Some thoughts on language learning

[regshoe]

I'd been thinking vaguely for a while that I'd like to try learning another language properly. Swedish seemed a good idea partly because I've been into Swedish books and music lately, partly because it's fairly closely related to English (twice, actually) and the similarities might make it easier to learn than a completely unrelated language and partly because I want to visit Sweden and do lots of birdwatching in the future.

So I've been doing lessons on Duolingo, supplemented with some very helpful Youtube videos on pronunciation (I can now understand things like 'voiceless velar fricative', which feels very impressively technical)—and I've now got myself a dictionary and reference grammar, which looks like it'll be very useful for sorting out all those verb types and so on. (Duolingo is good for practising vocabulary but its grammatical explanations are fairly basic). Folk songs are also very good for making vocabulary memorable, especially the more repetitive ones—I've learnt all the words in this very simple song, and am working on more ballads.

(I've also set up my keyboard to type in Swedish, which makes it easier to do this öäå but also moves all the punctuation around, which is slightly confusing—I'm developing a second muscle memory to remember where everything is).

That thought about similarity is true so far—a lot of basic Swedish vocabulary is very similar to English (katt/cat, hus/house, gå/go and so on)—and, interestingly, of course for historical reasons, it's especially similar to northern English, and also Scots. I'm finding a lot of geographical terms and other northern dialect/Scots words, which lead to terribly interesting etymological investigations—so e.g. dal/dale(/valley), gråta/greet(/cry), barn/bairn(/child), vilka/whilk(/which)... as Horrible Histories memorably put it, thank a Viking!

But the differences are also interesting, and I'm enjoying learning some neat grammatical features that English doesn't have. So e.g. instead of having a word for 'the', Swedish nouns add a suffix to become definite (en katt, a cat; katten, the cat), which I think is quite elegant, and which also makes learning noun genders easier because the suffixes are different. Swedish also still has the singular/plural 'you' distinction which has been lost in English (the singular, du, is I think related to 'thou'), which is very useful!

Obviously it will be good to learn more Swedish ballads in the future, and read books, etc. (I read some of Astrid Lindgren's books in English as a child, and I think they'll be nice to revisit when I get to that stage). I'm not sure how good my speaking skills will ever get—being autistic, speaking isn't always the easiest in English—but hey, it's an experiment, we shall see.

Comments

[theseatheseatheopensea]

(Duolingo is good for practising vocabulary but its grammatical explanations are fairly basic)

I totally agree, that's why I use it more to practice what i already know, than to learn new languages from scratch. It's still a super useful tool, and I love Duo the owl so much, as well as the random sentences, like "the bee writes a letter", or "the ant reads a book", or "today is the prince's birthday", haha! XD And music is such a great (and fun) way to learn too, it's so good for pronunciation and vocabulary and basically for getting your brain used to the new language!

Good luck with your learning, and have fun, of course! :D

[regshoe]

Ooh, what language(s) are you learning?

Hehe, those random sentences are good fun—I got 'Mice do not exist' (Möss finns inte) the other day—and they're also useful, of course, because they make you pay attention to the details of the words instead of guessing, and they make things more memorable!

[theseatheseatheopensea]

I have all the languages I know something of in my profile there (Portuguese, English, Italian, Guaraní...) but I'm really bad at keeping up my streak, I should practise more, so I don't forget them. And a while ago, I started to learn Klingon XD Nuqneh jup! (That's something like: "Hello friend!" :D And if Duolingo ever offers Basque, I'd be really interested in learning it from scratch, and adding it to the list of languages I speak horribly! XD

And you're right, the random sentences are super useful because they are funny, so you end up learning the words... who can possibly forget something like "the crab drinks wine"? XD They are way more entertaining that the sentences in my old English textbooks ("The cat is under the table", "Jane has a pencil", "John and Jane play with the ball", etc.)

Qapla! ("Good luck" in Klingon, because I'm a nerd! XD)

[regshoe]

Oh, that is an impressive list :D Basque is an interesting language, although I know very little about it (I remember it's one of the unusual languages spoken by the old lady of Cannaregio in JSMN). And very cool that Duolingo has Klingon, haha.

Qapla! ("Good luck" in Klingon, because I'm a nerd! XD)

:D I wonder what's the Quenya for 'thank you'?

[theseatheseatheopensea]

Haha, thank you! It's not that impressive, because I'm not that good at any of them! XD

Basque is super interesting indeed! My grandfather was from Iparralde (the French Basque country) and the culture and mythology is beautiful... and ohh, I always remember that JS&MN connection too! :D

I'm surprised that Duolingo doesn't offer Quenya (at least, not the last time I checked?) because they already have some constructed languages, like Esperanto (which is super useful for learning Romance and Germanic languages--it's very intuitive), Klingon, and the Game of Thrones language, I think? So maybe they will add Quenya one day! Or Khuzdul! :D

[regshoe]

My grandfather was from Iparralde (the French Basque country) and the culture and mythology is beautiful...

Oh, there is actually one Basque thing I know—the Christmas carol 'The angel Gabriel from heaven came', which is one of my favourites! Such a beautiful and unusual tune.

maybe they will add Quenya one day! Or Khuzdul! :D

Sounds like a good priority :D

[luzula]

:D I wonder what's the Quenya for 'thank you'?

I studied Quenya during a summer, years ago, but it's not like I actually remember it! But a quick search in the documents I still have tells me that "thank you" is not actually attested in Tolkien's corpus of words. A related word which is attested is "Eruhantalë", "thanksgiving to Eru". From that, someone on the internet constructed "hantan len" for "I thank you". "Hanta-" would be the verb "to thank", "-n" is a first person suffix, and "len" is the dative second person pronoun.

[regshoe]

Oh, how cool that you've studied Quenya :D And a very neat bit of linguistic construction there—nice.

[luzula]

Re: "möss", that's another way in which Swedish is similar to English--some plurals are not regular but are formed by changing the vowel...I guess that's generally a Germanic language thing.

[regshoe]

Yes, that's nice! (And kind of cool how 'mouse/mice' is irregular in English too, but with different vowels—then there's e.g. man/män which is exactly the same). And both Swedish and English also have some verbs changing their vowels in the past tense, too, right? (I say having briefly glanced at the section on verbs in my grammar, not actually studied the past tense yet...)

[luzula]

Yes, the irregular verbs are a lot like English too! For example: drink, drank, drunk corresponds to Swedish dricka, drack, druckit. That one even has the exact same vowel changes, though that's not always the case...