# Foreign languages: the WTF moment that made you throw in the towel **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [May 8, 2016, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312 "2016-05-08T17:58:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![gigi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a587f6/32.png) [@gigi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gigi)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/61 "2016-05-09T21:37:56Z")
> [@Dendarii\_Dame](#): > > I took five years of French, earning straight A’s. Learned a bunch of different ways to form the past tense, (in French, passe’ compose’) no problem. Then in the fifth year, our teacher said we were going to start reading French novels. > > That’s when I found out about passe’ simple. See, in French literature, they’ve got a whole new way of putting things in the past tense, which isn’t what I’d spent four years learning and has, as far as I can tell, no rules. You just have to memorize each verb’s passe’ simple form by brute force. I did it, somehow. > > But I didn’t take French in college, as I’d planned to. I was so relieved to place out of a foreign language in college, based on my French AP scores. We had gotten as a far as maybe simple poems and I would not have done well in college! I did get a lot more careful about throwing around French after I told my housemates I was going upstairs to take a _douche_. :smack: ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/62 "2016-05-09T22:12:13Z")
All languages have their quirks. Chinese has two different words for “two”: one that is the number two and a different word that is used for “two [things]”. And all those classifier words because, even with tones, it is still saturated with homonyms. And some words that are gender-specific. At first glance, it looks very simple: no number/gender/tense/case morphology, but it is more complicated when you dig into it. My belief is that the quirks and irregularities of any language (and English has plenty) are a sort of signal-error-correction scheme, so that in noisy or difficult environments, a hearer can extract meaning from muddied or incomplete speech. I know my own utterances at home can be elliptical and otherwise barely intelligible but emerge from context. All languages are fascinating and best understood when backlit by the culture from which they arise. Except COBOL. That is pure evil and elicits sympathy for anyone who is stuck using it. ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/63 "2016-05-09T22:15:16Z")
> [@bump](#): > > But why correct them in normal conversation? They’re not going to change, and you come across like the biggest pedantic asshole ever. And that’s not limited to Americans; having some French asshole tell you that you asked where the bathroom is wrong is infuriating, and made me want to just go piss in the corner of his restaurant out of spite, instead of finding the bathroom I’d asked him for. My spoken French has never been better than “adequate to communicate”. While in France it wasn’t unusual I’d ask something, I’d get a smile and an answer, a thanks for bothering to learn some of their language, and then a polite statement that saying it differently would be more _élégant_. Which struck me as a fairly positive way to acknowledge communication and correct spoken language at the same time. The only place in France I encountered “French assholes” was in Paris. Given the conduct of some of the other tourists in that city I’m not entirely sure I blame them, man, some people are really stupidly irritating. ---
**Author:** ![Sofis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Sofis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sofis)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2016, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/64 "2016-05-09T22:49:44Z")
> [@thelurkinghorror](#): > > Yes, I know both of those facts, but wouldn’t it make more sense to establish that gender is more of a Indo-European “thing” not common in other families first? > > And my point about Sami was that they make up less than 0.1% of the population of Sweden, so it’s odd that that much territory would be covered. Even in the area marked, I think the majority of the population is still Swedish. The light blue in Norway makes more sense, although even there they are less than 1%. You’re missing several things. The first is that the northern parts of Sweden are very sparsely populated ([map](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Norden_pop_density.gif)). The second is that while Saami speakers do indeed make up less than 0.1% of the population, Finnish speakers are over 2%. The third is that Saami and Finnish speakers both are heavily concentrated in the north. ---
