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Post by Queen on Jan 7, 2022 7:40:07 GMT -5
In my experience folk from the Netherlands are the fastest to learn Danish. There are a lot of similarities. My cousin's wife commented that it's similar to Afrikaans which she grew up with. According to my Dutch teacher the fastest to learn Dutch are the Germans, the Danish are second. We've had some fun comparing German, Dutch, Danish and Swedish in the past! Lots of similarities.
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Post by tucano on Jan 7, 2022 7:43:17 GMT -5
Don't get me started on the ui sound in Dutch.
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Post by Queen on Jan 7, 2022 7:46:02 GMT -5
Don't get me started on the ui sound in Dutch. ha ha ha ha ha ha That and eu were the hardest sounds for me and at the time I was traveling to Muiden and Breukelen.
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Post by scicaro on Jan 7, 2022 7:51:52 GMT -5
If all the house stuff works out I will be moving to Rødovre. One of the notoriously difficult to pronounce properly areas of greater Copenhagen.
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Post by snowwhite on Jan 7, 2022 8:42:15 GMT -5
I'm glad you say this because I can't hear the difference between Dutch and Danish very well, not speaking either. The Germans always can and find it odd. In my experience folk from the Netherlands are the fastest to learn Danish. There are a lot of similarities. My cousin's wife commented that it's similar to Afrikaans which she grew up with. Dutch and Afrikaans are pretty closely related (I don't know details). Apparently it's really easy to learn one if you know the other, but not so much the other if you know the one - (I can't remember which way round it it is), but there is a difference; I think one feels faster / more complicated. I'm vaguely remembering a conversation I had about this with someone at a linguistics conference.
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Post by vinnyd on Jan 7, 2022 8:44:45 GMT -5
Afrikaans is simplified Dutch, more or less.
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Post by snowwhite on Jan 7, 2022 8:45:42 GMT -5
if you just happen to hear someone talking in the background it's easily mistaken for English... The hell it is... I think you're underestimating the extent to which you're affected by your Dutch proficiency. It's a fairly well-known phenomenon. This whole conversation reminds me of a video compilation I saw via fb (I think) of what various languages sound like to people who don't speak them. The comments about some of them from native speakers were interesting - Chinese speakers not appreciating that speakers of other languages won't get the tones at all for example.
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Post by sprite on Jan 7, 2022 11:53:45 GMT -5
I remember that little video!
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Post by Liiisa on Jan 7, 2022 12:12:17 GMT -5
The ij is easy but it's WEIRD You think that's weird, wait until you learn English. Touché I would assume that "Breukelen" would be pronounced like "Brooklyn," since that's where it came from IIRC
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Post by Queen on Jan 7, 2022 12:47:56 GMT -5
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Post by Queen on Jan 7, 2022 13:09:55 GMT -5
Afrikaans is simplified Dutch, more or less. I think so, and good news for Liiisa - no "IJ" Afrikaans sounds lazy or mumbling to Dutch speakers, because certain consonants get dropped when they're between two vowels, and there are a lot of words that sound like the diminutive. And it borrows new words from English rather than Dutch, so the Dutch wear spijkerbroek, but the South Africans wear jeans.
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Post by snowwhite on Jan 7, 2022 18:16:44 GMT -5
I remember that little video! Might be this one? I'm sure there are various versions out there.
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Post by rikita on Jan 8, 2022 18:54:12 GMT -5
that is pretty funny - the german part even sounded german to me (just that i didn't understand anything) ...
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Post by rikita on Jan 8, 2022 19:02:53 GMT -5
as for the compound nouns, basically reason for starting at the back is that the last one usually says what the thing/person/whatever is, and the ones before just define it closer - like, Wasserflasche is a bottle (Flasche), more precisely a bottle for water (Wasser). Or Datenschutzgrundverordnung is a regulation (Verordnung), more precisely a basic or general regulation (Grundverordung), more precisely the general regulation for data protection (Datenschutz - which again is a protection, more precisely the protection of data).
