I'm new here so I thought I'd make a post about it and tell y'all about myself.
I'm graduating this month with a bachelor's in linguistics and I'm also learning Russian because learning French apparently wasn't enough for me.
I was raised Christian but at around 8~10 I started thinking about what I believe and by the time I turned 15 I told my (very religious) family that I'm atheist. Luckily my dad is pretty chill with it.
Decided to join because I could always learn more things from different perspectives.
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Good to have you. Welcome. Russian is a really smooth language to speak. I tried it while studying German because I thought it would correlate(being that they are big on their cases) and therefore wouldn't be a big challenge, but Russian is a whole different Animal lol. I hope you stick with it.
Don't even get me started on all the cases it was a smack in the face going from French which arguably has maybe one case to Russian which has 6 lol. I do plan on studying it even after I graduate though.
Not to mention that cyrillic script lol. I'd argue that the romance languages are pretty easy once you've got the hang of at least one. With the cases, don't sweat it cause that's wayyy better than the 31 case Hungarian.
Btw congrats in advanced on your Graduation.
Sprecht du Deutsch? I didn't know that. I use Duolingo to learn German right now, but I'm a bit rusty. I love foreign language. German and French are especially cool though because those two languages formed together to make English in 1067 after the Norman conquest of England. I guess I owe a lot to William of Normandy.
Ich kann schrieben Deutsch, aber spreche kein Deutsch lol
I'm an absolute addict for Language. We can talk about this for hours. I'm proud to say that Spanish is my second language in regards to actual fluency. German is a steady progress, but it has taken the back burner so to speak. I was surrounded with Spanish in Florida.. Now In NY I am always around Mandarin Speakers, so I've taken it on as well. It's not hard, yet not easy. Just another puzzle to solve. Game on.
I too love language. I've only ever spoken English fluently, but I've studied Spanish, German, and French. I only seriously study German now, but it's a back burner thing for me as well. I've got exams to worry about lately.
If you know English and a bit of German, you'd learn Scandi languages in no time. I've studied Norwegian for a year or so and now I'm able to at least derive the meaning from context when I read something in any or them. Really easy and fun.
Pronunciation is a different story though :D
That's awesome! Thanks. I'll check them out.
- "Pronunciation is a different story though :D"
To get Swedish pronunciation just right, watch some episodes of the Muppet's Swedish chef. It's spot on...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-kPcC8aqRA
Hey Illuminaughty (love the name). Welcome to Atheist Republic! Hope you like it here :)
Welcome, illuminaughty! Clever screen name.
Welcome!
Hi illuminaughty
Glad ur here:)
Congrats on graduating soon. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Welcome Illuminaughty.
If you get tired of Russian, try Japanese. It has no cases, fuzzy tenses, no singular and plural, no genders, no real pronouns, endless politeness levels, adjectives cross-dressing as verbs, verbs that pretend to be adjectives, two alphabets, and about 2,500 Chinese ideograms, each with several different meanings and pronunciations.
On second thoughts, you're probably better off with Russian.
is it not 3 alphabets? or did you mention that with the ideogram comment?
@SecularSOB "is it not 3 alphabets?"
There are two phonetic scripts: hiragana and katakana, each of which has about 80 symbols. Each symbol represents a consonant plus a vowel, like ka or mu. The only consonant that occurs alone is n. Hiragana is used for grammatical words like prepositions and verb endings, and katakana usually for foreign words. You could write Japanese just using these scripts, but it would be difficult to understand. That's because Japanese is full of homonyms, words that sound the same but have different meanings, like here and hear or there and their in English. So most words are written in Kanji, or Chinese characters.
The advantage of Kanji is that once you know them the meanings just leap out at you. To understand the English word "atheist" you need to learn it from a dictionary or understand the language it came from. In Japanese "mushinronsha" is made up of four kanji meaning "no belief argue person", so you can figure out what it means instantly.
Wow I'm glad I asked. There's nothing like the analysis of someone who learned as an adult. Thank you for breaking the concept down for me Algebe!
@SecularSOB: "There's nothing like the analysis of someone who learned as an adult."
Adults can't really learn a language unless they can first learn how to think like a baby. Don't ask why the language is like that. Just take it on faith and soak it up. It's a bit like religion really. And then one day when you're really familiar with the language you can sit down and analyze. That's when you have a WTF moment and realize how crazy it is.
Agreed.
"Adults can't really learn a language unless they can first learn how to think like a baby."
I think that's the best way. This is somewhat the type of approach I took to spanish. Never had a formal teacher. If something didn't make sense, then "it is what it is" until I became concious of the pattern and got that "Ohhhhh that's why.." moment.
Welcome!
Hiya Illuminaughty, I too am new so let's be newbs together!
I'm new here too. So how does this work? Can you post a new topic on your first day?
Yup. No experience required. On the forum page there's a button that says start new topic. Click it, decide where you want to post it (like the Debate Room, Atheist Hub, Site Support, etc.), then type away. Ask any question or make any statement, provided it adheres to the guidelines posted somewhere around your screen. Have fun.