What's strange about *your* language?

Zyst

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Jan 15, 2010
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Spanish: The letter ñ, also how our rr is pronounced, I've not seen many foreign people do it correctly.
 

Dyme

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Nickolai77 said:
Also, question to native Germans- does it really matter if you use the wrong gender to describe something? If i wanted the Hähnchen off the menu say, how important is it i get the gender right?
If you are foreign no one really cares, because most people get the genders wrong. If you are German you obviously always know what is which gender.

And to clarify, it is "das" Hähnchen. It would be confusing if you said that you wanted "die" Hähnchen, because that would be plural and you probably don't want more than one ^__^

And more general about genders:
A bridge is male in Spanish and female in German. Some scientists found out that German people rather associate bridges adjectives like elegant while Spanish people rather think of strength etc.
 

Hristo Tzonkov

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Apr 5, 2010
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The language is incredibly phonetic and most of it's grammar rules makes the rest of the rules not count,making it a ***** to learn.

What's really sweet is the backwards nod,which isn't exactly a language thing but still counts towards communication.A Bulgarian will nearly always nod backwards:yes means no and no means yes.
 

ZehMadScientist

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Oct 29, 2010
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Creator002 said:
In German,[footnote]German is not my native language, English is. That would be the reason I find this weird.[/footnote]every noun has a gender.

Der Vater = The father.
Die Mutter = The mother.
Das Kind = The child.

The gender isn't linked to the meaning of the word either but rather the word itself.

Das Mädchen = The girl.
Das Auto/Der Wagen = The car.

Then there is the cases in which a word's article has to change (similar to how "he" changes to "him".

Accustive:
Der Vater - Den Vater
(Die and Das do not change)

Dative:
Der Vater - Dem Vater
Die Mutter - Der Mutter
Das Kind - Dem Kind

Gentive:
Der Vater - Des Vaters
Die Mutter - Der Mutter
Das Kind - Des Kinds

Due to this there are 3+ ways to say "a/an", "the", "your", "their" and "you".

During my first two years of learning, I was so frustrated, but I loved the language enough to keep going. :)
Behold, the reason I dropped German classes.

OT: Dutch being my mothertongue, it is all natural to me. But some expressions have always raised a question mark above my head. For example, the Dutch equivalent of "let's show them who's boss" is litarally translated "Let's go let them smell a fart". Another example; "What's wrong?" would be "What is on the hand?". Such a weird language.

Also, If a person is born deaf, in what language do they think? (philosoraptor ftw)^^
 

SckizoBoy

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A Hermit's Cave
Nickolai77 said:
No offense OP, but you've made your language sound well and truly cluster-fucked :p
None taken, and for those trying to learn it, it is 'truly cluster-fucked'. :) There are plenty of fluent non-Chinese Mandarin speakers, but if I ever hear someone speak fluent Cantonese and turn around and be confronted by a face that isn't yellow, my head will explode. I remember that there was a black guy visiting the school where my Mom teaches, whose Mandarin was basically perfect, if you just listened to him, you'd swear he was from Beijing. Tried switching the conversation to Cantonese (as my Mandarin... sucks, to put it lightly) and he was stuttering, because the complex tones confused him. So we said 'screw it, let's talk in English!'

Also, question to native Germans- does it really matter if you use the wrong gender to describe something? If i wanted the Hähnchen off the menu say, how important is it i get the gender right?
Ha! You could do like me... speak so damned fast that the article is blurred.
 

erbkaiser

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Jun 20, 2009
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Something about my motherlanguage (Dutch) not yet mentioned that strikes me as quite odd is how we swear with diseases -- something I don't know any other language does.

Really weird if you think about it -- in traffic for example it's quite common to hear someone wish typhoid fever or cholera or someone else, but at least it's unique. Most other languages seem to only curse with sex and excrement.
 

DrunkPickle

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Sep 16, 2011
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Ever used the idiom, "Speak of the devil..."? Well, a Polish version of the saying roughly translates to "Speak of the wolf". Also, fun fact: the letter "e" in English, is pronounced the same as "i" in the Polish alphabet.
 

aksel

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Nov 18, 2009
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Well, Faroese is a sort of weird language. It is basically a mix of every language surrounding us: A lot of Icelandic (or Old-Norse), Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, German (mainly due to Denmark), a bit of Celtic and English.

