Hillary claims to be able to speak Southern Black
Posted on 06/13/2019 4:21:38 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I learnt French as a child and German as a teenager and found that English seemed like a bastard son of the two - with German words and French grammar. Later I learnt Italian and Spanish which are so much simpler than French and indeed are dialects in a way of each other -- you can have a roughly mutually intelligible conversation.
Anyway, I digress -- what I mean to say is that Melania's language skills are enviable, but doable if you grew up learning at least another IE language besides English
Children who are monolingual in English or Spanish (another highly simplified grammatically speaking indo-european language), then you are handicapped in learning another language
But if you grow up learning a slavic language or Armenian or albanian or learn Latin or Sanskrit, then you will not find it weird to have
She probably grew up learning Slovenian and Serbo-Croat as in the former Yugoslavia and learnt German and English or French in high school
Italy is right next door so she may have picked it up.
I know many on FR want monolingualism, but I think it is a mistake imho
After learning a few Indo-European languages, you see the connections between English-French-German and Italian-Spanish-French and then once you know German and English, then Dutch and Flemish are simple. Similarly with Sanskrit-Hindi-Farsi - though the Arabic loan words in the latter two throw me off
Polski was also fiendishly hard - knowing some latin and Sanskrit helped, but the cases when you need to put different starting pieces to a verb to change the meaning still throws me off -- uczyć się means to learn, uczyć means to teach, pouczyć to teach a little, nauczyć means to teach (to completion)
Or to take words traveling in Indo-European
Door --> Tur (german) --> Drzwi (polski) --> Dar (farsi) --> Darwaza (sanskrit)
Or Mead/Miód/Med/Medu -> honey or variation
Different branch of Indo-European go different ways. Like the Greek and latin branches take porta/puerta --> d migrating to p for door. Germanic languages also have specific vowel changes
teach your kids before the age of 12 - ideally before 6 at least 3 languages. I would always suggest latin or Sanskrit to be one of these as they both have the "basic script" for most IE languages - and if you know Latin very well, then picking up "Modern Latin" i.e. French or Spanish or Italian or Romania or indeed much of English becomes very simple. Polish is hard, but Russian is easier (it has a simpler past tense form than polish and far fewer sounds)
When folks get impressed with the languages I know, I quite frankly don't think it impressive compared to people I know who speak Indo-European AND non-indo-european languages - really, you pick up another IE language and you can pick up some strings of similarity, but if you pick up a text in Hungarian/Finnish/Tamil/Japanese/arabic - you go "what the heck?!?" -- and there are people I know who know 3 or more languages from different language FAMILIES -- like Tamil / Japanese and English. Now THAT is impressive.
I tend to agree. The level of English in poland is really bad - the way it is taught in schools. the same for french or other languages
but the ones who speak it fluently seem to watch a lot of movies or cartoons
poland has this silly thing of "polski lektor' which is where a person reads the script OVER the voices of the actors. It's dying out but still popular
Hillary claims to be able to speak Southern Black
Tak jest!
Wookinese, Sasquatch, and Ebonics. Three in the tree.
Agata is easy on the eyes as well. Gotta love Poland.
I know what a pain. But the secret is, just learn vocabulary, and don't worry about cases. Poles understand that a foreigner most likely isn't going to master a language that so few outside of their borders speak, so if you can simply manage to get the basic words correct, they will understand what you're trying to say, and will appreciate it. They aren't like the French, who will scoff at you if you dare not use the passé composé properly.
My wife expects me to speak it fluently (you know, polish women....)
“” “” They most definitely are not the same language - Slovenian and Polski are NOT mutually intelligible “” “”
It is true that most Slavic languages are phonetically very different but it doesn’t mean they aren’t mutually intelligible.
Take Polish and Russian as an example. Phonetically not even 50% similar but still mutually intelligible.
Take for example ‘lekarz’ which is doctor in Polish. Russian for doctor is ‘wrach’ which is not near similar.
On the other hand to treat is ‘lechit’ in Russian and it sounds literally the same in Polish.
The way words composed in Slavic languages it is absolutely clear that for the Russian that the word ‘lekarz’ means a person who applies treatment or doctor.
Both languages are also influenced by Western languages with many words meaning the same after German or English originals. Sometimes it is in one language but not in another but still intelligible.
For example automobile pronounced ‘avtamabil’ in Russian and ‘samochod’ in Polish. Not near similar once again but English name is somehow international and mostly known to the Polish so they understand the Russian word. Also in both Russian and Polish the literal meaning of ‘samochod’ is ‘goes by itself’. For that reason the Polish word is easily understood the Russian despite obvious phonetical difference.
A lot of words are practically the same. It is not without flukes though. ‘Uroda’ means beauty in Polish and ugly in Russian. On the other hand ‘krasa’ also means beauty in both languages.
If we take Serbian, Bulgarian, Belarusian or Ukrainian they are even closer to the Russian.
How are you on python or (speaking of ancient languages) COBOL?
The dims claim Melania cannot speak English but I seem to understand her just fine.
Funnily enough I used to code in cobol and jcl when I started in business intelligence work 20 years ago. I do some python coding but mostly plain sql and r. Why?
The Polish first lady is stunning, both in looks and fashion. She is the first wife of a foreign leader who can rival Melania.
She spoke ebonics.
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