
It's two of us, neither very physically imposing, and they're 3 times our number and all military and stuff, they could have wiped the floor with us, plus I'm Chilean and the Bolivian military does not hold us in high esteem.
But something about our command of the language versus their fumbling speech helped to establish some kind of dominance, and they completely backed down, apologized in their bad English and left shortly after.
posted by signal at 4:19 PM on September 17, 2021 [2 favorites]


During my study abroad in England, we went to Paris to see a friend. She took us to a really loud house party full of her friends. I speak basically no French, but have some German.

I honestly don't know how I communicated with anyone there -- but I know myself well enough to be sure that I couldn't have held my tongue all night. A German-English friend said that after too many pints I lapsed into German that was surprisingly good, so...I guess that?I may have set back cultural relations by years.
posted by wenestvedt at 4:34 PM on September 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


I tried Glossika a year or two back as I've been studying Italian and since before that I hadn't tried to pick up a new language since school, I was super excited for all the app possibilities out there! Sadly I have been mostly disappointed across the board. Memrise is alright (I still subscribe) and use it for like 5 minutes a day to drill vocabulary (more than that gets painfully repetitive). I think DuoLingo is utter trash in every way besides implementing gamification in a way that seems to be sticky for people. Pimsleur I've always found effective (just finished up the last italian course there), but those are OLD and I was hoping someone had made a better app in the meantime??? Pimsleur also makes the mistake of going needlessly formal and skipping essentials. On the second to last lesson of Italian 5, they finally introduced the word "dai" which I'm pretty sure is like the 6th most used Italian word or something. Memrise won me over when I downloaded it and in my very first set of vocabulary was "c'è il WiFi?" (Is there WiFi?) Actually essential!!

Just to be nosy about this wild NYTimes piece, I just started up another free trial of Glossika. A few sentences it gave me were semi relevant to everyday life I suppose:

Sei contagioso? (Are you contagious?)
Sono costipato. (I'm constipated.)
Il suo bagaglio supera il limite delle dimensioni per i bagagli a mano. (Your bag exceeds the carry-on size limit.)

Why is the last sentence sooo much more complicated than the other two? I do however feel seen - my bag for sure DOES exceed the carry-on size limit.

The strategy here, mimicking five sentences five times to a computer is utterly boring, and I don't see how this could in any way sink in - you're reading them off a screen which means they're going to be one in ear out the other for the most part. I really don't get it. You have to actively think at some point in the process in order to learn and retain things, I thought.

So my disappointment with the language learning app space continues, but I would love to be proven wrong. One piece that would be great is a spaced repetition system like Anki but with minimal setup work (Memrise almost does this, but you can only add vocabulary that's part of its dictionary which is extremely limited). It would be great to learn a word out in the world, spend 1 second / 2 taps max adding it to a list and then have computers manage the spaced repetition side of that vocabulary word forever. Is that so hard?

In any case, everyone's language learning stories have been extremely entertaining, thank you all for sharing.
posted by internet of pillows at 8:42 PM on September 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


There should be a universal set of emergency words that everyone learns. I don't mean learning a whole language like Esperanto, just a few very basic universal words. Please, thank you, sorry, yes, no, I need help, where's the toilet, that sort of thing.

Berlitz himself, I think, published a book like this. I have it somewhere. Its title is something along the lines of Around the World in 80 Words. It is a phrasebook in dozens of languages covering what Berlitz thought were the eighty most crucial words.

I worked in a hostel at one point where all the staff could get by in three to five languages each. One day we had our tragically misguided manager give us her insights into “the universal language of gesture.” She was a monoglot and was sure she could convey anything through improv signing. She demonstrated specifically the thumbs-up 👍 and the okay 👌 sign, blithely unaware that in some parts of the world, these are how you signal “up yours” and “you asshole.”

I’ve since picked up every book I have ever encountered on gestures around the world. So far as I can determine, the only two that are truly universal are (1) spread your hand and turn it perpendicular to the face, then touch the thumb tip to the nose and waggle the fingers (Nyah-Nyah) and (2) make a loose circle with the thumb and index finger of one hand and holding the index finger of the other hand rigid, make repeated thrusting motions into the ring.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:47 PM on September 17, 2021 [6 favorites]


I did a Pimsleur course a few years ago. About a month in I had the idea of watching television in my target language, as a way of comparing the subset of the language I was getting in my lessons to the way that actual speakers actually spoke. I’d do this about once a week.

Nearly every time, there was a word in the television broadcast that would suddenly “pop” out of the incomprehensible background, because I had learned it in a lesson that day or the day before.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 11:55 AM on September 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


I am an anglophone who learned French in West Africa. One delightful result of the accent that I developed is the consternation of some Parisians* as they hear me and immediately want to try to shift the conversation into another language so I'll stop butchering their beloved French - only they have absolutely no damn clue what my native language could be.

My takes: I'm convinced that Paris natives intentionally blur and garble their speech to confound outsiders, both French and foreign.

French as spoken in West Africa, on the other hand, is often a second language learned with care, and used to communicate across community and national boundaries. I've often found it to be clear and well understandable--including in videos, where I'm not the other side of the communication (and possibly trying to simplify that conversation myself).

Short version: I've found French in West Africa to be a relative joy to listen to.
posted by gimonca at 11:57 AM on September 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


A few years ago, I was in a rented car in rural eastern Hungary. The town I was staying in was on the other side of the Tisza river. I could not find a bridge anywhere near where I was.

The gas gauge was running low, it was getting late in the day. I stop at a tiny MOL gas station in one of the river towns. Maybe I can ask the woman at the station how to get across?

Does she speak English? No. German? No.

Okay, so maybe I can dust off the tiny little bit of Hungarian that I tried to learn before the trip. Might as well try, I'm running out of options here.

