#the easy languages are italian and spanish because they're romance languages

[moinsbienquekaworu]

I am also incurious about the world. I am. I do it too. I know. I do it. But I don't go on tiktok to confidently say that english is the current lingua franca because it's one of the easiest languages to learn!!!!

[beevean]

Beevean, what did find hardest when learning a language? I need to gather information since one of my characters is having trouble learning a language and it's rules, so I thought it would be good to ask someone who went through that experience.

The rule of thumb is that you're going to struggle with grammatical principles and words that are not similar to your native language (or languages that you're fluent in)

I know that when Americans study Spanish, they generally have a hard time wrapping around grammatical genders, because they don't exist in English anymore. Other Romance language speakers have no trouble with it, although at worst what is masculine in one language may be feminine in the other, and viceversa. Or, when I vaguely dabbled into Korean, I noticed that it had a similar sentence structure as Japanese: I had already learned the "noun-particle-object-particle-verb" structure, so that was a passage I could skip.

I also noticed that English speakers struggle with Japanese's very simple phonetics, because they're used to a much wider range of wovels. Personally, that was very easy for me. However, I did struggle to learn the R sound (which sounds something like a mix between L and the D/T in American - pudding in Japanese is purin lol) and sometimes I forget to pronounce the H sound, which doesn't exist in Italian but it exists in English.

Sometimes, and I mention it in case you want to add a similar detail to your character, the problem might be completely personal! I have a slight defect of pronunciation: I have never learned to make a rolling R sound, which is the standard in Italian. My Rs are all pronounced at the back of my throat. Helps me a lot with English and French! I also never fell into the trap of saying R in Japanese when the sound is more similar to L/D! Very annoying in Spanish, though, which has the same sound in words with RR.

As for the rest, it depends from person to person. I enjoy learning grammar more than I do vocabulary lol. Grammar is usually logical, and it makes me picture putting blocks together to form a construction. (I may have been lucky of course lol) Vocabulary... well, if you're learning a language similar to your own, you have to look out for false friends. If you're learning a language completely alien from your own, then it's little more than brute force memorization. But this is my perspective: many people I knew hated grammar more than vocabulary lol, precisely because for them it was a bunch of rules to memorize. (then again i'm the weirdo who was good at math in school, that might have influenced me...)

And, of course, you have to practice. Often. Both actively, by speaking and writing, and passively, by reading and listening. Depending on the language, this can be easy or excruciatingly hard. Needless to say that if you're learning English, Spanish or Japanese, resources throw themselves at you lmao. Learning Albanian? Haha, good luck :)

I think I covered everything I could? I hope it was useful!

[beatrice-otter]

Thank you so much! I do not know very much about Native American names for geographic features in general, but I knew enough about Pacific Northwest tribes to look at the OP and have ... major questions.

To explain why, let's look at a map! This map is from the National Museum of the American Indian, and it is a map of language families (and individual languages). Each color on the map is a different language family, and separate languages within that language family are delineated with borders. (A language family is languages that are related. Like, say, French and Spanish and Italian are all Romance languages.)

If you look at the map, you will note that while most of the continent has languages families that cover a fairly broad geographic area, or have a couple of language families interspersed, there are some areas with a bunch of different language families that each only cover a small geographic area. One of those, is the West Coast. Now, California has a lot more language families than Oregon and Washington, but there's still a lot of linguistic diversity in the Pacific Northwest, relative to the rest of the country.

And also, as with all maps of Native American peoples or cultures, this is ... to some extent fictional. Because in most places there weren't hard-and-fast borders. And most tribes moved around, and territories overlapped (sometimes quite significantly).

A better map can be found at https://native-land.ca/

Go there, toggle territories off and lands on, and look around the Pacific Northwest. Look how many different languages they are and how much they overlap. There is pretty much no area in the entire PNW that has only one language family.

Those tribes (as ajomagurd pointed out) often had different names for the same geographic feature.

So when they don't agree on what the name is, which one are we going to go with? Sometimes it's (relatively) easy, because all the people living near it spoke languages from the same family, so it's roughly the same name, just differences in pronunciation (like, say, Netherlands verses Nederland, depending on whether you're speaking English or Dutch). But sometimes the names aren't just versions of the same word.

The thing about Denali is that all the native people from the area around it agreed on what the name should be. They all spoke the same language! The situation in PNW is different!

I agree that we should decolonize the names of the mountains and geographic features of the PNW. But part of decolonization is listening to and respecting the local peoples. When the collected tribes of the PNW get together and agree on what white people should call them, I'll use those names. Until that time, I'm not going to play favorites and pick one.

On a related note, "Turtle Island" is a name that a lot of tribes promote as an alternative name to North America. Many tribes across the eastern and middle part of the continent have a shared cultural heritage, such that while they are very distinct cultures, there are also similarities. Among those similarities is the centrality of the turtle in the creation stories of those tribes. However, the tribes in the western part of the continent do not come from the same root culture, and their creation stories don't have turtles. So, for example, I know a Native woman from Washington who gets cranky whenever anyone uses the term Turtle Island because to her it's no different than North America. They're both foreign names being imposed on her culture ... and in some ways Turtle Island is worse because the people using it claim to speak for her because she is "Native American" and Turtle Island is a "Native American" name, therefore it's relevant to all "Native Americans", right?

Part of decolonizing is realizing that while white people like things really simple--one name you can use everywhere and in all circumstances--a lot of the time that doesn't actually work in practice. There may not be a universal, simple name that you can use without thought or regard for context.

It's time we decolonize the Cascadian volcanoes

[romance-of-three-memes]

Unlike English and Chinese, Romance languages (there are a lot, but 'the big ones' are generally considered to be Romanian, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French) gender nouns and some other kinds of words like articles (words like 'the' and 'an'). Cultural relativism and all that, but gendering inanimate objects is unnecessary no matter how you slice it. But at least Spanish makes it easy. Feminine words end in -a, masculine words end in -o, or sometimes they have an e where feminine forms have an a (la vs el, which both translate to 'the'). Easy peasy.

French just can't be like that because it's basically the wild fuckin' west as far as I've found while trying to teach myself some. Some are easy like le and la (which also translate into 'the'), others are uh. Well. They're basically the same except for spelling and the pronunciation is a teensy bit different. Take une vs un, both of which translate into 'a' in English. You don't pronounce the e at the end of une (French adores throwing letters on at the end without pronouncing them), basically the only difference is that you pronounce une a bit more softly/lightly. Une is the feminine form so of course it has to be softer and gentler, because gender stereotypes are so firmly entrenched in our minds that it comes out in ways like that. To be fair, English does that sort of thing too, albeit more subtly.