**Author:** ![Sangahyando](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f14d63/32.png) [@Sangahyando](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sangahyando)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 8:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/65 "2016-05-10T08:25:03Z")
> [@Broomstick](#): > > The only place in France I encountered “French assholes” was in Paris. Given the conduct of some of the other tourists in that city I’m not entirely sure I blame them, man, some people are really stupidly irritating. I gather that the people of other parts of France, agree that Paris is the country’s “asshole central”. The Parisians did turn this to good account during the World War II German occupation, when they were thoroughly unpleasant to their German “guests”; staying just on the right side of the fine line, across which they would have got nasty consequences for that ploy. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 8:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/66 "2016-05-10T08:32:49Z")
> [@bump](#): > > That’s more of a matter of politeness, not a matter of linguistics. I mean, someone who would say “I haven’t took no money” would almost certainly be thought of as some kind of bumpkin or from the ghetto, and probably also considered to be functionally illiterate. > > But why correct them in normal conversation? They’re not going to change, and you come across like the biggest pedantic asshole ever. And that’s not limited to Americans; having some French asshole tell you that you asked where the bathroom is wrong is infuriating, and made me want to just go piss in the corner of his restaurant out of spite, instead of finding the bathroom I’d asked him for. See, from our point of view he was being polite. The assumption is that people want to speak in a way that’s as clear and easy to understand as possible; yes, there will be things which are understood to be pretty much insurmountable (Francophones and Hispanics generally can’t pronounce each other’s "r"s, for example), but if he had problems understanding your question, he was being perfectly polite helping you improve. You assume people aren’t going to change; we assume they’d like to, if that change makes communication easier. I think you could say we have a Doper approach to speech. ---
**Author:** ![Sampsiceramos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Sampsiceramos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampsiceramos)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 9:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/67 "2016-05-10T09:17:00Z")
> [@TwoCarrotSnowman](#): > > I haven’t read the whole thread, but I wanted to say that this is Pratchett-esque, which is the highest honour I can bestow on a sentence. Well done. 🙂 As others have already noted, not entirely of my own invention, I’m afraid. A lovely adage all the same. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 10:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/68 "2016-05-10T10:07:24Z")
> [@eschereal](#): > > Chinese has two different words for “two”: one that is the number two and a different word that is used for “two [things]”. So two forks would be a duet of forks? 🙂 Or a pair but c’mon, calling them a duet is prettier. ---
**Author:** ![MickNickMaggies](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/59ef9b/32.png) [@MickNickMaggies](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MickNickMaggies)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 11:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/69 "2016-05-10T11:31:51Z")
> [@Broomstick](#): > > If you want “nuts” study Irish Gaelic - they have no word for either “yes” or “no” Which provides the joke in the title of Ciaran Carson’s book of poetry, ‘The Irish for No’ And I adore the fact that, in French, Pierre the midwife is still a midwife (sage femme). I loved Pierre. And his car analogy for false labour. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/70 "2016-05-10T16:01:54Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > So two forks would be a duet of forks? 🙂 > > Or a pair but c’mon, calling them a duet is prettier. It is almost exactly like that. For example, 42 is rendered as something like “four-ten-two”, and you use the regular number two when saying “42 (things)”, but the “duet” word is used exclusively for two (not “four-ten-duet of forks”). And there are dozens or scores of words for the “of” used in enumerating things, so the “of” is always in there. There is one for short slender objects that would be appropriate there. However, the analogy kind of breaks down with “forks”, since the Chinese are too civilized to use those things outside the kitchen. ---
**Author:** ![sachertorte](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sachertorte/32/3727_2.png) [@sachertorte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sachertorte)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/71 "2016-05-10T17:24:12Z")
The large library of Chinese articles I agree with, but the two forms for two isn’t all that bad – relatively speaking. And no mention of the goddamn tones?! As for the original question: The WTF moment was when my mom burst into laughter when I tried to say something in Chinese. Apparently, it was very funny and caused by butchering the tones. (Cantonese , btw) ---
