ITT: baffling things about foreign languages

>Russians literally say "I doctor" instead of "I am a doctor"
It's easy though.

>no genders
what is the deal with this liberal diversity language for fuck sake

But that's (like just about everything in German) consistent.
Literally the only exception that springs to mind is gucken (the g's pronounced more like a k than anything else).

Similarly, in Turkish you say "X bad" rather than "X is bad", since the 3rd-person singular form of the "to be" suffix is nothing. It's great fun.

peasant languages

Which country has the best cursing?

I've read some older novels in English and that is how they counted in those.

Four score and seven years ago...

Is Latin also a peasant language?

Yeah I can't really remember, but it's somehow the "original" when it comes to Germanic languages or something. Danish still uses some fucked up similar system that we Swedes always complain about. Not sure if it's the same as German though (I know the German but not the Danish one).

>he says in English
perhaps you are a peasant

>german
>consistent

o i am laffin

Yes, only Greek and German will do

The northern dialects of Norwegian desu

Yes.

English is the language of the ruling classes.

Yiddish.

name a few exemplaros if you favor

>English is the language of the ruling classes.
Oh user, you're so naive.

Why does Veeky Forums have such a hard time staying on the topic of literature?

Wait, what? I thought this board was about anime?

its quatre vingt seize
so its four twenty sixteen

>7 cases
>14 verb cases
>3 genders
>4 declensions
>Completly phonetic, able to reproduce any sound possible

Serbian is beautiful, and you fucks will never truly master it

No, it's more like
>English wastes time always sticking in the verb 'to be' even when it's obviously intended

Serbian

I writer

>verb cases

try polish
>7 cases
>like 21 verb cases
>3 genders
>8(?) highly irregular declensions
>highly phonetic

kanker

Jap has a bunch of different counting words depending on what type of thing you're counting.

Kanker jezelf

Oh boy, I did that in intro to general linguistics course @ my uni

Even our final exam had some of it

God damn
>four sticks is ching chong stunk
>four bees is chen chun bonk
>four drinks is chon chon dink

Don't forget that it doesn't have a proper plural, and is highly contextual; going as far as replacing a sentence with one word.

Sanskrit.

3 genders
3 numbers
8 cases
About 24 declensions, although there are as many exceptions as to each declension as there are declensions
13 tenses
3 voices
10 conjugations, half of which take different verb stems in half the tenses, for some reason
Arabic-type root-verbal system
Verbal adjectives which half the time do not resemble their verbs at all
Causatives, desideratives, intensives, denominatives
4 different kenning/compounding methods

And about 150 changes in Sandhi, rendering what would be perfectly readable, separate words into a mash of all the words together with 'euphonic' changes to the ends and beginnings of every word.

> mālāṃlabdhvāsmākamatithirgrāmaṃgacchati
> Our guest is going to the village after having received a garland.

Hell.

Dr Pavel, I CIA

Hest kuk!

>learned Spanish
>easiest language to speak where virtually everything is pronounced just how it is spelled
>simple grammar rules with almost no exceptions
>absolutely beautiful prose

Why can't all languages be as simple as this?

English has a very unusual R sound

>genders
>Literally no reason for them to exist. None.

Does anybody actually believe this though?

Agreed, but have you ever heard the (Brazilian) Portuguese R?

They're a weird borrowing from berber-semitic languages that overtook the original animate/inanimate categories originally in Indo-European languages.

Technically you could use -dir, though that's considered "encyclopedic". Türkçe gariptir.

What language are you speaking right now? It may not be of the ruling class but it certainly won the culture war.

Since English is so widely spoken, it's pretty much the peasant language of the world.

>English is so popular and the three main countries that speak it are so culturally relevant they made English the world language and the language of the future
But it for like le peasants!! xDDD

fucking this. spanish must have the highest ROI of any language

>tfw speak spanish with a regional accent that is pretty much italian
Literally a pussy magnet.

>three main countries that speak it are culturally relevant
The culturally relevant countries that speak English are america, america and america

the hierarchy is very clear in those three of whose culturally relevant.
America:Excels at pretty much everything culturally from music to movies and tv shows and we even have some pretty good authors
England: Great music and movies and authors; has been out shined by America in the past century and I have my own personal beef with them, I feel like they're to in love with their own accents and expect everyone else to love it to without realizing that the English accent most foreigners say they love isn't even really spoken by most people there.
Canada:They try there best I think but they'll never live up to their father and brother

Nice try, Loxley

>Britons and their pansexual tongue

german is fucking regular.
compare it to french or english.
unless you cant even recognise strong verb vowel changes or patterns in pluralisation, in which case, learning languages isnt for you.

have you heard of ireland and scotland?

