Public Commander Keen Forum

listen to Panzer Mensch. german lyrics that sound completely english!

@VBB: Not always. *wink wink*

I've always wanted to learn German... In fact, since I was only 5 years of age. It was the first language I actually wanted to learn.
I picked up a few phrases and swear words from Wolfenstein and Rammstein, but never actually pursued learning the language like I wanted to. Instead, I somehow I got talked into learning French, which is kind of cool... But I ALSO really wanted to learn Latin! And I'm not sure if I have the capacity to know four languages fluently.

siete dei poveri folli.

I've always wanted to learn Portuguese and I'm not sure why. I should learn it somewhere interesting, like Angola or something. Then the Angolan flag I have will have an explanation.

Eros wrote:listen to Panzer Mensch. german lyrics that sound completely english!

Yeah, my friend is crazy about Rammstein. I'm not a big fan of NDH or metal in particular, but I have picked up vocabulary.

CKeen wrote:you people should learn italian

I like the sound of Italian but...it's kind of useless.

If you were to go all out on learning a new language, the best choice would definitely Mandarin. After that I'd say Spanish. If you had Mandarin, English, and Spanish covered, you could communicate with most of the world. Italian and German, not so much.

everybody's learning mandarin nowadays. but it's freakin' difficult to learn from scratch.

heck, it's still difficult even if you can speak a bit of it, writing's the strangest part.

I'm okay with mandarin writing. It's the speaking that's dumb. Even while now there's the chinese hype I'm predicting chinese will die out sooner or later, since it's maneuvered itself into a position where it can't live as a spoken language alone, you need characters to understand it (even chinese people need characters, every chinese movie is subtitled in chinese)

tulip wrote:I'm okay with mandarin writing. It's the speaking that's dumb. Even while now there's the chinese hype I'm predicting chinese will die out sooner or later, since it's maneuvered itself into a position where it can't live as a spoken language alone, you need characters to understand it (even chinese people need characters, every chinese movie is subtitled in chinese)

That's fascinating Tulip (seriously!). But can you elaborate a bit on how this works? Why would speakers of Mandarin need subtitles for their movies?

Djaser wrote:

tulip wrote:I'm okay with mandarin writing. It's the speaking that's dumb. Even while now there's the chinese hype I'm predicting chinese will die out sooner or later, since it's maneuvered itself into a position where it can't live as a spoken language alone, you need characters to understand it (even chinese people need characters, every chinese movie is subtitled in chinese)

That's fascinating Tulip (seriously!). But can you elaborate a bit on how this works? Why would speakers of Mandarin need subtitles for their movies?

Chinese is a tonal language. Words mean different things depending upon how you say them. The most well known example is "GAN", which means "dry" when spoken in a high pitch and "Fucl" when spoken in a decreasing pitch. The result is computer translators providing stuff like this...

But it's not just the tonality of Chinese that makes it so difficult. A tonal language can be as expressive as any other if one has the ear for it, but the problem Chinese has is that syllables with the same tone also can have different meanings, and it's only the character that changes. Go down to the Homophones section on this page, it explains this pretty well.

DHeadshot wrote:The result is computer translators providing stuff like this...

epic win.

Well, DH, your example is one of the few where the situation is the opposite, the character å¹² gan has both meanings, "dry" and a vernacular "fucl", and it's indeed only distinguished by the pronunciation. But yeah, StupidBunny's link explains it pretty clearly. It states that syllables which sound the same are usually distinguishable by context, and that "usually" is exactly the problem, as soon as the movie isn't taking place in your everyday environment.