Scary AustinI've helped fellow travelers in fluent French, okay Spanish, and even my sketchy Russian, but I will never be as badass as this person.
Erik Ableson@MaryAustinBooks There is badass and there is *badass*. Hat’s off to this guy
mbpaz@erik @MaryAustinBooks To all native speakers of germanic languages, I would like to humbly remind you that Latin is different to modern romance languages... but NOT HUGELY different.
If you can speak Portuguese, Italian etc you can recognize quite a bit of Latin (with some imagination)
CrazyDogLadySezPEACE@mbpaz @erik @MaryAustinBooks Native English-speaker here, had Spanish through the 400-level in college in the 80’s, which should’ve made me fluent but I didn’t have anyone to speak it with so it’s mostly gone. I can still read it a bit, or well if I have time and a Spanish dictionary for unfamiliar vocabulary.
I’ve watched Polish shows on Netflix (thankfully not all tv is as dumbed-down as USA tv), in Polish with English subtitles, and I was pleased to learn how much Polish is very like Spanish, I assume bc of Latin and the Catholic Church.
(I know it is not a Germanic language. Just chiming in in the Latin-is-(almost)everywhere-if-you-know-how-to-look theme.)
@Heartofcoyote @erik @MaryAustinBooks Native Spanish speaker here - can confirm after some traveling to Poland that I cannot understand a single word of Polish 😂
As far as I can tell, Polish is fundamentally slavic, but with significant Latin and Germanic influence. OK, a word here and there may resemble something I know, but it's definitely very unlike romance languages.
@mbpaz @erik @MaryAustinBooks Huh. Maybe it had something to do with accents? I would literally hear what sounded like Spanish words and see from the caption text that yeah, I had heard what I thought. Maybe it wasn’t so much, though, and just made an outsized impression. 🤷🏻♀️
@Heartofcoyote @mbpaz @erik
I was surprised how many French loan words there are in Russian (until I thought about it for a hot second and then I wasn't surprised). I was expecting my French background to be no use at all for a Slavic language, but it helped more than I thought it would.
I was surprised how many French loan words there are in Russian (until I thought about it for a hot second and then I wasn't surprised). I was expecting my French background to be no use at all for a Slavic language, but it helped more than I thought it would.
@MaryAustinBooks @Heartofcoyote @erik modern and not so modern loan words do help a lot - once you hear "machina" and "technika" it's easy to associate the words with vehicles.
On the other hand, the very literal transcriptions may sometimes shock you - It took me a while to understand "hemenex" meant... ham and eggs.
(And yes, in Spanish we write "fútbol", I know)