the worst part about studying languages is knowing that you will never be nearly as good at it as a literal baby
The only reason babies are better at language learning is because it’s their full time job and they don’t get embarrassed
If you, a teenaged or adult human, wasn’t embarrassed and could study language full time you would learn way faster than a baby.
In my defense, babies receive more positive reinforcement than I do as well. Babies will say ha ba bah dah ba hah and all the adults around them will be like 🤯 really? Wow 😱 that is so interesting 😁 great job! 🤗 and then what happened? 🤔
also people who are like “I’ve been studying for a year and I only have an eight-year-old’s grasp of the language”:
how long do you think it took the eight-year-old
Also, I really cannot stress enough how important it is that you are willing to get embarrassed. Learning a language is just putting humiliation coins into the machine until fluency pops out.
if anyone ever tells you that english isn’t ridiculous remember that the reason why we have a silent b in debt is because a group of guys got together to standardise english spelling and got to the word debt, which at the time was primarily spelled either ‘dett’ or ‘det’. so they basically went:
‘everyone speaks latin, right? so let’s put a silent b in debt. like debitum, which is latin for debt. problem solved.’
also the reason why there is a h in ghost is because when the printing press first came to england the only people trained to operate it were flemmish speaking, and they put a h after g because that’s what you do in flemmish. they put shit like ghirl and ghoose, but the only reason why ghost stuck is because people saw ‘the holy ghost’ in the bible and were like ‘well, that MUST be right’.
so yeah english is a really stupid language with some of the most ridiculous spelling
Anyone telling you that English isn’t a bullshit Frankenstein language is lying.
A reminder that Irish survived as a ‘national’ language for more than two millennia only to be wiped out by two centuries of brutal dedication.
Rationally, I know it speaks to human resilience but it’s still fucked up how so many of us endured and survived conquests, invasions or downright genocide only to identify 100% with our enemies’ language, culture and religion a few generations down the line.
sometimes i remember that hebrew was literally a dead language. dead!! for two thousand years!!!! until this one guy in the 1880′s was like hey fuck german and russian and spanish and french We Are Jews we should speak The Language Of The Jews!! and everyone was like dude tf hebrew is DEAD it’s OLD it’s missing too many words, we can’t use it. so he was like ok. i’ll make up new ones. checkmate, atheists and he fuckninh didhe stood up by his little desk (?) and invented so many new words and wrote a whole dictionary and then he had a child and only spoke hebrew to him and that child was the first person who’s first language was hebrew in two thousand years and…………………………… i’m sorry i’m so emotional over my man, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. he singe-handedly revived a dead language. what a man
ifesbob 