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Post by rikita on Jan 8, 2022 19:03:50 GMT -5
(though google just tells me that in fact, it is written Datenschutz-Grundverordnung, but that seems to be making it too easy)
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Post by Liiisa on Jan 8, 2022 19:25:20 GMT -5
I learned Wasserflasche the other day! "Flasche" is kind of like "Flask" in English, which is sort of a specific kind of bottle.
Anyway that makes sense - all the bits at the beginning are modifiers on the bits at the end. Scientific things are like that in English, just not all one word. Like a "Russet-naped Wood-rail" is a kind of rail that lives in the woods and has a russet-colored nape, medical conditions are often like five words long with the basic condition listed at the end ("chronic lymphocytic leukemia"), etc.
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Post by lillielangtry on Jan 9, 2022 5:00:23 GMT -5
Yes, this is why, for most of my translations, the English is shorter than the German but has more words.
If you've done Wasserflasche, Liiisa, you could add the very important Weinflasche;-)
We were supposed to be practising Farsi at breakfast today. We didn't do that much, although I was pleasantly surprised that I do seem to have internalised the verbs "to eat" and "to like" in the present tense.
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Post by tucano on Jan 9, 2022 7:49:07 GMT -5
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Post by Liiisa on Jan 9, 2022 8:04:51 GMT -5
"Skweege!" - yeah wow. I've seen that n with the thingie under it before and had no idea how it would be pronounced (still don't, really - I don't hear any "n" sound in that "Skweege"?)
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Post by vinnyd on Jan 9, 2022 9:17:43 GMT -5
You can hear the nasal vowel if you listen closely.
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Post by Liiisa on Jan 9, 2022 10:47:40 GMT -5
Oh yeah, I see what's happening there. I think in Sanskrit there's an n with a thingie under it that implies nasality also (vague memory from when I was doing Hindi).
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Post by tzarine on Jan 17, 2022 0:27:48 GMT -5
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Post by snowwhite on Jan 17, 2022 4:52:35 GMT -5
Danish is getting harder. There are sections on possessive and object pronouns, genitives, articles and plurals before checkpoint one. Oddly the one on clothing is very hard (to me) - possibly because the way to say 'wearing' seems to be something like 'has [item of clothing] on', plus the words for clothes aren't very guessable to me anyway.
And I'm now having to learn how to spell, rather than just recognising words. I don't really understand why 'plate' (tallerken) is considered a basic word, and the collection of animals is a bit strange - I'm assuming they're the ones whose forms are regular or something. Beyond dog and cat they've introduced mouse, bird, elephant, horse, turtle and spider.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Jan 17, 2022 7:52:25 GMT -5
Reinforces my impression that the Chinese are doing what the Europeans did for several centuries.
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Post by rikita on Jan 18, 2022 17:47:58 GMT -5
not sure i mentioned it yet, since i couldn't find an affordable japanese course for children that i liked, i instead made a duolingo account for a. - of course she enjoys that it is like a game and soon found the various little tricks to get better through the exercises, but she seems to be picking up a bit here and there (like she remembers ichi, ni, san, and recognizes some hiragana signs) ... though she needs my help as they don't have japanese with german instructions, only with english (but that way, she also practices a bit of english at the same time).
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Post by vinnyd on Jan 18, 2022 19:28:38 GMT -5
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Post by Liiisa on Jan 22, 2022 19:16:48 GMT -5
Latest puzzlement re German: a driver's license is really a "Führerschein"?
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Post by vinnyd on Jan 23, 2022 8:00:13 GMT -5
The -schein part is related to English shine: something you show (to prove something). A Parkschein is what you put on your dashboard to show that you have paid for parking.
Führer is just leader. Too common a word to have been poisoned by its use in the National Socialist period. “Drive" in the sense of driving a team of horses or oxen is the cognate treiben, but that didn’t catch on for driving a horseless carriage.
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Post by riverhorse on Jan 23, 2022 8:28:25 GMT -5
Führen can also mean "to guide" - so a Reiseführer is both a Lonely Planet-type guide book as well as the person who takes you on a guided tour of some place.
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Post by riverhorse on Jan 23, 2022 8:30:32 GMT -5
And yes, - führer as a suffix is common to indicate someone who drives or operates something. A colleague of miner's husband is a "Lokführer" which is a train driver.
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