duolingo - the nemesis lesson

Now I remember something: Family. That lesson.

This is where it all started going wrong before. And this time I know why, because I nailed down everything else.

That third singular 'you'. Just came out of nowhere.

That's what started the downward spiral toward linguistic annihilation. One you, English; two 'you', Spanish taught me that, I got it down; three you???? WHY? Why does any language need three?

Even worse? It is nothing like the other two.

Check it:
You (my personal favorite): तू
You (my second favorite): तुम
You (from hell): आप

Why, you ask? Besides this being an extra sneaky third you thrown in?



The first two start with the 't' sound, and the first is not unlike a slightly sharper Spanish 'tu' (linguists: to my ear, which is not so refined as yours). I could roll with either, because the 't' sound showing up in second person is startlingly common in surprising number of languages (like, seriously).

Now, it's actually--if I were sane--a really nice type of 'you'; it never changes form in possessives, you just toss in a का, की, or के and call it a day. It is, in fact, much much easier than alllll the goddamn forms of तुम. However, for four lessons, the 'you's were 't' and now we have this which note, looks and sounds nothing like them.

However, even this strange alien (kind of cool) third you by itself wouldn't have been a problem if not combined with what is--admittedly--a very useful possessives rule where you don't use the possessive form of a pronoun you already used in a sentence.

(This example is obviously from duolingo, I am not anywhere near popping out sentences on demand)

Example: I eat my apple
Exact version: मैं मेरा सेब खाता हूँ
Correct version with possessive pronoun substitution: मैं अपना सेब खाता हूँ।

Cool: switch out मेरा (my) with अपना (substitute my). You can do this in first, second, and third; they're all the same! This is legit easy; just switch out the last vowel for feminine or plurals.

So what is my problem?

The first letter अ. Or more specifically अ, आ, ओ, औ.

To be specific, a distressing number of words right now start with one of these that I am seeing all at once; worse, some are quite new words. And of those four, the first two are the biggst problem. Combine that with third you and possessive substitution--which all starts with अ--my brain keeps stopping short to confront me on the issue. Now, there is improvement in one aspect; my grasp of the alphabet means I also know some of these phonetically,but if I think I know it, I won't and...yeah.

Then again, this all could also be a symptom of the oblique case that I'm not dealing with well.

One of the disadvantages of native tongue is that we do, in fact, learn English cases; we just don't remember doing it or the case names because honestly, they had no obvious connection. Examples on the board of cases had a much friendlier name, though. And once we worked out friendly name for weird case name, that was it.

On one hand, I get why non-native languages start throwing out cases so early; it's rule set that help you mentally organize while learning. On the other hand, I feel it would benefit by also getting a friendly name. Example: when I was in Finland, it took me an inordinate of time to even wrap my mind around this series of cases that were called pretty much everything (in two languages) but 'they're like English prepositions, Jenn; we just suffix them to nouns.'

Finnish noun cases

Maybe not use any word on that page whatsoever and instead try 'let's go over some super common usage'. Back then, I couldn't even google or wiki for what the hell 'partitive' meant.


Non-native/non-first language English speakers--with the understanding that vast swathes of English are irrational, when you were learning, what particular point just made you stop and go 'why?', like it almost felt like English was mocking you personally?

Comments

[fox]

True or false: Castilian Spanish actually has four yous: tu (which may have an accent on the u, I can't remember), vosotros (deprecated in most if not all New World dialects?), usted, ustedes? And (I know this is true) Ud. and Uds. take third person verbs, like you're talking directly to someone as if he's not even in the room. "If your honor would take a look at the memo we are handing him right now" - where the antecedent of him is your honor, which I don't think we do even in stuffy English.

French is a pain in the ass in a lot of ways but it does just have two: tu and vous and that's it. German has three if I'm not mistaken - du, ihr, Sie (and Sie, the polite plural, does the same third-person stuff as Uds. in Spanish, doesn't it?).