>tfw trying to learn Finnish
Tappaa minut nyt

ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/genkau2.html

Good luck with that.

are you really this retarded or just have no idea about the german language?

It's incredible how easy Spanish is when you already speak a Romance language. I'm currently reading 2666 and my few years of high school Spanish (which I put zero effort in) are enough for me to understand almost everything.

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.

Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it's written).
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say-said, pay-paid, laid but plaid.

Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,
But be careful how you speak,
Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak ,

Previous, precious, fuchsia, via
Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
Woven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.

Say, expecting fraud and trickery:
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,
Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles,
Missiles, similes, reviles.

Wholly, holly, signal, signing,
Same, examining, but mining,
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far.

From "desire": desirable-admirable from "admire",
Lumber, plumber, bier, but brier,
Topsham, brougham, renown, but known,
Knowledge, done, lone, gone, none, tone,

One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel.
Gertrude, German, wind and wind,
Beau, kind, kindred, queue, mankind,

Tortoise, turquoise, chamois-leather,
Reading, Reading, heathen, heather.
This phonetic labyrinth
Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth, plinth.

Have you ever yet endeavoured
To pronounce revered and severed,
Demon, lemon, ghoul, foul, soul,
Peter, petrol and patrol?

Billet does not end like ballet;
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.

Banquet is not nearly parquet,
Which exactly rhymes with khaki.
Discount, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward,

Ricocheted and crocheting, croquet?
Right! Your pronunciation's OK.
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Is your r correct in higher?
Keats asserts it rhymes Thalia.
Hugh, but hug, and hood, but hoot,
Buoyant, minute, but minute.

Say abscission with precision,
Now: position and transition;
Would it tally with my rhyme
If I mentioned paradigm?

Twopence, threepence, tease are easy,
But cease, crease, grease and greasy?
Cornice, nice, valise, revise,
Rabies, but lullabies.

ncf.idallen.com/english.html if you want to read the whole thing.

I very much doubt you're even slightly appreciating the prose though

Russian has something called "Mat", it's a swearing language. The only four words you need are "blyad" (whore), "khuy" (dick), "pizda" (cunt) and "yebat" (to fuck). And with the help of these four words, russians came up with hundreds and thousands of ways to express themselves. It's even possible to construct whole sentences only with these words.

>agglutination
>tonality
>roots
>genders
>declensions
>all in one language

same here. What's your native language?

When I say I understand the text I don't mean that I'm slowly deciphering it (which is something I've experienced with other languages), I'm really comfortable reading it. I've been exposed to English my entire life and I'm reading Bolaño faster than I've ever read any book written in English. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are much tougher texts I wouldn't understand (I briefly tried to read 'Cien años de soledad' and it seemed harder for example), but it's pretty great just being able to understand authors who have a simple prose because our languages are similar. I've been studying Russian every day for about two years now and Spanish is still way easier to me.

French.

Italian is the perfect language for cursing.
It offers both the greatest bpm (blasphemy per minute) and the biggest creative potential.

>East Asian languages don't have an alphabet
>they still use tens of thousands of different abstract scribbles to communicate
probably the biggest thing holding them back

is there another country with as many blasphemous curses as italy?

That way out counting actually goes back to Celtic.

>you almost never pronounce the last letter in french words, specially if a vowel

I also find it baffling that "oi" sounds like "ua"

All those fucking vowel forms in Portuguese
Sort/hard consonants in Russian

holy fuck this is such a reddit comment. kys

March into three mother pussies, faggot. May god allow that you die.

russki-mat.net/e/Russian.php

Nothing like good ol' kurwa.

Negligible.
litearlly opening to a random page of my dictionary over here
>immoste
>immoralisme
>immortaliser
>immunisation
>immunologiste
>impasse
>impassible
>impécuniosité
>impensable
>impérialisme
>impérissable
you pronounce the S in every one of those words
not to mention every word in French that actually begins with S

>English isn't the language of the ruling classes.
Grandpa that's not your email you're on Veeky Forums again

Everything is easier without them.

Arabic to be honest. Or at least Arabs are masters of the craft.

One of the things parents will say to kids when they're bothering them is "damn the day I ever saw you". It's beautiful.

No wonder they had such an autistic (caste) society.