We have genders assigned to all nouns. All nouns also have different endings, based on which time the sentence is in, like past, present and future, but we have 5 different times, and no future. We also have 4 different "falls", which determine which form of a noun we are to use. with several different types of endings and spellings. They are determined with what can be translated to "Who goes there?" (hvørfall), "Whom did you see?" (hønnfall), "Whom are you looking for?" (hvørjumfall) and "Who are you here to represent?" (hvørsfall). The last one is weird because we use a word, nonexistent in the English language, so I had to make something up that meant the same thing.

Added to that, we also have two additional variations of noun endings, called strong and weak nouns. I'm not going to go into that, because honestly, I don't understand it at all. I don't even think there is a rule of grammar to support it. Instead, we use a two different nouns as templates, strong and weak respectively.
Because our language is fairly new in written form, some rules of grammar have yet to be determined, and in the information age, it is very hard not to just adopt other words.

Faroese is also one of the only languages in the world that uses the letter "ð" (capital: Ð), the others being Icelandic and I think Old English. We also use ø, ó, í, ú, ý and three "put-together letters", ei, ey, oy, pronounced just as they are written. I don't see the purpose of putting them together, but whatever.
We have all of those extra letters, yet we don't use c, q, x or z. I have no idea why.

I could go into a lot more, but honestly, I'm drunk and have to finish an essay on gun control in the U.S.
 

Randomologist

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I made it up, in its entirety.
Wibble!

OT:
Th3Ch33s3Cak3 said:
The Irish language has so many exceptions for the verbs, there's no real point in having the rules there in the first place.
Welsh is another Gaelic language with an awkward grammar system, as in Irish. Many words in it are indeed very old, but a lot of the more modern ones are just lifted straight from English. Aluminium > Aliwminiwm.
 
Dec 27, 2010
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I don't really know. I speak Irish but I don't really see anything weird about the language, or any language in general. Modern Irish (the one I speak) is a bastardised version of old Irish, with most of the words that have come in the past century are just English words that use Irish phonetics, though, to be fair, most of the words in the English language are just the same except with German and French.

Edit: We also gave the world the word whiskey. It comes from the Irish "uisce beatha (water of life)", which some Normans who landed in Wexford mispronounced as "wishkey". That in turn was anglicised and is now the weirdest word on the planet.
 

Robert Ewing

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Mar 2, 2011
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The English language. Because we have so many words that mean different things.

The their, there and they're - your, you're phenomenon seems to remain at a constant level.

And we have useless letters. For example, Gnome. WHAT IS THE G FOR? I DON'T EVEN.
 

SpadeJester

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Apr 4, 2009
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Russian, the language in which you can write a sentence full of swears and it won't be swearing.

Is that strange enough for you?
 

GundamSentinel

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Aug 23, 2009
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For Dutch it's the ridiculous number of vowels (some 26) and stupid lists of exceptions. Every rule in the Dutch language has a long list of exceptions. Why make the rule in the first place? To make matters worse, the Dutch language society comes up with new and improved rules (read: more complicated and ruining the language) every couple of years. That's one of the reasons why I never read Dutch literature anymore (the other reason being that it's dreadfully dull). Hell, I even prefer writing in English nowadays.

And of course, let's not forget the weird R and G in Dutch.
 

M-E-D The Poet

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Sep 12, 2011
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Renegade-pizza said:
In Afrikaans you have to say "nie"(not) twice in a sentence or some other doubled negative.
For e.g.: (This is basically directly translated): You do not have to do that not. Putting the second negative can be ***** sometimes, since literally only 2 countries officially speak Afrikaans and I go to an English school.

This may not exactly be strange, but Afrikaans actually has two words for family. "Familie": Your entire group that shares a common ancestor and "Gesin": i.e. Mom, dad and siblings. I'm actually surprised that English doesn't also have two words for it.
this

And the fact that written/sung afrikaans and spoken afrikaans are two very different things

For example you might find the artist dans dans lisa singing " Gisteraand is die wereld vergaan en ek was daar" which roughly translates to : Yesterday the world was destroyed and I was there"
but if someone 'd say it they'd say " Gisteraand verging de world en ek was daar "

It's not a real example it's just one I thought up real quick whilst listening to the song haha

But anyway to clarify : written afrikaans is akin to dutch with english grammar, spoken afrikaans is akin to old dutch with english words mixed in spoken in a manner similar to french

edit : oh and our pronounciation from time to time too : God= the dutch sch-j-o-t
 

esperandote

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Feb 25, 2009
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Spanish, among many other things, the way we abbreviate United states of america "EE. UU." wtf?