**Author:** ![Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/les_espaces_du_sommeil/32/308_2.png) [@Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Les_Espaces_Du_Sommeil)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/72 "2016-05-10T18:02:23Z")
> [@panache45](#): > > Anyway . . . before visiting Amsterdam, I tried to give myself a crash course in the Dutch language. Getting absolutely nowhere, I finally gave up when I discovered that everyone there speaks English (I did learn a little, though, just to be polite). I’m convinced that Dutch is the same as German, spoken with a mouth full of herring. Dutch is boneless German, actually. ---
**Author:** ![Sampsiceramos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Sampsiceramos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampsiceramos)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/73 "2016-05-10T18:23:51Z")
> [@sachertorte](#): > > The large library of Chinese articles I agree with, but the two forms for two isn’t all that bad – relatively speaking. > > And no mention of the goddamn tones?! > > As for the original question: The WTF moment was when my mom burst into laughter when I tried to say something in Chinese. Apparently, it was very funny and caused by butchering the tones. (Cantonese , btw) If memory serves, Cantonese is so tone-sensitive that a simple error in intonation turns an otherwise innocent greeting into a term for the female pudenda. ---
**Author:** ![Omar\_Little](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/omar_little/32/269_2.png) [@Omar\_Little](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omar_Little)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/74 "2016-05-10T18:28:52Z")
I gave up when I realized that I was never going to get beyond translating in my head. I thought early in my career that learning Spanish and possibly Mandarin would be helpful for my career, but I learned that English is the language of international business. When a Brazilian company and an Italian company are negotiating, the talks and the docs are done in English, as that is normally the common language of the two. My daughter on the other hand has attended a dual language Spanish/English school since Kindergarten, and is nearly fluent in Spanish. She thinks in Spanish and English. She’s going into 4th grade next year. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/75 "2016-05-10T18:58:10Z")
> [@Sampsiceramos](#): > > If memory serves, Cantonese is so tone-sensitive that a simple error in intonation turns an otherwise innocent greeting into a term for the female pudenda. [Here is a very short page](http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/tonemistakes.htm) on Cantonese to mistakes. “Hungry” could become “diarrhea” (that is a rather unlikely mistake, based on the tone spread), “cigarette lighter” can be misspoken to be “beat up the waiter”. The tones are pretty simple (no bent tone, as in Mandarin), but there are a lot of them and they are pretty subtle. For a person who learns the language as a youngster, they are a very natural feature of the language – except, I have been reliably informed that tone deafness can be a very real handicap. English, however, is not exactly an atonal language. A change in melodic and/or metric inflection can alter the underlying meaning of a statement. Tone is often used to indicate sarcasm, and a garbled sentence can sometimes be interpreted just by its musical structure. And Chinese are, like, humans, endowed with the natural ability to infer from context. I think most tone errors are broad enough that the actual meaning does not collide with something so near to what was meant as to be troublingly confusing. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/76 "2016-05-10T20:02:15Z")
> [@Broomstick](#): > > The only place in France I encountered “French assholes” was in Paris. Given the conduct of some of the other tourists in that city I’m not entirely sure I blame them, man, some people are really stupidly irritating. Actually, I used to work for American Eurocopter, and it was kind of funny in that us Americans could easily tell the Parisians from the people from the rest of France, as the Parisians were kind of arrogant and snooty, while say… the guys from Marseille were quite cool and fun to be around. But yeah, my one trip to Paris was rendered relatively unpleasant by crabby Parisians who were not at all pleased for me to try and speak French, atrocious as it may have been. I guess it was the fact that we were just trying to communicate, not necessarily get a lecture on how we should say something. Had he told me and then said a better way to say it, I’d have understood- sort of like if a guy came in and said in broken English “Where is being the shitter?”, I’d probably point him toward it and say "Over there… and next time, “Where’s the bathroom?” is a better way to say it. But just stopping the guy and saying "No, it’s “Where is the bathroom?” before telling him where the bathroom is located is treating him like a 2 year old. ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 8:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/77 "2016-05-10T20:21:46Z")
