(Russian Reflections #2) Машина (ma-sheen-a) Machine, engine, mechanism God, I love words like this when studying foreign languages. Something is recognizable, but changed to have this kind of exotic tone to it, so the word just sounds catchier to the ear. I think this happens a lot with English words to the Japanese ear, for whatever reason or another. Personally, one of my greatest motivators in studying German was because of the momentary elation I would get from recognizing a word that was just barely off from what I’d expect, but I could still understand the meaning. Like how “hund” (pronounced like “who-nt”) means “dog”, but I can recognize it quickly as relating to “hound” as well as to “hunt”. At that point, the memory device makes itself, “hund” brings to mind the image of a hunting dog. I actually encountered a number of German words that I didn’t have to think about too hard to commit to memory. I really felt like I got a lot of progress out of relatively little effort. You could see it as being lazy, but in another light, the process was efficient. I prefer the latter term. Back to the word [ машина ], I love the stressed-unstressed pattern of MA-shi-NA. It’s just pleasing to me on a fundamental level. This is easy to remember for me because, of all things, in the video game series Final Fantasy, they had robots called “Machina”, but that had a similar stress pattern, albeit with a “ki” in the middle instead of a “shi”. When I can link a word to something I already have a sense for, even if it’s just a thing from a video fame, then it makes it a lot easier to remember. One more thing, I think the bootleg Japanese pronunciation of “waifu” is a superior word to “wife” because of the stressing pattern. You can get more mileage out of using your intonation while speaking when you have two syllables on a word as opposed to one, which makes my sarcasm and general frustration about marriage in the modern day much easier to emote when I have more vocal room to work with. Um, I think I’m getting off-track though. I really like digging through languages to find words that strike a chord with me. It’s hard to make a rule set for what makes certain words more appealing on an emotional level than others, but nevertheless, I still take time to appreciate words like [ машина ] when I do find them. I don’t know why. Maybe it feels like it’s opening up new possibilities or new perspectives, which doesn’t logically make sense given how influent I am in every foreign language I’ve studied. Maybe the psychological process of finding appeal in sounds and meaning is what really draws me to continue studying. Not sure if that’s a common motivation in language study though… Anyway, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one.
