Learning Japanese

Comments

• Gullible@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  The US still looking weird by calling Germany “Germany.”

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  • missingno@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    About as weird as calling Nihon "Japan".

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  • trashgirlfriend@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Tbf a good chunk of Europe calls it “land of people that can’t speak” basically

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    • Lumidaub@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      They’re clearly thinking of the Dutch.

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    • agavaa@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Cause they can’t!1!

      But for real, for those who are curious: the border between Germany and Poland is effectively the border between western and eastern Europe. So to Slav people Germans lived right over there, and yet spoke something incomprehensible; so we called them “mute” (in Poland at least). If I can’t understand you you are mute to me, basically. And the word for “Germans” is the same as for “Germany”, so we call the country itself mutes 😅

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    • user224@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Nemecko
      Nemý

      Never realized that.

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  • ceiphas@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Du meinst Deutschland.

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  • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    And what about the Romance languages. They call Germany “Land of the Alemanni”, they called an entire country after a single Germanic tribe that lived near the French/Italian border. It’s like calling the entire country of the Netherlands Amsterdam.

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    • Dicska@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      It’s like calling the entire country of the Netherlands Holland. Holland(ia?) is part of the Netherlands which gave the name of the country in a bunch of languages.

      This is weird, by the way, I just wrote about the exact same thing not too long ago.

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  • mech@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The weirdest ones are the Finns, calling Germany Saksa.
    I’m German and I feel more at home when I’m in Finland than in Sachsen.

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    • bstix@feddit.dk ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Finnish Saksa is a reference to the Saxon tribe from Old Saxon in Northern Germany, not the current Sachsen.

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    • First_Thunder@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      What about the Portuguese! ALEMANHA for Germany

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  • chuckleslord@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    English speakers call Deutschland Germany, don’t give us all the credit here. And it’s called that cause the UK hated keeping track of what y’all were calling yourselves, so they chose bigotry instead (a common theme for England). The rest of us usually don’t know the history and just have a word with no context as to why it is that way.

    For those Americans who don’t understand, calling it Germany is like calling First Nation land “Indialand” because “how can anyone keep track of what they call it? It’s always changing!”

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    • b_tr3e@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Actually, it was the Romans who came up with the term “Germani” for the various tribes at the nortthern end of the world. The anglo-saxons being one of them.

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  • remon@ani.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Not any weirder than any other English speaking country.

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    • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Or any country really. I’d be curious to see if a chart of languages ranked on how many countries’ endonyms are also the same word in that language. But there’s definitely no language that doesn’t have exonyms.

      en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endonym_and_exonym

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  • Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    TYSKLAND

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  • samus12345@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Why put that on the US? We just carried on calling it what the English did.

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    • Gullible@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      To spur discussion, mostly

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• Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I constantly mix up sore and sono. 😮‍💨

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  • Lumidaub@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Thank you for actually talking about the post ;)

    I find that when speaking about them in isolation I also have to take a split-second to remember which one is which. But after a bit of practice, when actually forming sentences, you’ll develop a feeling for it and using the wrong one will sound wrong to your ears so you won’t need to think about it.

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    • dwemthy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      It helps me that ‘no’ marks possession or relation so ‘sono’ is like a shortening of ‘sore no’ and that means something more specific comes after.

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  • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Just remember that “no” is the particle that indicates possession, so you need to show what it’s possessing if you use it.

    Sore can be used as a subject or object directly:

    それを説明して下さい。
    Explain that please.

    Compared to:

    その話を説明して下さい。 Explain that conversation please.

    Using “no” to show possession can be used without indicating the possessed word with regular nouns, but not the kono/sono/ano words.

    家のドアは大きい。
    The house’s door is big.
    家のは大きい。
    The house’s is big.

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  • humanspiral@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    what about koitsu … Germany line?

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  • PodPerson@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    But both of those examples are pronouns?

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    • Lumidaub@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I think they were just saying that in both sentences “that” has different meanings.

      Maybe clearer:

      Sore ha ringo desu - that is an apple

      Sono ringo wo kaimasu - I’ll buy that apple

      (ringo is apple)

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• db2@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  m.youtube.com/watch?v=nhD9gyRSz0g

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• rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I was screwing around on Duolingo for a while, trying different languages. Happened upon Russian.

  After you get through the alien character set and sounds, it was pretty easy, or so I thought.

  There are 16 verb classes There is formal and informal dialect Nouns are gendered.

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  • ickplant@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I happen to be Russian, and yeah. Not the language to learn for funsies.

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    • rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Hey, until I got to grammar, it was great!

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• nialv7@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Ok but then what about are, ano, aitsu?

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  • 87Six@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I’m expecting the last one to mean “anal”

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