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The main reason i learned english as a kid was that games weren't localized in brazilian portuguese yet, and all the best guides on the internet at the time were in english. But i was also consuming anglophone shows, movies and music, and people would sometimes use english terms when speaking. Also even when something is dubbed you're still aware of where it came from, like you're still going to get mentions of stuff like Thanksgiving, PB&J sandwiches, US specific school life, etc.
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Apr 19, 2024 17:29
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I picked up most of my English by playing Monkey Island and watching The Simpsons.
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Apr 19, 2024 17:36
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drk posted:edit: ah perhaps its their great love for terrible american TV Partly, but now it's mostly because it just has critical mass. Pretty much everywhere in the world is switching to English as a mandatory high school subject (if not before), even in places with strong and once-ubiquitously-spoken major colonial languages like Algeria for French or Azerbaijan for Russian. Like I think of all European national leaders, Erdogan is the only one who is not known to speak fluent English. It was something like this:  but the one I remembered still had Merkel on it. Also does Olaf Scholz seriously not speak either English or French? If that map is accurate, then that's pathetic.
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Apr 19, 2024 17:42
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Saladman posted:Partly, but now it's mostly because it just has critical mass. Pretty much everywhere in the world is switching to English as a mandatory high school subject (if not before), even in places with strong and once-ubiquitously-spoken major colonial languages like Algeria for French or Azerbaijan for Russian. its sad that so many leaders in europe are non verbal 
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Apr 19, 2024 17:48
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Saladman posted:Partly, but now it's mostly because it just has critical mass. Pretty much everywhere in the world is switching to English as a mandatory high school subject (if not before), even in places with strong and once-ubiquitously-spoken major colonial languages like Algeria for French or Azerbaijan for Russian. Here is Scholz addressing the world economic forum in English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzSx0ZA0qEo&t=308s I'm guessing he doesn't feel completely fluent so he won't list it, but it doesn't look like he is having a lot of trouble with it.
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Apr 19, 2024 17:49
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Archduke Frantz Fanon posted:its sad that so many leaders in europe are non verbal
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Apr 19, 2024 17:50
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Guavanaut posted:German would probably be the default language of chemistry and electrical engineering if if weren't for that period where a lot of international goodwill was burned, most of the 1880s-1920s stuff is compiled in that language. Eiba posted:So while the root cause is the British Empire, I imagine the huge number of speakers is as much because English has achieved a critical mass and it's useful to everyone now as an international language. FreudianSlippers posted:I picked up most of my English by playing Monkey Island and watching The Simpsons. Archduke Frantz Fanon posted:its sad that so many leaders in europe are non verbal
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Apr 19, 2024 17:50
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We had an assistant German teacher in school who was ESL (German native speaker) but she spoke english with a really pronounced American accent, which was very weird to me. gently caress knows what I sounded like to a German though, probably Bavarian or something.
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Apr 19, 2024 17:53
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FreudianSlippers posted:I picked up most of my English by playing Monkey Island and watching The Simpsons. like 50% of my vocabulary is from lucasarts games & my dad's stack of 70s mad magazine. also why i knew who spiro agnew was and what he looked like OwlFancier posted:We had an assistant German teacher in school who was ESL (German native speaker) but she spoke english with a really pronounced American accent, which was very weird to me. my first english teacher spoke 100% RP. my high school teacher was more normal-sounding. they were both pretty good teachers tho. i remember writing an essay with something like "the moon was revoluting about the planet" and thinking i was hot poo poo for it until i got my marks back lol Carthag Tuek fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Apr 19, 2024 |
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Apr 19, 2024 17:54
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Around the start of the millennium, I had a German teacher who was still convinced of the need to know German if you wanted to get into a technical field. He wasn't right, but I did actually end up having to use German later on due to the manual for some electrical gizmo only being available in German. I wouldn't be surprised if he had been right a decade or two earlier, and perhaps he still was for electrical engineering in particular. When I started a law degree in the Czech Republic (before I dropped it a month later for a tech one in the UK, not sure it was the best choice these days) we were basically told that English was far less useful than German because so much of the case law is in German or comes from German-speaking countries. Up until then German along with French were treated as hobby languages more than anything, was a bit of a surprise. Private Speech fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Apr 19, 2024 |
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Apr 19, 2024 17:56
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It's like when I or another ESL person takes that NYT dialect quiz, the thing goes crazy because we picked up pronunciation from a variety of shows and movies.
