Linguistics is kind of like biology, its just for extreme accuracy but you dont need to be a biologist to know how to breath or the fact that drinking water keeps you alive
It provides tools for describing languages in extreme detail, but a lot of the time it doesn't actually apply them in a way that accurately reflects real world language use. Another reason to be careful when diving into the linguistics of a second language you're learning; you may pointlessly second-guess intuition you're developing through engagement with native speakers because "the science" disagrees with it.
@@niwa_s for languages that have been extensively studied, like English, Spanish, Japanese, French, Arabic (some varieties), Chinese (some varieties), German, Russian, etc. your intuition as a learner is much less likely to align with what native speakers do than the current science. Note that I’m not talking about textbooks, full of artificial rules and outdated ones. I’m talking about what actual modern linguistics has described, which’s the rules native speakers follow subconsciously. Like how English speakers can reduce the vowel in “can” to schwa, but not the vowel in “can’t”, but they can drop the final t in “can’t”.
not a good analogy, in real life, some people really nead to learn Biology, physician, veterinary, agronomist, etc. essential knowledge for living Who need to learn linguistics in real life? besides students and researchers of linguistics. "So you are saying that some knowledge is more important then others based on the use and needs in real life"?" YES
Yeah he does say уй [uj], doesn't he? I was wondering, is that intentional, like part of the joke? Or is that actually him doing that? I mean I do think it's actually a bit of a diphthong, at least it never sounds like pure [ɨ] to me. Maybe a bit more like [ɯɨ̯], starting more in the back?
@@sjuns5159 he definitely says it more in the back of the mouth, but just for the funny, because when he speaks russian seriously, he does pronounce "ы" correctly
@@holaliceanosim pretty sure his whole channel is a parody making fun of dumb language channels that pretend to learn a language in a short span of time just by learning a few sentences that they use in the video
There's nothing scientific about ordering orange chicken in flawless Chinese, but there's definitely a ton of science in studying how Chinese speakers order their orange chicken.
I cannot believe that I am not the only one who cannot read the IPA 😂 lol - I see the IPA for Icelandic and Gothic and Norse words, and I don’t know what c is supposed to sound like, and it’s very confusing, because isn’t the k sound a k and isn’t the ch sound a tsh sound or something like that, and then I am thinking, what could c be then, and also, why is j used for an y / i sound when j is a normal j sound like the j in the French word je, and why is the z-based symbol used for the j sound when it isn’t a z-like sound at all lol, and why the y and the i have different symbols when it’s literally the same sound aka a full / normal i sound like the ý / j / í in Icelandic and Norse and the i in Spanish and the y in English, like, it’s literally the same exact sound, I don’t hear any other sound that wouldn’t be a normal i sound, so, the IPA symbols are very confusing! (But anyways, dative was created by the germanic dude that created the first language Proto European which is the first language with proper grammar and thousands of words that came with the first writing system, that inspired all other languages and writing systems, either directly or indirectly, but mostly indirectly, and the dative case also kept being used by every other dude that created a new language by modifying it or newer previous languages, as one automatically uses the dative case whenever there’s an indirect object or a third party in the sentence, even when the word endings are the same, and it didn’t appear naturally, and this environment was also designed by its creator!)
Hi, the feeling is mutual. We actual linguists hate polyglots. Hate the player and the game. Every time I tell someone I study linguists they ask "How many languages do you know?" as if I need to be a polyglot to be a linguist. You don't need to study linguistics to be a polyglot and vice versa. The answer is 4 btw, none fluent.
Lol, so true - Wow, linguistics? How many languages do you speak? - You know, you don’t need to learn a ton of languages to study linguistics because you are studying the structures and you can use special scientific descriptions and you can do research on languages you know nothing about and blablabla… But. I speak 5~7 languages, if you are still wondering
"The answer is 4 btw, none fluent." None fluent? That's a bit surprising since the question was "How many languages do you know?" and not "How many *foreign* languages do you know?".
I respect anyone of this opinion :3 I couldn't disagree more tho :3 My language teachers at school made learning way too hard by never talking about linguistics at all, solely relying on "absorbing". Once I got my hands on a German book that contained grammatical explanations, it all suddenly made sense and I finally knew how to speak correctly
So I agree that Linguistics is not for everyone. But it took me 3 hours one night to learn the whole IPA, and now approaching new languages comes easy for me, since I can just quickly learn the sounds and be on my way. It’s supposed to be a resource not a hindrance. But not all resources will help everyone.
