Parental Encouragement sessions.
↓ Transcript
Amanda: Well, what do you think of the story? Creepy, huh?
Wu: Do you have a version where you don’t talk like you’re a hundred years old?
Amanda: Ggrrr...
Amanda: WELL, my MOM says I’m smart enough to read BIG KID stuff. So THERE
Sandy: Oh, yeah same. Our Mom and Dad want to teach us to read Chinese.
Wu: It's really hard!
Selkie (VO): I tolds you My Dad's gots me German lessons, right?
Sandy (VO) Oh, yeah! I forgot! Are you any good?
Selkie: Ich benutze es meistens für Beleidigungen.
Wu: Do you have a version where you don’t talk like you’re a hundred years old?
Amanda: Ggrrr...
Amanda: WELL, my MOM says I’m smart enough to read BIG KID stuff. So THERE
Sandy: Oh, yeah same. Our Mom and Dad want to teach us to read Chinese.
Wu: It's really hard!
Selkie (VO): I tolds you My Dad's gots me German lessons, right?
Sandy (VO) Oh, yeah! I forgot! Are you any good?
Selkie: Ich benutze es meistens für Beleidigungen.
"I mostly use it for insults."
Ouch. Parent talk in front of the two kids who aren’t adopted yet…
Yeah, and Keisha’s already gotten the heartbreak of being left behind twice when they promised they would all go together so…Yeesh.
Chinese? That’s really hard. Not just the signs, also the pronounciation.
Two small nitpicks, not sure if intentional.
“My Dad’s” -> “my Dad’s” or “my Dads”.
“beleidigungen” -> “Beleidigungen”
I wouldn’t know about the German, but this is Selkie talking. She’s still got her plurals lisp, though it’s a work in progress.
Ignore my lisp comment, I derped in reading. But I’m curious why insult would be capitalized. Is that a thing for the German language?
Greetings from Germany.
Indeed, it is a thing. We capitalize our nouns.
That’s actually pretty neat! Everyone has so many differences, it makes the people who are multilingual all the more amazing to me.
Best German word: Auschuss. It means garbage, trash, Board of Directors! Talk about your political commentary.
How awesome is that? That’s not slang usage, that’s Langenscheit’s Dictionary!
@Diane: Basically, “Beleidigungen”(=”insults”) is a noun, so it has to be capitalized. It would be different as a verb: “to insult someone” = “jemanden beleidigen”. But yes, capitalisation can be pretty confusing in some cases in German.
Plurals don’t have an apostrophe when they don’t end in an S.
plurals don’t have apostrophes at all
I find it interesting the lisp does not show up when Selkie speaks German
That’s because it’s not a lisp. It’s been brought up before in comic, but I can’t remember where. The gist of it was that the person they were talking to (Pohl and his wife, I think) mentioned that it’s got to do with English having more limited grammatical structures than Tensei does and that Selkie learned it through a “crash course immersion” style rather than being taught properly.
For the spoken language, it’s a bit of a trade-off. Once you convince your brain to code tones as part of the word (took me about 3 months of listening to it and practicing on a daily basis), it’s actually easier in a way than German and Romantic languages, because there are no tenses, no conjugations, no cases, no nothing like that, so you’re only learning one set of verbs and nouns. There are some word-order differences, but those are just pattern recognition. It’s actually a very straightforward language.
Learning to read/write it is a nightmare.
*Germanic and Romantic
You mean Germanic and Romance
Leaving aside the utter nightmare of the writing system, how easy it is to work with the tonal thing I think depends quite a lot on how well wired your brain is to adjust to novel pronunciation. I tend to do pretty well, and can relatively effectively mimic most sounds I hear, but for whatever reason a lot of adults I know seem to be extrordinarily bad at it.
It’s a funny contrast with Japanese, my other language, which has a slightly improved nightmare of a writing system, but is super easy to pronounce because it’s almost anti-tonal and even inflection doesn’t matter (except for about 5 near-homonyms when it does for some bizarre reason)… but is an absolute hell of meaning-by-conjugation.
I think there are 14 or 15 different verb conjugation forms without even including blunt, polite, formal, and archaic conjugations. You also conjugate adjectives!
Japanese conjugation is highly regular though – the difficulty lies in the fact that the system’s underlying logic is so different from most other languages.
And being a Mandarin speaker learning Japanese, I would argue against their writing system being “slightly improved” 😛 Sure the kanas are regular and do help at the beginning stages, but any real-life text requires knowing the kanjis, and the pronunciation of kanjis are far more complex than in Chinese, with multiple pronunciation for most characters (two or three or even more), and countless homonyms only distinguished by the characters used. Though I suppose if the main hurdle is the *number* of characters used, they do have an advantage……
Age tends to play a big role in how well someone can learn a new language. As someone ages, the less plastic (adaptive or flexible) their brain becomes. Of course there are other factors as well, such as whether or not this is their first new language, among others, but age is a pretty big one. Sorry for geeking out about this, as I’m majoring in linguistics with a focus on second language acquisition.
On a side note, I do happen to agree that Japanese having both an on-yomi (Chinese reading) and kun-yomi (Japanese reading) for kanji makes it rather difficult to understand which one is being used.
I’ll be honest, Google translate told me it was capitalized, and I assumed that was an error. I’ll make sure to correct that later tonight, thank you.
Just FYI, you forgot to correct it in the transcript as well.
Thanks
Now I wonder whether (and how) Selkie’s speech pattern would manifest in German.
Interesting question. In many cases in German, plurals are a lot more complex than just adding a letter at the end. Maybe Selkie would still keep it at just adding a letter. Or she would try to use the correct plural. Or she just gets fed up with thinking about the correct plural each time and that leads to her using it less often.
What is Selkie saying in German?
“I mostly use it for insults.”
I could be wrong, but with all this talk about people learning new languages, it seems Amanda is the only one left out.
I wonder if she is going to start learning Sarnothi. That would certainly be interesting!
When I was a kid moving from country to country, the first thing we learned was the swears, so we would know when we had made someone angry.
Feel a little bad for Keisha and Georgie being left out of the conversation on language lessons, but it’s nice to see all the kids playing nice together even if they have gone from scary stories to trying to one-up each other on who has the best parent. xD
Side note, when I went to check the S&K update, it said the site doesn’t exist?
Love the pentacle on Wu’s shirt 😛 Don’t think I didn’t miss that! <3
Because… you did miss that?
Well, the feedback was what I’d expect from a school kid who already was sceptical beforehand… Sorry, Amanda. Your story was nice but that’s how the world is.