the questions of our times: formality and vampires

[rm]

This, thanks to a discussion started by weirdquark. Please do visit the comments where you will learn many things including the many ways formality is structured in different languages (something my questions did not fully take into account, and I apologize for that), werewolf pack dynamics considerations, and whether there are vampires in France.

[Poll #1601631]

Comments

[rm.livejournal.com]

The multiple levels of formality thing is new to me (since I know about three sentences of Japanese all of which basically translate to "oh fuck, I'm at Pennsic sweating my ass off, would you like a rice ball?") and raise some great questions. Many others in comments have addressed that phenomena as well.

[kittydesade.livejournal.com]

Currently I speak six languages, varying from conversant to fluent. I grew up bilingual and have been fascinated ever since. Japanese was in college, right now I'm reviewing it. The very abbreviated version is that a friend linked me to one of those discussions because she knows it amuses me and playing with languages and words is something I do for fun.

Japanese definitely has the most formality strata, though. Most of the others I speak have just the two.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Which?

[kittydesade.livejournal.com]

Which others? Spanish is my second best after English (sadly, I don't use much besides English, though I'm trying to change that), then French. and after that in a flurry, Japanese, German, and Russian.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the rundown.

What do you think of Japanese and Russian? I found Russian excruciating. Didn't have much trouble with anything else - started with Japanese, which sadly isn't my best language anymore, having been educated primarily in English, and learned Spanish, French, ASL, and Mandarin Chinese, with a smattering of German and Latin along the way.

[kittydesade.livejournal.com]

... god, you sound like me. I started English/Spanish bilingual, being raised in a bilingual household (via Spain-Spanish and Mexican/Chilean-Spanish, of all things) and went to an English/Spanish bilingual elementary school till I was about 12. Then two years of Latin, four years' worth of French compressed into three (I skipped a level), then Japanese in college, which was about ten years ago. And now Russian and German on my own, while reviewing Japanese.

I haven't had much trouble with Russian, to be honest. I didn't find it any more or less difficult than Japanese, there are different parts that drive me crazy, though, and with Russian there's one specific aspect of the grammar (verbal aspect, oh how I hate it) and one specific verb set (why does one language need fifty bajillion verbs for 'to go'??). With Japanese it's just minor quirks, but there are more of them. Particles, the lack of plurals as far as I remember, the strangeness of address both with the relative lack of 'you' and the varying levels of formality. They don't actively frustrate me a lot, though. Just, if I had to list things that bothered me about studying the language.

(And for a random bit of trivia, I've now found two points of similarity between Russian grammar and Irish grammar. Go figure.)

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Might just have to friend you. ;)

I grew up in a Japanese-speaking household (exclusively, within the household confines, which also included the car) in an English speaking environment. Japanese-only as an infant, English initially from Methodist church ladies, Japanese Saturday school until I was 13 or so (I hated it)...

Understandably, the linguistic quirks of Japanese are not a problem to me - those just make sense! (Ha.)

I think the Russian problem might just be that I was trying to learn it without a good text, while living with a native Russian speaker (who was fluent in English to basically non-detectable except by really attuned people levels). I hate grammar texts. I should probably go study basic grammar texts (in a general linguistics sense) and then go back to Russian. I'm doing the linguathon this year, focusing on Russian children's songs and stories (so as to be able to expose my kids to their Russian linguistic heritage).

I'm somehow not surprised by the similarity of Russian and Irish - I know an Irish guy who became a language buff via Polish, and now is doing a lot of computational linguistics stuff.

[kittydesade.livejournal.com]

I might just have to do the same. ;)

Of course! Just as a lot of the quirks of Spanish I actually have to think my way through before I can explain them to anyone learning, and so on. Or figure out where among the dialects I learned it!

That would probably do it. The grammar isn't similar enough to English for me to be able to extrapolate rules from there, most of the time, and it doesn't seem to me to be too similar to Japanese, and speaking as a near-native speaker of Spanish teaching it to someone without a good grammar text backing you is... awkward. At least without training. Currently I'm learning Russian from a university textbook, which is my preferred way of studying any new language because I want to learn to actually speak it, as opposed to the travel-fluency most [language]-in-30-minutes-a-day type books teach you.

And that comm looks interesting... must. Finish. Day job. Work! Then poke the shiny new toys.

Huh! That makes a certain amount of sense. The two quirks I noticed were the possessive phrases and... another one I forget. I think it was the tendency to repeat the question as a way to give an affirmative answer. Sadly, I don't know enough Irish to be able to find others, but I was writing dialogue for an Irish dialect speaker of English at one point and looking into how that would be, and those two points stuck in my memory.