Wait, you're telling me that an academic discipline that was never intended to have an application to language learning does indeed have no application to learning languages? Who would have thought?
I have just started studying for my master's degree in linguistics, and it's safe to say that what you hate is not the "science" itself but the prescriptive side of it implemented as a language learning tool. To be fair, same. I also believe that language is learnt best via the immersion method. And... linguistics is a science as much as other social sciences like psychology or sociology is a science. Are we open to discuss their status too? Because then I have way too many arguments.
The problem with learning pronunciation only by ear is that many people's ears aren't that well tuned to picking up sounds in foreign languages. Learning phonetics and phonology can be of great help to improve your ears' tuning. It's not just theory. It has certainly helped me a lot, especially when listening for sound differences (phonemes) that don't exist in my native Norwegian, but are crucial in a target language. For instance, I could quickly be aware of the differences between open and closed e and o in Italian and how the various Polish fricatives work. Instead of spending ages not being aware of that and being misunderstood because of the confusion I caused, I could move on to learning vocabulary and other parts of the language, being confident that my pronunciation was at least OK. It's odd to see how awful pronunciation many polyglots have. That includes Language Simp's pronunciation of the Russian ы, which ... leaves a lot to be desired. Good pronunciation isn't just about showing off, it's about getting understood easily. In the worst case, bad pronunciation will cause misunderstandings. Phonetics isn't that difficult to learn, and well worth the effort, because you can apply what you know to any language.
@@dodolulupepe OK. It's sometimes hard to tell if he's joking or not. This whole video could be a joke for all I know. Using irony online is difficult.
I learnt IPA when studying English without even trying. Whenever I looked up a word in a dictionary, I saw its phonetic transcription, and - knowing how the word was pronounced - I inferred the sounds represented by the characters. Now knowing IPA helps me a lot with my French because I can revise words in Anki without having to listen to them.
As a linguist I absolutely love this hahaha especially phonetics. Our professor was SO obsessed with the IPA we had to learn all of it. But I do find the vowel chart pretty helpful when learning languages. Also I love grammar and loved grammar even when I was studying languages and not studying linguistics. Great video as always!
Learning phonetics is like learning the names of colors. Sure it helps to pick up the basics, but it's not the end of the world if you don't know the difference between magenta and fuscia.
My pronunciation is perfect, and I cannot read the IPA to save my life, and children don’t know the IPA either when learning how to speak the first language that they are made to learn, and are just imitating the exact sounds that they hear - besides, my target languages are only the pretty languages, including the prettiest languages ever Norse / Gothic / Icelandic / Faroese / Dutch / Norwegian / Danish / Welsh / Breton / Cornish which are as pretty as English, and these languages and my other target languages don’t have any of those odd sounds that sound like coughing or other funny sounds, so they are usually the same sounds that I am already used to, including the coolest sounds and the other normal sounds that are naturally easy to make by imitating the sounds one hears!
To be honest, having a perfect pronunciation is more about the accent, not really about knowing the IPA, for example, one may know all the sounds in German very well and one may even know the IPA, but one is still not going to sound native in German if one isn’t native speaker level, because German has one of the accents that are the hardest to imitate, having a category 2 accent and pronunciation, so one must practice a lot and learn each word automatically, plus it takes years to fully develop a natural native German accent - however, in languages such as English / Icelandic / Norse / Gothic / Dutch it is naturally easy to sound native as these languages have the accents that are the easiest to imitate and the easiest category 1 pronunciation, so I could sound native in Icelandic even as a beginner, for example, but now I am advanced level!
@@FrozenMermaid666 perfect pronunciation is subjective depending on regional dialect. If you took your perfect Danish pronounciation (which 💯 does sound like coughing BTW) to Skåne, and applied it to Swedish, your pronunciation would be understood a lot better than if you took the same pronunciation up north, lol.
i really like the IPA. i wouldn't bother studying it but i like it to look up proper pronounciation occasionally. sure, a language is not exactly defined by its pronounciation but people will get different ideas about you depending on your pronounciation and i enjoy switching between fluent native and foreigner with accent at will
It’s so interesting because language is so many hobbies at once. I love linguistics because it gives me insight into how the human brain organizes its thoughts and presents them to other humans. I have a rough idea of why Basque grammar is so different to grammar in other language families and I love that and think it’s so cool to learn about, but I don’t know a single Basque word. I love learning dead languages and about how languages evolved and continue to evolve because it gives me perspective on people who have lived in so many time periods whose lives were just as real and interesting as my own. I have it on my bucked list to try to learn as much Sumerian as a person could learn from what we have because it’s from a people who were completely unique who have no living relatives and yet we can still know about their real human experience. The past and the way things work can be just as interesting for some people as actually speaking to other humans is to others.
