quote: | Originally posted by Sushipunk
Sounds exhausting. |
Totally, I'm knackered
quote: | Originally posted by DJ RANN
It's weird though how interchangeable those languages are; my other half is Swiss and they used to get dutch radio when she grew up and after about 10 mins, could understand everything. Then a dutch mate came over the other week, I was speaking Swiss German to my missus in front of him and he suddenly "got it". |
Actually, it is English that is the damn outlier here
The Germanic languages haven't split that long ago, and there are quite a few words that are still pretty uniform across all languages (such as "hand", with the occasional vowel shift). If you measure the lexical differences among European languages, you'll see English hanging on its own, far from both the languages from Western Europe and the Scandinavian ones (with Danish being a bridge in more than just one way).
As a native speaker of Portuguese, though I feel English is to Germanic languages what French is to its closest relatives. Can I read French? Yup, no problem. Can I understand a French speaker? Now that's a whole different ballgame, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out Cristiano Ronaldo can shout something in his native language to Paul Pogba during a game and make himself understood, but I suspect it doesn't go both ways. Hell, even Romanian (a distant Romance language no one else understands in spite of the fact they get what everybody else says (pdf)) sounds more familiar
quote: | Originally posted by DJ RANN
Afrikaans just sounds like scouser Dutch |
I wonder if Trance-M concurs
quote: | Originally posted by Lews
It was a Dutch paper, but written in French, thankfully.
I used to speak some basic Afrikaans, though never very much, but that went out the window when I started learning German when I was 13/14. My grandfather was not pleased, he thought/hoped I would progress from basic Afrikaans to basic Dutch to fluent Dutch. I overheard many angry comments when someone told him I was studying German! |
I guess he may have underestimated how much ít takes to go from basic Afrikaans to vloeiend Nederlands, although I can see why it made sense. Don't you feel like learning Dutch though? If you're studying German, and English is your native language, it'll feel like "German lite"... although it's just a matter of time until you start mixing it up with German and Danish
(I had no idea the Dutch wrote newspapers in French. I know it's writing in English to a foreign audience when French was the international language du jour, but still)
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