"Tokajra autoval megyek.....hol van a híd?"

The woman's face lit up -- of course, she's be happy to help. She pulls out a blank sheet of printer paper and starts drawing a map for me with lines, boxes, a wavy line river, the occasional tree.

Did I understand a single word that she said? Not a freakin one.

But the map was just enough to show me to the spot that explained why I couldn't find a bridge. There was no bridge here. Instead, there was a Stalin-era wooden barge, just big enough for a couple of vehicles, with a tiny control booth and a noisy, smoky engine that ran on....something. It was tethered to a heavy steel cable that ran to the other side of the river. Paying the fare also got you a couple of old-school paper receipts, printed at some point in the past. My car, another car, and a couple of bikes found our way to the other side of the river just fine.

Even those little bits of language can work wonders at times--something is better than nothing.
posted by gimonca at 12:15 PM on September 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


gimonca: French as spoken in West Africa, on the other hand, is often a second language learned with care, and used to communicate across community and national boundaries. I've often found it to be clear and well understandable

Yes! I can second that. It's also easier to speak. My French French isn't great but my African French works fine.
I have had many an interesting conversation with people from African countries, thanks to their very decent French.
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:39 PM on September 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


The comments about "African French" remind me of an Italian fellow at a conference who spoke some English but not enough to really communicate with me, an American. "You native speakers don't follow your own rules," he told me. "It's much easier to speak English with Germans." Some other folks in the conversation agreed: Germans speak the best English.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 4:23 PM on September 19, 2021 [4 favorites]


I would also echo that I have spoken French with Moroccans and Algerians and Vietnamese folks (among others*) with passable ease. I grew up in English Canada and we were taught French French, as it were, in school. Because of accent and vocab, I actually tend to find it easier to hold a conversation with other second language francophones from anywhere in the world (or of course people from Marseilles or Brest or Paris) than with my own countrymen from Chicoutimi or Trois-Riveres and the like. Quebec French is actually the least easy to follow for me.

*Possibly the unlikeliest pair of conversations I have ever had successively was once when I was checking in a Japanese guest. We started off in English but she was not totally comfortable in English, so I offered to switch to Japanese. My command is functional down a narrow professional channel to ask how many nights someone is staying, to direct them to their room, to talk about how the front desk is open 24 hours if they have questions, etc. However, she had several questions that required more detailed answers than I could easily provide in Japanese. I initially thought I’d try to grab a colleague who spoke better Japanese than I, but she offered up that she had studied French in school so perhaps we’d have more common ground there. We did.

Fellow in line behind her was French, but he had lived in Japan for two years, and having heard our conversation, thought it would be droll to check in in Japanese. The sudden gear-grinding shift from Japanese-accented French to French-accented Japanese would be an odd moment for many. For me it was Tuesday
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:45 AM on September 20, 2021 [2 favorites]


The sudden gear-grinding shift

this is the hardest, for me. Down the street there is a terrific sushi place (terrfic and wildly improbable) and one of the waitstaff is French and when they speak their heavily accented German I find my brain trying to cram the words into French meanings. It is disconcerting.
posted by From Bklyn at 5:41 AM on September 20, 2021


fantabulous timewaster: ""You native speakers don't follow your own rules," he told me. "It's much easier to speak English with Germans." Some other folks in the conversation agreed: Germans speak the best English."

Swedes IMO.
posted by signal at 7:33 AM on September 20, 2021


The sudden gear-grinding shift from Japanese-accented French to French-accented Japanese would be an odd moment for many.

Heh; one of the early conversations I had on that first trip to Paris was with a guy who ran a fruit stand at a market - I was able to say a few things in French, but then asked to switch to English, and we kept chatting a bit longer as I browsed. At some point he told me that he had taught himself English at the age of 14 by listening to a lot of Beatles records - and after he said that, I started noticing that his English had a bit of a Liverpool note to it. English in a combined French/Liverpool accent is a trip.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:11 AM on September 20, 2021


I’ve since picked up every book I have ever encountered on gestures around the world.
Fascinating. I'm not sure I've ever seen a book like that. (I also haven't looked for them.) Neat.

I'm tempted to argue that pointing to a thing is pretty universal, even if which fingers you use to do it may not be. Possibly holding up a hand for stop? Sometimes it's normally a fist or crossed hands, but I don't think I've seen an open, upraised hand at face height mean anything else. (There are of course many places I know nothing about.) I'm guessing airport apron hand signs are truly global. But, not naturally so.

I still can't get used to which voice/video apps on my phone are swipe up to answer and which ones are swipe down to answer. I get it wrong more than seems statistically likely.
posted by eotvos at 10:30 AM on September 20, 2021


eotvos: " I'm tempted to argue that pointing to a thing is pretty universal, even if which fingers you use to do it may not be. "

In this text: Gesture for Linguists: A Handy Primer, they point out that that kind of gesture a representational gesture, and in this case deictic one, which is distinct from an iconic one. Fascinating topic.
posted by signal at 11:46 AM on September 20, 2021 [2 favorites]


signal: TIL the term "deictic", so thank you.
posted by Lexica at 12:46 PM on September 20, 2021


I'm tempted to argue that pointing to a thing is pretty universal, even if which fingers you use to do it may not be.

Like the patented Disney Parks Two-Finger Point.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:42 PM on September 20, 2021


Some other folks in the conversation agreed: Germans speak the best English."

Swedes IMO.


Er, you guys have heard of the Dutch, right?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:21 PM on September 20, 2021


I remember sitting behind two people with German accents on the bus. One said to the other, “I hate when Americans speak German, because they think we all talk like Hitler.” *long pause* “And we don’t.”
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:48 PM on September 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


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