Do you like your native language?

[GundamSentinel]

flapdrol (How can you loathe a word like that? XD)

Yes indeed. Dutch has crazy grammar and is practically impossible to pronounce properly for non-native speakers, but it has some amazing words in it. What other languages has words with eight or nine consecutive consonants?

 

[rvbnut]

As a native English speaker, English is completed messed up compared to other languages I've looked at (Japanese, Cantonese, French, Italian, Arabic, German).

Some words just don't sound right even if they follow the correct pronunciation.

 

[BrotherRool]

I adore Welsh (except for mutations). It's just incredibly beautiful to look at and hear and it makes place names in Wales infinitely more interesting. Llandudno ftw!

Words like 'sglodion' and 'llaeth' are just really fun words. And even the horrible welsh words like 'araf' and 'archfachnad' are still horrible in a more interesting way than English. Just look at the way Cymraeg is spelt and pronounced. It's cool stuff. 'Nadolig Llawen', 'Hywl!' our greetings and goodbyes are really varied phonetically, and the spellig is frankly awesome.

'Dw i?n dy garu di...' clearly passes the I Love You test of a language, it's a lot softer than English, although the 'garu' is a bit harsh and horrible. 'Dw i'n dwyli...' is nicer sounding if it were only appropriate

... I'm just not very good at learning it.


English on the other hand (I'm binational right? I get two languages. I guess I could claim Esperanto if I felt like it too), has a lot of variety which I like and a flexibility which is pretty cool, it opens itself well to word play and confusing situations. But it's got no style, it sounds fairly neutral and the spelling systems are atrocious. It's a good medium, you can do a lot through it and the laxity of rules can be helpful when learning. It doesn't have a ridiculous gender system which is already a plus. But you can't do so much with it. There are less opportunities to just love the structure or the soundings of the words as they are, and when it does come about its often very intellectual and the words are too unfamiliar to grasp easy meaning.

I think for example, the romantic languages (except French) have huge advantages over English in terms of sound, and German has huge advantages because you can have a lot more fun with the language and say a lot more with what you've got, instead of having to learn obscure words that everyone needs a dictionary to understand. With German you can imply a lot of meaning with sentence structure and the case system, you can and are supposed to create new words freely from combing old ones and can extrapolate this to ridiculous levels (like face-I-want-to-hit can be a word). Finally you can have a lot of fun in German, for example

'The by a mob into town whilst on horseback chased man stopped off for an ice cream.' Is a perfectly valid (if posh) sentence structure in German. (On the other hand I'd've preferred German more if they allowed more laziness. Don't seem to be fans of doing things the short way)

English doesn't quite have these things. It's a middle of the road language. It's also a shame we don't have polite forms of phrasings, we lost a lot of information there

 

[violinist1129]

Meh... English is all right, I guess.

I sometimes think it's a little... plain. But no big issues with it.

Why do you think English is plain? The amount of vocab available to us is monstrous compared to most other languages (~600 000 compared to ~200 000 for German and ~100 000 for French), it has huge variance in etymology, and the grammar allows for wildly divergent methods of relaying identical information. I always thought it was more of an overly made-up prostitute of languages, the bloated amalgam of dissimilar lexicons it is.

'The by a mob into town whilst on horseback chased man stopped off for an ice cream.' Is a perfectly valid (if posh) sentence structure in German.

In English, 'The chased-by-a-mob-into-town-while-on-horseback man stopped off for an ice cream' would be just as valid (neither are great and both are obnoxious to parse) and one could get away with dropping the hyphenation if writing casually.

(I was one of those kids who actually enjoyed diagramming sentences in grade school and am a huge glossophile, so I love many languages for different reasons. However, English remains my favorite as my first lover)

 

[somonels]

Yes, but a history of awful relationships with teachers has conditioned me to be very hostile toward learning it and left me with noticeably below average in many ways.

 

[Bvenged]

Well English is the only language I speak, so yeah, I like it.

It certainly makes getting things a lot easier.


Ever tried to order a meal via charades?

You rarely get what you want.

Seriously though, English is a a very malleable language.

You can mix and match a lot of things that just aren't possible with other languages.

What Daystar said for English, plus the fact that nearly everybody on this planet can understand it, though it would be cool if I could speak my home language of Welsh.

I don't like it. Knowing I'm living in an lesser-known country where only half the population actually bothers to learn the native tongue can make it all the more interesting, like knowing you could speak a language nearly nobody else on this planet would understand, but I'd much rather learn to speak Greek or German than I would Welsh any time soon. Also, the accent is so flamboyant: It bled over from Welsh to English for those of us who speak English first.

As the great Rhod Gilbert sounds:

I know place names and how to sound words out, but I couldn't converse in Welsh at even a basic level. So no, but I do like English more.

 

[Chromatic Aberration]

Hmmm every language has its strengths somewhere - my native language being German I have to say it is sometimes needlessly complex and overly bureaucratic in its form. Hence, why I personally like English a bit more when it comes to casual conversations - I feel, its more....to the point. On the other hand, there are so many examples of just absolutely beautiful German verses that I cannot see to work in any other language. Take, for instance, the following poem.