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Apr 19, 2024 17:56
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Frionnel posted:It's like when I or another ESL person takes that NYT dialect quiz, the thing goes crazy because we picked up pronunciation from a variety of shows and movies. there's also a lot of words we probably haven't heard ever but only read e: one girl in my high school class had been an exchange student in california and had gone full valley girl, started literally every sentence with "so like,". it was pretty funny in mid 90s denmark i tell u hwut
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Apr 19, 2024 18:00
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I kinda hope somewhere there's someone who's learned really fluent english but unfortunately they were taught it by the most geordie bloke in the universe and is now completely incomprehensible to anyone else.
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Apr 19, 2024 18:02
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Guavanaut posted:And German failures in diplomacy. My PhD advisor told me of a time back in his day where all chemistry students had to learn German as another language Not so much anymore, but it wasn't that long ago
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Apr 19, 2024 18:02
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OwlFancier posted:I kinda hope somewhere there's someone who's learned really fluent english but unfortunately they were taught it by the most geordie bloke in the universe and is now completely incomprehensible to anyone else. p sure there was an american goon who was taught german by an austrian and their had pen-pals somewhere in germany. then at some point they spoke on the phone the german was like "i cant talk to this hick" and they never spoke or wrote again
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Apr 19, 2024 18:04
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Carthag Tuek posted:p sure there was an american goon who was taught german by an austrian and their had pen-pals somewhere in germany. then at some point they spoke on the phone the german was like "i cant talk to this hick" and they never spoke or wrote again Lmao. Sounds about right to me.
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Apr 19, 2024 18:08
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:My PhD advisor told me of a time back in his day where all chemistry students had to learn German as another language It just stopped being the prestige language you'd be expected to publish in a while before then.
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Apr 19, 2024 18:16
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What is the perception of the various German accents? Thinking of starting to learn German since a good friend of mine is moving to Frankfurt later this year. Berlin is the only place in Germany I've ever been, did a study tour there in grad school. Still a lot of the country I'd like to see.
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Apr 19, 2024 18:17
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Carthag Tuek posted:there's also a lot of words we probably haven't heard ever but only read Mustang posted:What is the perception of the various German accents? Dutch = Funny High German = Bad
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Apr 19, 2024 18:21
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Mustang posted:What is the perception of the various German accents? Thinking of starting to learn German since a good friend of mine is moving to Frankfurt later this year. get real weird with it and learn Hunsrik
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Apr 19, 2024 18:24
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OwlFancier posted:We had an assistant German teacher in school who was ESL (German native speaker) but she spoke english with a really pronounced American accent, which was very weird to me. This came up in the thread not too long ago. When I speak English, it's with my approximation of a generic US English accent, even though we were taught RP in school. The United States is my frame of reference for the English language, on a mostly subconscious level. Even Brits themselves often switch to an American accent when e.g. singing - again, as we discussed recently. The current dominance of English is mostly due to the United States, and you can clearly see that in the timeline. It didn't truly become the sole international lingua franca until well after World War II, when the British Empire had already collapsed. Of course, the USA is itself obviously the result of British colonialism, so it's a second-order thing, as said by Carthag. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Apr 19, 2024 |
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Apr 19, 2024 18:41
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I think Brits get really mad when you point out that they didn’t really cause their language to be important, so I encourage you to keep saying it.
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Apr 19, 2024 18:52
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I feel like the UK probably has quite a bit to do with the prevalence of the language in say, India, and parts of Africa.
