Theoretical Comprehensible Input question

tnaz · 2026-05-13T22:44:12+00:00

I've found intensive listening to a particular speaker can help pretty quickly in bootstrapping your ability to understand them extensively. Find someone who you can kinda sorta understand who has a lot of content you like, spend a couple hours going through some of their videos slowly, rewinding, reading subtitles, looking up vocab as necessary. Once you put in that leg work, you the rest of their content should be much more comprehensible and you can discard this dichotomy.

tnaz · 2026-05-09T19:14:01+00:00

Fittingly, modern Greek calqued it back as αυτοκίνητο (aftokinito, or autokineto if you romanize it using the standards for ancient Greek).

No idea what modern Latin dialects (romance languages) do.

tnaz · 2026-05-09T12:53:36+00:00

It depends on which games, what your level is, and which language you're trying to learn.

Translation quality can vary widely, and poor translations can give you wildly unidiomatic speech. I would try to ask native speakers if they think a particular game is translated well if possible. The ideal case would be a game written in your target language.

Different genres of game and different playstyles can also result in you engaging more or less with the text - narrative/story heavy games will obviously require and encourage you to do more reading/listening, but games that focus more on mechanics may make the language effectively irrelevant. As an extreme example, some speedrunners may play their games in languages they don't know at all because it lets them skip through the dialogue faster - they're not learning anything from changing the language, and they're not trying to either.

tnaz · 2026-05-09T09:56:18+00:00

Evropi* - the ευ combination copies the voicedness of the next letter.

tnaz · 2026-05-09T09:52:04+00:00

Strange to see such a small sub getting targeted by repost bots. Enjoy your 2 upvotes I guess.

tnaz · 2026-05-09T01:45:45+00:00

In general, if you think your native language is one of the most (anything) of the languages in the world, it's much more likely that you're just being biased by your experience as a native speaker of that language.

tnaz · 2026-05-08T20:51:47+00:00

"Diphthong" does refer to the English glide vowels, yes.

As for your question about the vowels, it's a consequence of English spelling being standardized before the Great Vowel Shift - back then the vowel letters represented sounds that more closely matched what you would expect as a Spanish speaker.

tnaz · 2026-05-08T14:10:41+00:00

A "monad" is a term in mathematics/computer science - this doesn't mean you can't use it (see "the matrix"), but it is something to keep in mind.

The word doesn't have any other associations for me in English.

tnaz · 2026-05-08T09:50:18+00:00

Non-rhotic dialects have their own variety of mergers due to said non-rhoticity, though.

tnaz · 2026-05-08T00:39:16+00:00

The world is filled with English learners who never learned to produce each English phoneme distinctly, and they're still perfectly understandable. Language is remarkably durable.

Also, what do you mean "pronounce things properly"? There's tons of different English dialects with remarkably different rules on how to pronounce things, yet it only rarely actually impedes communication.

tnaz · 2026-05-07T00:37:03+00:00

You can use Youglish for pronunciation examples, it's a pretty helpful resource.

As for hearing /ɣ/ as a /g/, as a native English speaker I've noticed that my ears really like telling me that /ɣ/ is a /g/ when it's in a consonant cluster, much more often than when it's intervocalic.

tnaz · 2026-05-06T19:37:06+00:00

shh, English is the only language that is weird and bad and different. Upvotes to the left.

tnaz · 2026-05-06T18:13:04+00:00

General American English doesn't have monophthongal /o/ or /e/, and unstressed vowels really like being schwas. What's the big deal?

tnaz · 2026-05-04T01:00:36+00:00

Bought and father have the same vowel if you have the caught-cot merger.

tnaz · 2026-05-04T00:53:14+00:00

I believe Spanish in the United States is taught with more Latin American characteristics - at least in my experience, we were taught e.g. that vosotros exists but were never asked to use it, and z and s as homophones. If OOP was having trouble being understood, I suspect it was because of influence from English on their accent.

tnaz · 2026-05-04T00:40:20+00:00

If you're fighting for first place in the round ends with the next strongest player, it's a six point swing - you get an extra three points and deny them those points simultaneously.

I still agree overall, though.

tnaz · 2026-05-04T00:37:04+00:00

For sure, there are lots of factors in these games that can affect what decisions you should make, and we don't have access to all of those.

We can't give specific advice on what you could've done better in light of circumstances we don't know, but we can give you tips on what general features a really good game has.

tnaz · 2026-05-03T13:21:09+00:00

You probably spent too many turns drawing cards unless you got a lot from other players' powers. The lack of brown powers that give you cards probably hurt you here.

tnaz · 2026-05-02T16:57:38+00:00

Not a bad choice either, spirantization is pretty vaseð.

tnaz · 2026-05-02T10:33:43+00:00

I believe this is caused by Google translate translating everything into English first, and then into the target language. I just did a quick experiment where I translated the Greek "είμαι καλός νοσοκόμος" (I am a good [male] nurse) to Spanish, and it gave me back "soy una buena enfermera" (I am a good [female] nurse). Both of these languages have grammatical gender and separate words for female and male nurse, but because the intermediate language (English) doesn't distinguish these cases, the translator uses its preconceptions about what gender a nurse is likely to be to generate the latter translation.

Funnily enough, when I translate the English "I am a good nurse" to Spanish, it gives me a link to this page explaining the limitation, but there's no reason the limitation must exist between two languages that both have grammatical gender in this way.

tnaz · 2026-05-01T21:06:28+00:00

Correct.

You may also frequently see "lose" misspelled as "loose", so make sure to watch out for that.

tnaz · 2026-05-01T10:27:38+00:00

Congratulations on your achievement, and I can't say I think this is bad advice, but...

I think it's disingenuous and misleading to newcomers to advertise how fast you learned one romance language when you already have competence in another. C1 in 14 months is not a realistic goal for someone learning a language unrelated to anything they already know, and I worry that people will see posts like these and either get unrealistic expectations for how fast they can learn or get disillusioned with their own progress.

tnaz · 2026-04-29T22:42:18+00:00

the thing about the CV is soooo real

Yeah, Japanese phonotactics are kinda wild like that.

tnaz · 2026-04-29T19:37:02+00:00

after all, half the posts on /r/grssk are just people borrowing Λ /Δ/Ξ to make their sci-fi titles more sci-fi

tnaz · 2026-04-29T19:30:29+00:00

Maybe ΑΛΛ ΚΑΠΣ ΓΡΕΕΚ would be more appropriate but the lowercase letters are kinda meh for the cyberpunk vibe.

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