Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
We all like to poke fun at the English language (well, at least I do), with no better exemplar being how ‘though’, ‘through’, ‘tough’, ‘thorough’ and ‘thought’ have somehow managed to possess different pronunciations, without bearing the slightest similarities in meaning. For native speakers, the ability to distinguish between them comes relatively easy, but I can only imagine how hard it must be for English learners to remember the differences. This got me thinking about the quirks that every language inevitably possesses – and how I wish I had the plasticity of a 3-year-old to be able to naturally pick up these mental rules. So, here are some of the more interesting peculiarities among languages (that I know) that I have noticed.
Firstly, Mandarin versus Japanese. It’s well known that one of the Japanese scripts is kanji (漢字), which is more or less Mandarin Chinese “on steroids”, due to having two different types of pronunciations: the Chinese way (音読み) and the Japanese way (訓読み). Despite this, most Chinese speakers will be able to guess the meaning of the majority of kanji, as they possess the same meaning. The ones that are different though, often lead to memorable learning points. For example, ‘勉強する’ means ‘to study’ in Japanese, but in Mandarin, ‘勉强’ means to force yourself, or be reluctant about something. It probably wasn’t an intentional difference, but I often thought this was the height of irony and a great inside joke. Another example would be ‘大丈夫’, which means ‘everything is fine’ in Japanese, but is incomprehensible in Mandarin (transliterated as ‘large husband’?). These little differences accumulate the more you learn a language, and is a fun way to keep you on your toes.
Then, there is the Russian language. As a beginner learner, there is no greater ‘quirk’ for me than the differences between the handwritten and printed forms. It is much more extreme than the cursive versus typed forms in English, since some letters have no visual similarity to one another at all (e.g., the ‘T’ in print form looks like an elaborate ‘m’ in cursive form). Additionally, writing in cursive is the default in Russian, and so it was one of the first steps I needed to take to become more comfortable with the language.
Picture on the right: One of our class exercises in a (technically improper) handwritten typed style, before we learnt how to write in cursive.
To me, each language is like a personality – it can be fun, but also frustrating, with a few (or many) idiosyncrasies thrown in for good measure. The things I pointed out were casual observations, and I am sure that there are many more exceptions and irregular rules that these languages have. So, what are some of the ‘quirks’ that the languages you know possess?
This post was written by Jieying, our #SGUnited Intern. Jieying is a 3rd year Psychology student and speaks English, Mandarin, Japanese, and a little Russian and Cantonese.
At the Brain, Language, and Intersensory Perception Lab (BLIP), we investigate how learning particular languages might shape the way we experience our world. In Singapore, this is especially interesting since most of us grew up speaking or hearing more than one language. We thought it’d be fun and interesting to capture these memories of learning language!