You guys should try babelfish translate some sentence in english to japanese and then the japanese result to english again, and a couple of more iterations… I laugh allday long…
Here is an example:
Orginal text:
Opengl is a very good application programming interface for doing pretty three dimensional pictures
After some translations:
Clearly there is an umbrella which does the good application programming software three dimensional image in regard to the Opengl very with order and other things
Bref, vaut mieux pas se prendre la tête :
on a tous un cerveau qui est capable d’un tas de choses fantastiques comme comprendre et utiliser plusieurs langues. La principale variable ici c’est vous
translation :
Well, <cannot translate this> :
each of us has a brain which can do many cool things like understand and use several languages. Here the main variable is you
Originally posted by zed:
im having trouble logging into http://www.esperanto.le filet/ anyone with any ideas as to whats up
Ahm… if i understood it right, thats a translation of www.esperanto.net… (whatever did the translation, translated “net” to “le filet”; i ain’t sure, 'cause i dont really understand whatever language that is i just talk german (& swissgerman), swedish, somewhat english and even less finish )
btw: you can have a lot of fun with different languages, specially if they are somewhat alike. ex: german “faul” ( =lazy) sounds like the swedish “ful” ( =ugly)… Now guess what i said the first time i tried to say i had not done my homework yet, because i too lazy (in swedish)…
Mistakes in English? You should see my first language : “Brazilian portuguese”. It has more rules than you can imagine. Just the word “why” can have 4 translations, one to the Substantive, one to answer, one to ask and another one for answering with the word in the end of the sentence.
"Eu queria saber por que é que eu estou escrevendo isso?. A qüalidade de língua complicada do Português é indiscutível, entretanto. "
languages are kooky. english is my native tongue, but from studying spanish and french, english seems it would be one of the hardest languaged to learn. it contains words from many different backgrounds, and 1000+ vowel sounds (compared to 5 in spanish). take the letters “-ough”. at least 4 non-rhyming words contain these letters… rough, cough, bough, through. raise and raze are interesting because they are homonyms(words that sound the same) and antonyms (words that have opposite meanings). read and read (present and past tense for the same verb!) the list goes on and on. one of my favorites is the spanish word “esposa”, meaning both “wife” and “handcuff”
BTW, my favorite foreign word is the taiwanese ‘Mah’ (trying to put the sound into english pronounciation here), which, how a friend of mine from Taiwan told me, can mean both Mother and Horse, depending on the intonation.
english seems it would be one of the hardest languaged to learn
English grammar is very easy to learn. You have strict rules where each word has to be placed in each sentence.
In German, you can place each word at nearly every position. For example, you can write a sentence that is 3 lines long, and the verb comes LAST. That means when you hear someone talking it can happen that you have to “cache” 3 lines of text and you only understand the meaning when you hear the last word.
Once I heard a politician who spoke 10(!) minutes without finishing a single sentence. Of course this is rather uncommon, but sentences with 3-4 lines are used rather often in german (and not only in written german).
Originally posted by holocaust: Why does some people use the word “then” when one should understand “than” ?
I don’t understand this, con someone tell me ?
It hard to discuss stuff in German, because you can’t just agree with someone in mid sentence, because you have to hear it all before knowing what it was about.
I’ve studied German for 6 years, and it’s rapidly fading away simply due to the fact that I’m not exposed to it. I don’t hear it, I don’t read it, I don’t write it and least of all talk it.
With English, I read/write it more than I do Swedish (which is my native language) currenlty, mostly because I code a lot, I study a lot (all literature is in English at this level) and I spend a lot of time on the internet.
It’s horrific, I tried writing some techical documentation a few weeks ago in Swedish, and I stumped on every fifth word because all the terms that came up in my head were in English! I also have to fight with myself to use Swedish words instead of English when talking to my friends, especially for computer related stuff. (But also for other things… as almost all fiction I read is in English too.)
I’m going to try to learn some Japanese after summer. Just for the heck of it, plus that I like watching Anime. I hate dubbed movies, subtitling rules but it would be fun to know some of the spoken language too. All foreign films here in Sweden are subbed, so it’s very easy to pick up common expressions and such in other languages. (And since 99% of all foreign films are in English, you tend to learn that quite rapidly.)
Well i like english anyway a lot more than swedish or german in subjects like programming (computers) etc. (reading let say a open gl book in swedish/german just feels wrong =] )
You have to hear a complete sentence in german before beeing able to respond? I wouldnt say that… But then anyway: how nice is it to just disagree with someone, before he even got a chance to say what he wants
Its fancy how many schools here in sweden have possibilities to teach japanese/chinese … (Japanese (or maybe chinese) would be nice to try, but right now i dont have the time )
)