(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ foreign languages

what language learning is actually like

Come over and learn the basic grammar of my conlang

Let's create a Memrise course of the worst swear words in both our languages

We should make cookies in the shape of kanjis and see if we manage to make any that are recognisable after baking

Hey, let’s listen to a language we don’t know for 30mins to get a feel of how it sounds and then try and come up with words in that language and check if they exist on a dictionary: winner gets 1 kiss for every point of advantage they scored on the other

I WILL CONJUGATE TO ORGASM IN OH! SO MANY TENSES

I WON’T MIND YOU ADJECTIVING ME

IF ONLY YOU KEEP TRACING THAT SAME KANJI FROM MY CENTRE

LET ME TEACH YOU THE ORDER OF STROKES

A VOICELESS UNARTICULATED FRICATIVE WILL ESCAPE MY LIPS

LIKE A PANT LIKE A SIGH MY GLOTTIS WON’T STAY STILL

MY BODY TURNS INTO A PLOSIVE

[…] It’s a useful thing for lots of people that there is a language that’s almost a global language, you can get around the world using English, but never think that this is because the English language is so fine and noble and bold and true and suited to this purpose. It’s in some ways a rather rotten language to have fallen into this privileged potision. It has a truly terrible writing system - learning to spell English is just awful. You can literally learn how to spell Finnish, and get everything right - so you’d always have a hundred percent on any spelling bee - in about ten minutes. And that’s generous. That’s just an alphabet that works, and nothing else to learn. No exceptions. Enter English - thousands of exceptions, and even years of education leave some people quite uncertain about spelling. What’s more, it’s rather difficult to pronounce compared to a lot of languages. It doesn’t have a simple consonant-vowel syllable structure. You have syllables like “strengths”. And not everyone can do n-g-th-s in a go, and without stumbling or sticking extra vowels in. It could have been better chosen. And its grammar? English has about two hundred irregular verbs, and they’re so complex that native speakers get some of them wrong. Occasionally you hear people say that they “sung” a song, when they mean that they “sang” a song, and so on. Irregular past tenses, and about two hundred of them. And various different patterns, I don’t know, thirty or fourty patterns that they follow. Do you know the number of irregular verbs in Swahili? Zero. There are no irregular verbs. The language is highly inflected, but every verb is regular. That would have been a lovely language to have as a world language. It’s already a trade language across the whole of East Africa. And what do we get? English. Well, that’s unfortunate. Though it’s lucky if you’re an English speaker and you want to travel in foreign countries. Just don’t ever imagine that you deserve it. You don’t deserve it, you’re just lucky. - UQx WRITE101x Interview with Geoffrey Pullum - [x]

fml “fuck my life” in morse code is perfectly symmetrical