An anarchist here to ask asinine questions about the USSR. At least I was when I got here.
she/xe/it/thon/ꙮ | NO/EN/RU/JP
Det virker som du har en veldig interessant bakgrunn, kan du fortelle mer om språkene du kan, hvordan du vokste opp, hva forholdet ditt er til disse forskjellige språkene? Jeg er også nysgjerrig om språkdynamikken der du bor, mtp portugisisk og spansk og engelsk osv, og forholdene mellom disse.
Well, I should note that the situation for myself is that my mom’s first language is American English, and her second language is Norwegian, and my dad was the reverse, however both he and my mom mainly spoke English to me growing up. So I ended up growing up with both English and Norwegian, but because of the language dynamics in my family and in Norway in general, and because I was comparatively socially isolated for a long time, and because of various feedback loops, my Norwegian skills ended up basically “lagging behind” my English skills. This means that my idiolect in Norwegian has a number of prominent proscribed or eccentric features. So that’s something to keep in mind for when I put my Norwegian through this Swedish “filter” — that the Norwegian being filtered is itself already “Americanized” for lack of a better term.
Russian and Japanese are two languages that I have self-studied for a number of years. Neither of them are really up to the level I’d like, but I can still take pride in the effort I’ve put in and how far I’ve gotten, because even if my progress is slow compared to some learners, most hobbyist learners burn out and quit way sooner, right? Esperanto was one language that I tried to learn but quickly gave up on, but I’ve recently restarted learning that, and I hope and frankly expect that this time around I’ll make it to a much higher level, and it’ll become the fifth language I’ll say I can speak. And there are other languages still that I’d like to try my hands at eventually, and I’ve also been conlanging as a hobby for about a decade already, and languages are fuzzy things anyways, so just like anyone else I can sometimes understand individual words or sentences in languages I’ve never studied.
I can understand a very significant amount of Swedish but wouldn’t say I speak Swedish per se — I can rather put on an accent and apply some regular changes and switch out a few words in a crude approximation of Swedish, but is that really the same thing? There is actually a term for that sort of blending of Swedish and Norwegian, svorsk.
For whatever it’s worth, despite never formally studying Chinese, I managed to read both the Chinese sentences, albeit with the wrong tones. Like to be fair I have studied Japanese, and I am generally a bit of a weirdo with a knack for this sort of thing — but I do still have to wonder if more people are just going to start casually picking up hanzi just from exposure like I have, as China becomes more prominent. I could certainly see it happening.
“China is the future” is a bit of a vague question, though. Just from my interpretation of it…
I absolutely think that the USA is currently crumbling as the world’s hegemon — interestingly enough, the USA’s flag actually has stars on it to represent a “new constellation”, using the constellations in the sky as an allegory for the rise and fall of nations; so it indeed seems like the fifty-star constellation is beginning to fall beyond the horizon, as a new five-star constellation rises.
This being said, I don’t think China’s behavior as future hegemon will be the same as the USA’s current behavior as present hegemon. I don’t necessarily know what to expect from the future, though, so it’s probably best to prepare for all possibilities until we gain a clearer understanding of the situation.
Nettopp, nettopp. Jeg tror dette er vanlig for de fleste flerspråklige men blir ofte mer intenst for neurodivergente.