Spoiler: Der Panther von Rainer Maria Rilke

Der Panther

Sein Blick ist vom Voruebergehn der Staebe
so mued geworden, dass er nichts mehr haelt.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Staebe gaebe
und hinter tausend Staeben keine Welt.

Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betaeubt ein grosser Wille steht.

Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf - Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille -
und hoert im Herzen auf zu sein.

If you understood it, you have to admit: it's fucking awesome and I can't really see how one could transfer this strength into any kind of translation.

 

[Toaster Hunter]

I'm fine with English. Its has a great ability to take from other languages and make it its own. Plenty of words to describe my thoughts with.

 

[James Crook]

My native language is French.
OH CHRIST ALMIGHTY. I absolutely hate it. Thank fuck I know English.

Cantonese... as much as I like how musical it is... it's annoying as fuck, especially when you get an intonation wrong. And don't bother asking about the writing...

I study Mandarin. I tried to take a look at Cantonese but eventually gave up.

 

[Zagzag]

Ever tried to order a meal via charades?

Once, (kind of), it was hilarious!

I was in Germany with some german friends of mine, some of whom spoke reasonable English. For some reason we decided to have a bet on who could go the longest without speaking any German, which ended up with us trying to order a meal in a restaurant run by an Italian who spoke no English. Suffice to say, noone got what they wanted!

Spoiler: Der Panther von Rainer Maria Rilke

Der Panther

Sein Blick ist vom Voruebergehn der Staebe
so mued geworden, dass er nichts mehr haelt.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Staebe gaebe
und hinter tausend Staeben keine Welt.

Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betaeubt ein grosser Wille steht.

Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf - Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille -
und hoert im Herzen auf zu sein.

Despite not speaking German fluently I have to agree with you. German is a great language for poetry and music, despite the stereotype over here of it being ugly and clunky.

 

[Smokej]

Hmmm every language has its strengths somewhere - my native language being German I have to say it is sometimes needlessly complex and overly bureaucratic in its form. Hence, why I personally like English a bit more when it comes to casual conversations - I feel, its more....to the point. On the other hand, there are so many examples of just absolutely beautiful German verses that I cannot see to work in any other language. Take, for instance, the following poem.

Spoiler: Der Panther von Rainer Maria Rilke

Der Panther

Sein Blick ist vom Voruebergehn der Staebe
so mued geworden, dass er nichts mehr haelt.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Staebe gaebe
und hinter tausend Staeben keine Welt.

Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betaeubt ein grosser Wille steht.

Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf - Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille -
und hoert im Herzen auf zu sein.

If you understood it, you have to admit: it's fucking awesome and I can't really see how one could transfer this strength into any kind of translation.

a lyrical masterpiece needs a true poet to understand it, like KAHN!

 

[Wintermoot]

I hate dutch I set all my electronics to English by default

 

[Chromatic Aberration]

a lyrical masterpiece needs a true poet to understand it, like KAHN!

Ach wie geil XD

Because If I had to look for someone who can properly express the depth and strength of this poem I immediately think of Olli Kahn. Not that he does a bad job at it, even, but the absurdity of that situation is rather striking.

Also for completeness:

 

[ClockworkPenguin]

Someone once told me that English and French are the only languages that lend themselves easily to puns.

And for that alone, I thank the stars I'm English. I can't imagine a life without puns.

 

[liquidsolid]

I like English. The grammer can be a pain because there are all these stupid rules that sometimes get broken. I am really into rap music and the way that English can interlock can be complex. Wordplay really works in English as well. I like to listen to it and like to speak it.

On a somewhat related note: This song was written by an Italian and is supposed to imitate the way that American English sounds to an Italian.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcUi6UEQh00

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

Well my country is technically bilingual and yes I do like Irish and English. I just wish the former was thought much better and to a higher standard in primary schools.

 

[Aksor]

What are people hating on the dutch language? Niks mis mee
I found the dutch language fantastic, but also found it fantastic that we are wise enough not to dub stuff ( I'm looking at Germany/France), or even worse talk over it telling what they are saying (poland I think does that)

 

[Someone Depressing]

No, I hate English. It has so many stupid little rules that don't make ANY sense.

And, ironically, I was the top of my primary school class in English, which was weird, because I absoloutely hated the language. Though, I guess it's easier to learn than other, actually sensible, languages.

 

[Henkie36]

Nope. My native language is also Dutch, and there isn't one particular thing it's the best at. Shoouting orders in the military is best in German, in romance it's French, in music it's Italian, but Dutch isn't really good for anything. The only thing I can say is that it provides hilarious accents when Dutch people are speaking English. On top of that, it's a very plain language, but that may have something to do with the region I live in. It's funny, because every country has dialects, but are there any coutries where you can drive through, and the dialect changes every ten minutes?

So no, I don't like Dutch. It's complex, vague, there are no rules without exceptions, it's not good for anything, and speaking it makes you sound drunk.

 

[Major_Tom]

No. We have a same word for "time" and "weather" but ten (10!) different words for a helicopter (these are NOT different types but a helicopter in general, for example there is no distinct name for a gunship).