immersion & practice & whatnot
trying to keep my hungarian, japanese, and korean knowledge afloat
15Aug24
i don't like bragging that i'm "good at languages." humans are good at languages, that's like our whole thing. i just have a hobby. however, i will admit that i learned to speak like some of the hardest popular languages so i guess i can say that i'm to the right of the bell curve. anyway up until now i was always like "welllll anyone can learn a language, you just gotta practice everyday. i don't know why i'm ~so good~"
today, while discussing language learning, i think i finally had an epiphany about what helped me so much!
- open winner's attitude this was the only one i always identified. i do not believe in saying that the way a language does something is stupid. it can be defeating at best and kinda-racist vibes at worst. all languages were created so people could communicate. it is very important to me to find the beauty and utility in all grammar rules and writing systems. lots of letters? that's so it's phoentic and anyone can read anything on the first try. multiple writing systems? instant identification of the different word categories. they just do something different than your native language? well they probably think the way your native language does it is stupid too, so that's 1-1.
- native root word heavy native language i realized that, with hungarian being my first language, i was born into a world where most root words were in my native tongue too. hungarian is a very isolated language with, i think, less "outside" influence than some other languages (as compared to, for example, romance languages that share so much with one another and latin). so many words in hungarian can be broken down into roots through simple sounding out, and it always fascinated and delighted me. i think this primed my brain to look for root words in a way that english doesn't immediately, in my opinion. lots of english root words are latin, old english, french, etc, and i recognize that i need to know all of those languages too to find roots. for example, "recognize" in hungarian, felismer, is just up ("fel") + know ("ismer"). "grammar", nyelvtan, is just tongue/language ("nyelv") + education ("tan"). both of those words in english are late middle english AND french AND latin. i saw so many classmates go straight to rote memorization, and it frustrated me. it is so much easier to memorize "cognition" when you know that "cogno" always means learning somehow. but now, i realize, my classmates really did have to hard memorize every word as children.
- graphomania i will finish this entry when it's not 4:30 am
6Aug24
today i'm trying to learn indirect reporting speech in Korean. i was doing exercises when i realized i had no idea how 라고 (rago), 다고 (dago), 자고 (jago), and 냐고 (nyago) relate to each other. i thought all of the 고's meant the same thing and the syllable before was just about the verb before it :,) clearly not...
so far i'm doing my little research and I'm finding that 냐고 is when you're relaying a question (my friend asked how tall you are), 자고 is a suggestion (she suggested we eat together). still working out the difference btwn 라고 and 다고 but I promise this will be the first place I record my findings.