> [@Dervorin](#): > > The Swiss, in their infinite wisdom, have stuck with the much simpler older system and count septante, huitante, nonante and then onwards to cent. And apparently they get mocked for this in France. Life just isn’t fair sometimes. On the other hand, a different but overlapping group of Swiss _claim_ that they’re speaking German, but any German from Germany > [@Sofis](#): > > You’re missing several things. The first is that the northern parts of Sweden are very sparsely populated ([map](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Norden_pop_density.gif)). The second is that while Saami speakers do indeed make up less than 0.1% of the population, Finnish speakers are over 2%. The third is that Saami and Finnish speakers both are heavily concentrated in the north. No, I’m really not, all I was confirming is that it was the case that they are either basing it on the most “unique” language in that area or what languages were spoken there hundreds of years ago. The mapping is ambiguous and the key does not describe it. I just think that coloring in almost a third of the country by area seems similar to coloring in good parts of Pennsylvania as using 3 genders because some people there speak German (5.58% in Lancaster County), or (if you prefer to only include native languages), that NE Arizona is colored in with Navajo (58.32% in Apache County). There was a Wikipedia image I wanted to find, but can’t now. [This one is close enough](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet#/media/File:Writing_systems_worldwide.png) (on writing systems though), and colors in a bar pattern or dots when an area uses a mixed system. In neither case is the mapping ideal, but at least less ambiguous. Even at 2% Finnish speakers, it’s still less than the ~6% Swedish speakers in the colored parts of Finland. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/78 "2016-05-10T20:52:10Z")
> [@Broomstick](#): > > If you want “nuts” study Irish Gaelic - they have no word for either “yes” or “no” Technically Mandarin Chinese doesn’t, either ; although “dui” (“[that is a] correct/true [statement]”) can substitute adequately for a simple “yes” in most contexts, as can “shi” ([it] is [so]). “Bu dui” and “Bu shi” for no, “bu” being the main negative particle. But the \*proper \*way of answering yes or no to a question like “have you eaten yet ?” is to say either “eat” or “not eat”, i.e. you repeat the verb used by the original speaker, plus a negation for no which can vary from verb to verb. For me (so far, I’ve only been learning it for two years now), the really bonkers part of Mandarin Chinese are the classifiers though. See, every single object or concept in Chinese belongs to one of 80+ groups/categories ; and when you count or designate items (e.g. “this coat”) you have to add the proper group noun in there. So you don’t say “two rivers”, you have to say “two [long, sinuous object] rivers”. How do you know which classifier corresponds to which noun/object and vice versa ? Rote, motherfucker ! [QUOTE=Waltzes with Cacti] the calamitous moment that Mlle Prendergast, our teacher, revealed that the French words for “seventy,” “eighty” and “ninety” were “soixante-dix,” “quatre-vingt” and “quatre-vingt-dix” (“sixty-ten,” “four-twenty” and “four-twenty-ten.”) That was the moment that I decided the entire French nation was _nuts_. [/QUOTE] Maybe you’d be more at home with the Swiss, Alsatians and Belgians ? They say “septante”, “octante”, “nonante” instead, in keeping with the previous -tens (cinquante, soixante etc…). It sounds weird as hell to everyone else :). ---
**Author:** ![Ice\_Machine](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Ice\_Machine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ice_Machine)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/79 "2016-05-10T21:10:24Z")
> [@Sampsiceramos](#): > > If memory serves, Cantonese is so tone-sensitive that a simple error in intonation turns an otherwise innocent greeting into a term for the female pudenda. In Mandarin a couple examples of the tones completely changing the meaning: ma - said with one tone means mother and with another means horse - I’m sure I’ve called my MiL a horse more than once gege - one tone is older brother and the other is penis (great to use to call your brother a dick) shuijiao - one way is dumplings and the other way is going to sleep, I’m always afraid of telling the waitress its past my bedtime. Tones is definitely the hardest for me. I’ve been learning on and off for over a decade and still can’t get them right. Numbers as noted above are a lot easier: 11 through 19 is 10-1, 10-2, 10-3 etc. and 20 through 90 is 2-10, 3-10, 4-10 etc. Where it gets difficult is there is a separate word for 10,000 and numbers above this are counted in multiples of this, thus 300,000 is 30 - 10,000 and not 300 - 1,000. ---
**Author:** ![Esox\_Lucius](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/848f3c/32.png) [@Esox\_Lucius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Esox_Lucius)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312/80 "2016-05-10T21:10:39Z")
I took four years of French in high school, and while I never gave it up, there were WTF moments, like genders for objects. The real WTF came long after high school when I learned that “vagina” has the male gender–_le vagin_. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/foreign-languages-the-wtf-moment-that-made-you-throw-in-the-towel/754312.md?page=5)