Like learning Norwegian (bokmål) while living on the west coast. French vocal r, secondary Norwegian language, one hour travel north or south can be regarded as a completely new language. Nice fjords, though.
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JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 5 days agoa lot of swallowed and mumbled consonants
This has been my experience learning French. The written language and the spoken one are pretty wildly out of tune, with up to ~5 letters at the ends of some words either not pronounced at all, or heavily swallowed.
The pronunciation of Castellano (i.e. a sister language) was vastly easier for me.
Griffus@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 4 days ago
Like learning Norwegian (bokmål) while living on the west coast.
In all honesty, I’d be absolutely terrified of trying to learn a Nordic language, which is absolutely NOT due to the lovely Nordic people I’ve met across the years.
It’s a “me” problem, and case-closed, please.
Griffus@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
This got me curious, what is it with Nordic languages that is so off putting to you?
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 4 days ago
Well.. I mean… what later become “English” branched off from its West-Germanic roots, long ago, and never did become “High German.” So theoretically, as an English-speaker, I have great familiarity with modern French, and we share the same basic sentence-structure as with modern German. Some of that is actually true. In practice, I could not be more of a complete dumbass upon those other languages.
TBC, I can speak Castellano and Français like someone with heat-stroke, and I can vaguely understand Dutch and German.
fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Maybe I have a little bias as a Spaniard, but I swear languages that lack a set of rules to correctly pronounce every word ever are mental illnesses.
I could give you any Spanish word you don’t know and you wouldn’t miss pronounce it.
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 3 days ago
Yeah, I don’t know enough about French grammar and pronunciation rules, but I think part of the problem comes from them trying to maintain a written language that got left in the dust by the spoken language ages ago. So instead of updating the written one, they chose to ‘preserve history’ and add a landslide of little rules explaining separate cases, not just for pronunciation, but in a hugely systemic way. Native French-speakers have actually complained to me about that occasionally.
I love that about Castellano, just that some regions speed it up so much that I can barely catch it.
fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Oh, dialects not only sped it up, they skip parts of words too. Funnily enough, I’m from the region where our dialect is to over pronounce consonants, and thus the easiest to understand haha.