English used to look like it had four, but as you note, that's because we had two and they declined into cases - thee/thou and ye/you.

Good times, man! I miss this stuff.

[seperis]

Yes: singular tu/usted, plural vosotros/ustedes. According to what I learned in school, vosotros is only used in Spain and Argentina. Usted/ustedes being formal, they switch to third person conjugations, possessives, etc.

To be fair, they're pretty straightforward, but in conjunction with pronoun replacement and the plural forms of both third person singular that can also be 'this' and 'that'....

[malkingrey]

Old English used to have singular, plural, and dual forms for both "we" and "you", but ditched the dual very early on -- the main (possibly the only) place it survives is in one particular passage in Beowulf, where one speaker is saying, "The two of you did thus-and-such," and the other is replying, "No, the two of us did this-other-thing."

[ratcreature]

The switch from using 2nd to 3rd plural as polite address is kind of fascinating in German because it happened so relatively recently. Like over the 19th century I think, first in the cities and later everywhere. But you encounter it in older literature where the polite address is still the second plural. And some German dialects never made the switch, especially I think in the South, like in Southern Germany and Switzerland.

Also really interesting, for a while, especially in certain regions, along with the switch to 3rd plural for politeness, or actually a bit before that, 3rd singular was used as a condescending form of address to less powerful people to diss them. That mostly fell out of use, though I think it's sometimes still done in Berlin.

[ratcreature]

Coming from German as a native language, English comes across as mostly harmless at first, because the two are very close relatives, only English lost almost all of the grammar that most German learners hate, like having to put not just nouns but articles and adjectives in different cases, the grammatical genders, and the horribly irregular plural forms. English still has a few like mice or children, but in German all plurals are like that and you just have to memorize them. (There are a few patterns but it's mostly a horror show, and native speakers hate them too as soon as they think about them, like sometimes there are competing plurals, they change over time and there are regional differences in what kind of plural people use for many words, it's just not a rational system.)

Anyway, English doesn't have any of that. The first really difficult thing aside from the obnoxious 'th' sounds, were all the unnecessary tenses. Those were pretty horrible at first (though it prepared me a little to face the even worse tense situation in French later). The whole thing with the continuous tenses seems pretty unnecessary, you just don't make that distinction in German and everyone hated it at first. Same with the simple past and present perfect distinction. That is really hard. German has analogous tenses, but just uses one in spoken language and one for story telling in writing, none of that weird usage difference, so beginners don't really need the latter at all. You don't use the future in spoken language either, just the present, but at least that's not quite as confusing. English has way more tenses with finicky and unintuitive usage distinctions than necessary.

Of course right away you realized that English spelling is mocking everyone, so I don't think my despair over that had anything to do with being a non-native speaker.

As for the t-sound in the 2nd person being common, maybe it's a Indo-European thing?

[j00j]

(English native speaker, had German exposure from infancy but not a concerted effort to raise me bilingual) the thing I always felt like German was trolling me with was separable prefix verbs, where you wind up stacking bits of verbs onto the end of your sentence. Now, this doesn't happen much in conversation but god, my classmates constructed ridiculous sentences purely for the sake of lolz.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, that's a bit weird, especially the cases where the stress and whether you separate the prefix totally changes the meaning, i.e. "ich umfahre das Hindernis" (I drive around the obstacle) vs. "ich fahre das Hindernis um" (I run over the obstacle)... Though I think it must be easier for English speakers than for people from other languages who never separate their prefixes at all, because English does the same thing, you just don't put as many sentence parts in-between and it's not as common. But I mean in English a word like say "to backtalk" is separated so that back isn't a prefix, i.e. "he talks back to his parents". So English speakers are familiar with the principle.

[silverflight8]

I think the answer is...why not?

[lilacsigil]

Japanese has literally tens of different words for "you" (same for "I") but fortunately most of the time you just don't use pronouns at all!

[bratfarrar]

I am reminded of this: