Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 August 27

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August 27

Swedish question

I'm almost ashamed to ask this, given that I understand Swedish quite well but not perfectly, as I'm not a native Swedish speaker.

But anyway, here we go. I saw a cartoon on Facebook where a pensioner on a stroller finds himself on a pedestrian walkway completely blocked with improperly parked foot pedal cycles (the ones you kick instead of pedal). He says: "Tacka vet jag mördar-sniglar!" I know that mördar-sniglar means "murderer snails" but I'm having trouble parsing the sentence as a whole. What does it exactly mean? JIP | Talk 00:38, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

An old-time "killer snail"

The cartoon, by Robert Nyberg, can be seen here. The caption of the cartoon, "De nya mördarsniglarna", means "The new killer snails", which appears to refer to these carelessly strewn kick scooters. Swedish mördarsnigel is a common name for the Spanish slug. (The hyphen in the text balloon is not part of the orthography, but inserted because of a line break.) On Wiktionary the entry tacka lists tacka vet jag as a "related term", but the latter is still a red link. This may be because this idiom is hard to translate. Here it is translated as "I prefer", with a footnote stating:

"Tacka vet jag" is quite hard to translate for it means many things. Literally it means "Thank(fully) I know of

. You might translate it here as, "I fondly remember", or, "Give me those old-time" (as in "Give Me That Old Time Religion"). Presumably the rollator operator used to already have a hard time navigating the old-time snails, but deems these new "snails" worse.  --Lambiam 08:54, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Spanish, French, German

For an English speaking person, which language is easiest to learn, if he learns alone without teacher using online resources? And he will appear for language test after two years. -- 10:07, 27 August 2020 Landdolphin

Please sign your posts using 4 tildes (~).

Please define your terms. What do you mean, exactly, by "learn a language"? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 10:46, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

If you don't have any background in any of the three, I would guess Spanish -- French has some difficult sounds (front rounded vowels, uvular "r") and a spelling system with a rather indirect relationship to the spoken language. German has front rounded vowels and some complex grammar (verb prefixes which sometimes detach from the verb, case distinctions in adjectives and determiners, and complex word-order rules)... AnonMoos (talk) 10:50, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Language acquisition is not an on/off state but scales in different ways for reading, writing, listening, and speaking (and even these things can be broken down into cross categories such as extensive vocabulary vs circumlocution). For example, my spoken Spanish is limited to "me gustaria dos chiles poblanos y un mojito" and I can only catch a vague gist if a Spanish speaker addresses me as if I'm wearing a disability helmet. However, I can occasionally write simple sentences with a dictionary and generally make heads or tales of a text (and the longer the better, actually). If you don't have a teacher, nor anyone to constantly practice with, your speaking and listening are going to suck (and hell, mine do and I took Spanish for three semesters at uni). If you don't regularly engage in output, your speaking and writing are going to suck (¿Quién tiene dos pulgares y no habilidad? ¡Este chico!). The only online sources that are going to fix this are... teachers! Even if you're just Skyping someone to practice and they're not giving you deliberate lessons, they're still teaching you.

Also, English speakers aren't a monolithic entity. Due simply to accidental exposure, someone living in the United States (especially in the southwest) might have a much easier time learning Spanish than someone in Canada (who would have an easier time learning French). Ian.thomson (talk) 11:19, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

An issue to consider is also the availability of online resources. Otherwise Scots may be the easiest, due to the grammatical similarity and high overlap in lexicon, but online "Teach yourself Scots" resources are scarce and spotty. The extreme regularity of the grammar of Sranan Tongo (as well as English having been its main lexifier) also make it very easy to learn - but again, hardly any online resources.  --Lambiam 12:30, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Be careful with Scots! It may not be what you think it is. In the last few days, it has been discovered that most of the articles on Scots Wikipedia were written in mangled English by an editor who doesn't speak Scots, which was widely reported in the news. See this discussion at MetaWiki. --Naddruf (talk ~ contribs) 21:51, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

I think the same advice applies to the Sranan Tongo Wikipedia. Much of it is written in a travesty of that language, with many totally made up neologisms for concepts for which established words exist, strange grammar and inexplicably weird spellings, such as a ubiquitous nyunr instead of the very common word nyun. Who knows how many other small Wikipedias with very few active editors (or in this case even none) are similarly compromised? (And rumour has it that a majority of editors at the Latin Wikipedia are not native speakers either!)  --Lambiam 00:16, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

When pondering closeness to nearby learning resources and speakers, Spanish if you live in USA/Canada, and German/French if you live in the UK. When pondering closeness between languages, English and German are closer, they both descend from the same West Germanic branch, while French and Spanish are closer to each other, descending from the same Western Romance branch. In summary, German or Spanish if you live in North America, German if you live in the UK.--TZubiri (talk) 01:54, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

@Landdolphin:, reading, writing, and speaking a language are three different skills, and you didn't specify which you meant. But assuming you mean a general knowledge involving a mix of all of those skills, the order is: Spanish (easiest), then French, then German. That's for a native English speaker; the order would be different if your native language was, say, Swedish or Dutch. TZubiri, the OP mentioned that their learning would be strictly from online sources, so geographic proximity is irrelevant. And while English is a language of Germanic origin, both French and Spanish are a lot easier for a native English-speaker to learn than German. Mathglot (talk) 10:24, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

An English speaker with a good-sized vocabulary should find a lot of the Latin roots of Spanish to be recognizable from their English counterparts. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:07, 31 August 2020 (UTC)