Language stumbling blocks

[nnozomi]

Because I am frustrated with the state of education in this country: tell me about characteristic mistakes in various languages!
For instance, native English speakers of Japanese tend to need a long time to get used to the practice of omitting pronouns all over the place. We also (at least judging by me and Seiden-sama) have trouble keeping straight transitive and intransitive verbs, and struggle with the fact that the お honorific prefix is sometimes used in humble, as opposed to respectful, language (I have a couple of college-era stories about this... .).
So what are the typical mistakes non-native speakers make in your language, and vice versa? Or what are the mistakes you tend to get stuck on in your second language?
Or if some more positivity is indicated, tell me about constructions or idioms or words or characters in one of your languages that just appeal to you specially. Anything!
Oh yeah, I have a[nother] dumb pun for this one, not really mine to begin with. So [the actor] Liu Chang posted some photos of himself and his friend Wa'er, with, respectively, big wide eyes and eyes squeezed shut, captioning it "没眼晴的弟弟快楽相遇" (happy meeting with my little brother with no eyes). The Japanese Twitter account that follows him for some reason, not that I'm complaining, translated this as 目が無い弟と幸せな出会い. I have no idea if it was deliberate or not, but 目がない in Japanese means both literally "no eyes" and metaphorically "devoted to someone," so you could more or less read the Japanese translation as "a happy meeting with my adoring/adored little brother" too... .
Be safe and well.

Comments

[yantantether]

I absolutely love the completely logical progression of numbers in Chinese and compared to the trauma of learning them in French (96 is "four twenty sixteen"? OK THEN) find them a delight. Same with days and months.

[nnozomi]

Oh yes! The Chinese numbers etc. are just like Japanese only even more straightforward (Japanese doesn't number its weekdays), so all I have to do is remember the pinyin. (I might still have the French numbering system tucked away at the back of my mind somewhere, but I wouldn't bet money on it...).

[laireshi]

native English speakers of Japanese tend to need a long time to get used to the practice of omitting pronouns all over the place.
Neither my native language nor Spanish need half as many pronouns as English does, but I'm so used to English, I keep using unnecessary pronouns in Spanish *lies down*

As a Polish speaker, I have no idea why English and Spanish need articles. We don't have them and we deal just fine! So that's hard sometimes. And one thing that kept baffling my betafriend--I had a tendency to say "under the wall" when I meant "near"; that's a literal translation from Polish.

[maggie33]

As a Polish speaker, I have no idea why English and Spanish need articles. We don't have them and we deal just fine!

Oh God, yes. Articles are my Achilles heel when it comes to English. I pretty much gave up on ever trying to learn how to do it right. Sometimes when I write fic I'm so sure that this time I got it, and then my fic comes back from my beta-reader and nope I really didn't. :)

I had a tendency to say "under the wall" when I meant "near"; that's a literal translation from Polish.

LOL It reminds of my sister's colleague, who wanted to say to someone "Zapłacimy z góry" and said "We will pay you from the mountain". :DDD

[nnozomi]

but I'm so used to English, I keep using unnecessary pronouns in Spanish *lies down*
Ha! My impression is that you can drop some pronouns in Chinese but not as many as in Japanese, but I keep omitting 我 out of sheer habit...

I had a tendency to say "under the wall" when I meant "near"
Oh, that's interesting! I love things like that in a way, where you can look at an error in language A and pin down the way it would be correct in language B.

[maggie33]

As I've said in my comment to laireshi articles in English are so hard for me. Also past tenses. But since I read and write and watch a lot in English I did get much better at tenses than I was for instance 10 years ago. Articles are a lost cause for me, I'm afraid. :)

As for idioms it fascinates me for instance that Polish saying "Z deszczu pod rynnę" which describes the situation of moving or getting from a bad or difficult situation to a worse one, uses water, because it means "Out of the rain and under the roof gutter". And the same saying in English uses the element contrary to water - fire.

[nnozomi]

My impression from teaching English is that articles and prepositions are the two absolutely worst things to learn. Japanese and Chinese also basically get by without articles. (Even as an English speaker I am fazed by languages like German and Ancient Greek where not just the nouns but the articles have declensions...).

"Out of the rain and under the roof gutter". And the same saying in English uses the element contrary to water - fire.
That is fascinating! Now I'm trying to think of all the rain idioms--"it never rains but it pours," one in Japanese about perseverance along the lines of "whether it rains water or spears..." Fun to compare.

