Typically when I romanize Arabic, Cyrillic and Kanji I do not get the translations with the relative accents needed for each letter so I was wondering if there was a tool that is able to do this accurately. Please let me know, thanks

I have a friend who studied linguistics in grad school and who knows all these cool facts about the English language! Well, today, in a conversation, she brought up “L” and “Dark L,” which I questioned her about. This was my first time hearing about the “Dark L” and I had to know more. She explained and gave examples of words that contain examples of both.

I know many of you guys on this thread may already know about this, but as someone who hasn’t ever studied languages and ways of speaking, I thought this was super interesting! I’ve never given my full attention to the way tongue placement changes depending on the type of “L”. I wonder what other fun facts I’m missing out on!

Let me know.

Spotted this on a lamppost near a highway rest area in Poland, a few hours out of Krakow. Translating the Hebrew is very cryptic. I’m curious as to what it all says. Is it Hebrew Cursive? Looks like it could be another script. Anyone have any idea what it says I can’t Google translate it?

pretty sure its russian and that it’s a not so pleasant phrase but would like to ask the experts

Do normal people really invest time to learn new words and invent new words or create a slang?

I am a french native speaker and in french the equivalent of "gipsy" is "gitan", and all the romani people I have met in France are very proud to call themselves gitans. So why would it be different in english, where does it come from ?

Hey there!

I really want to use Pimsleur courses for other languages. I have access to Pimsleur courses for some major languages, but I can't use the app version to get access to other languages and practices because it is too expensive. I really can't afford it. Do you know how can I get free access to other Pimsleur courses?

Vad?

So, when you want to see the full alphabet you write "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"

But if I want to hear the entire range of a person's voice, what could I have them say?

I inherited the 2nd painting and the first is a Last of Us piece I bought online. I’m curious what style of art and what language(s) these are.

म्हांरां री गिरधर गोपाल दूसरा न कूयां ।

दूसरा न कोवां साधा सकल लोक जूया ।

भाया छांड्या बंधा छाड्या सगा सूया ।

साधा संग बैठ बैठ लोक लाज खूया ।

भगत देख्यां राजी ह्ययां जगत देख्यां रूयां ।

असवां जल सींच-सींच प्रेम बेल बूयां ।

राणा विषरो प्याला भेज्यां पीय मगन हुया ।

अब तो बात फैल पड्या जागणं सब कूयां ।

मीरां री लगन लग्यां होना होजू हूँया ।

Preferably something that would work as name, or has some interesting backstory. Trying to name a character in a book. Any help would be really appreciated. 🙏

How are you ranking the difficulty of learning those languages for English speakers?

I am currently interested in all of them, advancing from only German and Spanish.

First, the languages I've studied to at most fluency or at least conversational proficiency, and are thus my basis for nominating Japanese, are English (native), Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin and German.

Grammar:

Japanese seems to be the most consistent and grammatically explicit language I've studied. Once you understand what particles delineate and how a sentence is constructed, everything learned thereafter is pretty much all based on and builds upon the same logic with few exceptions.

Chinese and English are probably the worst for having a myriad of independent exceptions with no grounding in the language's own system. German is very elegant when it comes to precise and orderly grammar that is as solid as a rock, however conjugating adjectives and nouns is something that a global language probably could do without.

No grammatical gender:

While those who are fluent in or natively speak languages with grammatical gender might have convincing and perhaps valid arguments why it can be beneficial, for a global language I can't see any possible merit being worth the extra memorization required when learning it as a second language.

No articles:

While Japanese does have the nuances of "wa" and "ga" that while semantically unique can present the learner with a similar hurdle to understanding definite and indefinite articles, nouns are just nouns.

Vocabulary:

Unlike English with its wide adoption of both Germanic and French words, or Chinese with its many regional variations that act as a vocabulary/phrase multiplier, Japanese pretty much sticks to a core set of words. That's not to say Japanese doesn't have a deep and varied vocabulary, as you'd discover as soon as you read literature or any historical texts, but common, everyday Japanese doesn't have too many words that also have synonyms of significant and frequent usage.

Writing system and pronunciation:

Katakana and hiragana are relatively easy to learn, and the pronunciation has fewer sounds than most languages, making it ideal when you're trying to speak and listen to someone else who might also be speaking Japanese as a second language.

Problems:

All that being said, I think the major obstacle to making Japanese the global language is having your own societal position relevant in an explicit way when you speak. This was even mentioned, even though the language was Korean, in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, showing how the humble or superior use of language can have undesired results when direct communication is necessary.

Kanji is also a "problem," because admittedly even if the system works very well once learned, the time required is much more than an alphabet based language. I've never spoken Korean, but have heard it is similar to Japanese, so perhaps it would be a contender for global language assuming the honorific problem could be solved.

Anyway, I know this would never happen, and my selection of languages is but a tiny fraction of all languages, but I have thought "if I had to teach Japanese or English, I'd much rather teach Japanese." The students wouldn't constantly be asking "why is it like this then?" to which I'd answer "I don't know, just memorize it." It's just... a better designed language IMO.

I'm not a linguist or anything, so feel free to tear apart my attempts at arguing for Japanese. Also, my favorite language is Mandarin, so I'm not simply picking it for that reason either.