Sharing etymological roots in pairs is particularly true when it comes to the word for "raspberry": For example, Lithuanian avietė & Latvian avene. it comes from Proto-Balto-Slavic *áwis "sheep", because to them, raspberries resembled sheep.
BINI members Maloi from Batangas and Aiah from Cebu challenge each other to guess the meaning of common phrases in their native languages Tagalog (Batangueño dialect) and Cebuano.
The current frequency of language usage on the Web (e.g. 52% of websites in English) doesn't reflect the diverse cultural and linguistic needs essential for global access, highlighting the importance of internationalization (i18n).
Fuqiao Xue, @w3c i18n activity lead, gave a comprehensive report of past and future @webi18n work, collaborating with spec and #browser#developers to address gaps, particularly for endangered scripts and #languages.
If you are into languages, you are probably familiar with those conversations with your multilingual friends: you take arbitrary elements from the languages you both speak, and randomly squeeze them together into sentences.
That is any regular Monday for the Swiss. Schwyzdüütsch, a.k.a. #Swiss German is a colorful amalgamation of German, French and Italian.
While living in germany not for long I once had a german friend telling me she build her own closet, so me in reply said 'wow, du bist schlimm!' (when 'slim' in dutch means 'smart')
Her face skewed and she threw a rant but after some explanation we had a good laugh, but yeah, languages can be funny sometimes mixing them up!
What’s a word or phrase in a language you speak that describes someone who is nervous? Not just nervous about an exam or something but like, you’re at an airport and the person next to you is shuffling anxiously not wanting to miss the boarding announcement even though it’s at least an hour away, and they just can’t stop shuffling? More a way of being.
People that have experienced language attrition of their native language, how difficult was it to relearn your language? And do you have any tips on how to overcome mental blocks and other challenges with it?
If you are learning a new language in general, which techniques work best for you that I can try?
Currently I speak my native language very poorly (about A2 level), but English pretty much fluently. I'm taking lessons and I know native fluent speakers IRL, but it really is a struggle.
@lazerdude I have recently re-learned German, a lot of which I forgot since my childhood (although, based on what you describe in the other posts, I was able to passively use it much more than you in the meantime). I haven’t done much specific to do that, the most important thing was just using it, which was easy, since I moved to a German speaking region. It felt mostly as if the knowledge was in my brain, just very hard to access, which is definitely a different experience than learning from scratch.
One thing that helped in the initial phases was watching a couple documentaries and a TV series. Kinda obvious advice, so this post is mostly about encouragement – it definitely can be done and good luck!
Hello there, I may look like 着 but I have four different meanings depending on the context! And just to make things interesting, I even sound different! Just which one am I when you read the text? Well, it's up to you to figure that out! Har Har.
Something I love telling people is that the Mandarin euphemism for ‘being horny’ is ‘I ate your tofu / I want to eat your tofu / they ate my tofu’. I feel like we should popularize that in pop culture. Like, you hear that in TV shows (mainly Taiwanese but also sometimes mainland Chinese)