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Apr 19, 2024 19:01
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Allegedly Lenin spoke English with a slight Irish accent because his English tutor when he was in exile was an Irishman.
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Apr 19, 2024 19:06
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OwlFancier posted:I feel like the UK probably has quite a bit to do with the prevalence of the language in say, India, and parts of Africa.
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Apr 19, 2024 19:08
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Aside from the one-two punch of Britain having the biggest empire in the world and then American cultural domination spreading media and army bases all over the world, there are a bunch of more official ways that English has been internationally enshrined.
OwlFancier posted:I feel like the UK probably has quite a bit to do with the prevalence of the language in say, India, and parts of Africa. I think in India it's still the most widely used language even if it's usually not people's first language.
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Apr 19, 2024 19:12
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The Valley Girl sociolect is peak American/Anglo culture. Is Dutch just German with an accent? would explain a lot
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Apr 19, 2024 19:16
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Honestly it seems very cruel to inflict english on the rest of the world, I get that it was convenient at the time but it seems like a lot of technical debt.
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Apr 19, 2024 19:16
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The most streamed TV show in the world, not just children's, but in general, is now Bluey, so I guess it's Australia's turn to pick up the cultural torch for English.
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Apr 19, 2024 19:19
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drk posted:Is Dutch just German with an accent? would explain a lot German is Dutch with an accent. Just consonant shifting all over the place for no reason.
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Apr 19, 2024 19:20
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OwlFancier posted:Honestly it seems very cruel to inflict english on the rest of the world, I get that it was convenient at the time but it seems like a lot of technical debt. Most human languages are messy; IMHO English is at the easier part of the spectrum, too.
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Apr 19, 2024 19:25
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SlothfulCobra posted:[*]It is an official language of the EU. Regardless of Brexit, Britain was a founding member of the EU, and as part of that, it was required for there to be English copies of all official documents, and that continues and is likely to remain so regardless of the UK's presence, as English is still the most widely spoken language in the EU. Guavanaut posted:The most streamed TV show in the world, not just children's, but in general, is now Bluey, so I guess it's Australia's turn to pick up the cultural torch for English.
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Apr 19, 2024 19:27
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The more I learn about other languages, the happier I am with English. No complicated endings, no grammatical gender. It's got two different branches of Indo-European as a basis for its vocabulary, and it absorbs words easily, so it has a ton of synonyms for nuance. If it's a creole, or was just grammatically simplified by Norse invaders- good. gently caress complicated grammar. The spelling could be more standardized, but the language itself seems fine. No really obnoxious quirks like most languages seem to have. I feel like learning about the established status quo is usually frustrating as things are often arbitrary inefficient and unjust, but honestly English seems like a decent language to arbitrarily be the world's lingua franca.
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Apr 19, 2024 19:34
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drk posted:Is Dutch just German with an accent? would explain a lot all germanic languages are a soup, but once borders and language commitees started showing up they diverged. also navies, and time.
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Apr 19, 2024 19:34
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Eiba posted:No really obnoxious quirks like most languages seem to have lmao
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Apr 19, 2024 19:36
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Wasnt French the dominant international language until 1900 or so
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Apr 19, 2024 19:40
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:Wasnt French the dominant international language until 1900 or so def, in russia
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Apr 19, 2024 19:48
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Should call it the lingua angla.
OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Apr 19, 2024 |
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Apr 19, 2024 19:52
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I heard a story from a guy meeting Iranians in Europe, excitedly taking the opportunity to practice his Farsi with them. “…did you learn in Afghanistan?”, one of them asked. It was apparently a serious faux pas.
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Apr 19, 2024 19:54
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Ras Het posted:Danish is definitely the French of the Germanic languages. Swedish and Norwegian are Spanish and Portuguese. English is Romanian, the weird joke no one wants to deal with He wrote in English.
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Apr 19, 2024 20:04
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