[extrapenguin]

As for idioms it fascinates me for instance that Polish saying "Z deszczu pod rynnę" which describes the situation of moving or getting from a bad or difficult situation to a worse one, uses water, because it means "Out of the rain and under the roof gutter". And the same saying in English uses the element contrary to water - fire.
The Finnish equivalent is "ojasta allikkoon" – from ditch to puddle. Now I wonder how many of the "bad to worse" idioms use water vs fire vs other things...

[maggie33]

The Finnish equivalent is "ojasta allikkoon" – from ditch to puddle. Now I wonder how many of the "bad to worse" idioms use water vs fire vs other things...

Oh, that's cool. And yeah, it would be very interesting to compare idioms with the same meaning from other languages.

[tinny]

That exact idiom exists in German, too. "Vom Regen in die Traufe" - which is funny, because "Traufe" does not exist anymore in modern speech, except for this one idiom.

Since we're on the topic of Polish, I find it extremely hard that the weekday and month names in Polish are traditional, and nothing like the words all the other languages I know use (let alone Chinese, which just numbers them - although I admit numbering them is kinda lame :D).

[china_shop]

I'm not sure what mistakes I tend to make, I'm so out of practice, but I can say with confidence that I'm still confused about topic vs subject markers.

And I really like 정신이 없다 and 눈치 없다 -- I wish English had better words for those.

[nnozomi]

I'm still confused about topic vs subject markers.
Oh me too, after twenty years speaking Japanese I still stumble over them. They're like a/the in English, the rules are so fractal.

I really like 정신이 없다 and 눈치 없다
The first one is new to me, and useful! 눈치 없다 is like 空気が読めない, can't read the air, in Japanese, which became such a popular phrase it was abbreviated to KY (kuuki ga yomenai) for a while. You're right, there is no good English for it.

[extrapenguin]

Finnish doesn't gender pronouns. As a result, Finnish speakers learning English will spend a stretch of time misgendering everyone, and flub pronouns even after that. There's also some subtle grammar/sentence construction stuff I can't really articulate.

[nnozomi]

Finnish doesn't gender pronouns. As a result, Finnish speakers learning English will spend a stretch of time misgendering everyone, and flub pronouns even after that
Interesting! A friend of mine who is Taiwanese and very fluent in English says that no matter how long she has spoken English she still tends to jumble "she" and "he," because of the 他/她 thing in Chinese with their identical pronunciation. Similar thing happening, I wonder...
(If lucky enough to have a peaceful retirement some day in the future, I plan to spend some of it studying Finnish; I figure the fifteen cases, if I have that right, will keep my brain healthy and interested for quite a while...).

[tinny]

Obviously, everyone in German gets the cases and the genus wrong.

Worse, young people (and immigrants over the last 50 years) tend to simply omit both, plus prepositions, so we have ended up with a language with just one case and no articles or prepositions. *sigh*

I love the Liu Chang example! <3

When it comes to positive things: I love how Chinese combines characters into words - just like German does. Hard to learn, but so fascinating, and so visual.

And with single characters as well; Xiaolu Guo just made the example of how the character for dew 露 is combined from 路 (road) and 雨 (rain).

And German just puts another one on top of that and doesn't stop you from just appending more and more words to the end to make theoretically unlimited words. (There's a game that starts with "Donaudampfschifffahrtskapitän", and every player simply appends another word to the end.)

It has always struck me as strange that there is a "longest word" in French. (I still remember it. It's "anticonstutitionellement".)

[nnozomi]

(sorry to deluge you with comment replies)
I love how Chinese combines characters into words - just like German does. Hard to learn, but so fascinating, and so visual.
Yes! Freshman year of college, when I was first studying Japanese, my classmates and I used to make up all kinds of arcane stories to help us remember the character parts. It's why I find the mainland simplified characters frustrating sometimes, because they actually elide the meaning, like 电 was originally 電, which has rain in it, on account of lightning (I think).

It has always struck me as strange that there is a "longest word" in French.
Ha! The one American kids learn as a joke (in English) is "antidisestablishmentarianism."

[tinny]

I agree with you on the tragedy of creating simplified characters at all. It's one of those "the state knows best" things that no normal society would ever dare pull on its citizens. *sigh* But of course I am still glad I only have to learn the simplified ones, so much easier to write. Dilemma. /o\

Ha! The one American kids learn as a joke (in English) is "antidisestablishmentarianism."

I didn't know that one! Will remember that! :D