A little something from abroad
I
can speak Finnish and English, and don't really want to learn any other
languages. I just don't feel like going through the massive effort of
learning grammar and vocabulary that would be needed to reach the same
level where I could write proficiently about things that I care about.
It feels so very useless and redundant.
The same energy is more productively used in learning to speak English
and Finnish better. Besides, just like computer programming languages,
all natural languages should be equivalent in principle so that the
same ideas and thoughts can be expressed in all of them. So if anyone
has a point that they want to make to me, they can do so in my
language, and any point that I want to make I can somehow make in
English. There are far too many languages in the world anyway, and it
would be so much easier if everyone just spoke their native tongue and
English.
I still have to keep learning a lot more English. For example, it wasn't until recently that I learned that the word "spendthrift" means the exact opposite of what I thought it meant, despite the fact that it contains the word "thrift". After this realization, I suddenly understood a lot better many articles that I had previously read whose message had back then seemed very strange.
As a humorous side note, I also remember when I first saw the word "carpetbagger" being used, which I later learned is a very Americana word and would be very difficult to translate directly in other languages. The thing is, this word was used about Hillary Clinton, so without thinking it through properly I mistook it for another word, giving me perhaps a somewhat distorted impression of the political discourse in America.
I still have to keep learning a lot more English. For example, it wasn't until recently that I learned that the word "spendthrift" means the exact opposite of what I thought it meant, despite the fact that it contains the word "thrift". After this realization, I suddenly understood a lot better many articles that I had previously read whose message had back then seemed very strange.
As a humorous side note, I also remember when I first saw the word "carpetbagger" being used, which I later learned is a very Americana word and would be very difficult to translate directly in other languages. The thing is, this word was used about Hillary Clinton, so without thinking it through properly I mistook it for another word, giving me perhaps a somewhat distorted impression of the political discourse in America.
In fact Latin is the one and only language I have ever purposefully _studied_, in my high school time, when I decided to learn it instead of English. All other languages have just simply caught, they are rather contagious after all, but now I'm feeling a desire to spend some of my time to something totally useless, and since life has taught me that sometimes even a genius like me just must put effort and work to gain something, I'm contemplating the idea of really studying some foreign language, perhaps English.
Posted by Catilina | 2:47 PM