For what it’s worth I do try to learn living languages. I can hold a conversation in Spanish and speak a little Norwegian. And want to learn more. But to me learning the language will always be a necessary chore that I do because I enjoy linguistics.
For the most part you're pretty much right, but it's kind of like being right when you say night is darker than day. It's basically a non-statement, because that's like the defining feature of night. My extra pedantic corrections are in a response to this comment, it's already long enough. So the thing is not 1 single actual linguist will tell you you need to memorize the entire ipa chart, vowels or no, except when you're taking a college or higher phonetics class. Most of us don't memorize the whole thing and even fewer can say all the different sounds. Mind you, ipa is flawed, but it's been created for a specific purpose, and it more or less gets the job done. It's like seeing a woodworker with a highly specific jig and getting upset at him because the jig isn't used for your table or chair or what have you, even though he never told you to use it for a table or chair or what have you. Also, it is a very valuable thing to know the names of the verb tenses if you're learning in a group or with an instructor. It enables the meta-language that can be used to talk about mistakes being made. For self study it's also useful if you're working out of a book or something, but otherwise you should be fine without it. I have no idea what your complaint regarding case was, so I can't really address it, but I feel like you were wrong.
Like everything, knowing ipa for language learning is a useful tool, but only bother with the sounds of your target language and use them specifically for meta discussion of the pronunciation. Don't worry about being perfectly accurate with pronunciation, it's just a tool, not a rule. Phonetics is the study of how we make sounds/what sounds we make generally. Phonology is the study of how we think about sounds and what sounds we make in certain contexts. I personally think phonology is fake, but if you're talking about phonotactics (contextual sound change), you're talking phonology. The names of the characters in ipa are not the same names as the sounds. You were describing sound names (central/lateral, voicing, place, nasal/oral, manner; feel free to drop what's redundant) and letter names. For example, "ŋ" represents the central voiced velar nasal stop (nasal stops are sometimes just called nasals, so in english you'd typically call this the velar nasal), but the character's name is engma (pronounced approximately /ɛŋmə/ or /eŋmə/, which is basically the way you want to say it).
@@alyss_aq It's funny, because linguistics are descriptive, therefore if they consistently spells it like that along with other people, it's a valid spelling.
@@WhizzKid2012 it’s from LOTR; the original quote is “ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul”. Look it up.
I like learning linguistics things, especially when it tells me about the history of my language and how languages develop and differentiate between themselves. Learning that William is the same name as Guilherme, João is Ruan, and that kind of thing is really cool for me. Realizing the influence of other languages on my mother language (Portuguese), knowing that "Dona", to refer to a woman because it came from Italian, or that "garçom" is a term that came from the French, but that remained only in the context of a restaurant to refer to the boy who works serving customers and that instead of using "fille", which is the equivalent term for a girl that serves customers in a restaurant, we use the French feminine declension in the context of restaurants in Brazil in the term "garçom", so, instead of "fille" to refer for this waiter, we use "garçonette". I really like learning these things, I understand better my country, my culture and that stuff
As a SL English speaker, IPA helped me a lot after I could understand most conversational material with ease, because it made it easier to distinguish sounds absent in my native language, as well as having confirmation that phones that sounded identical to those in my native language were indeed the same. But when starting to learn French, being too neurotic about pronunciation has slowed me down and hampered my motivation. My advice would be to study some linguistic concepts by the measure of your own curiosity only after you feel comfortable with the language. Even more so if you're already acquainted with linguistic jargon, it'll be a lot easier after you've built an intuition for how the language behaves. Beyond language learning, linguistics is just a ton of fun too.
Yes, English is my first language, but I can't imagine how hard it would be to learn English as a second language without IPA, because: (1) English has so many freaking vowels (I didn't even realize how many until I learned the IPA symbols); and (2) English spelling is chaos, so you need IPA for your pronunciation dictionary. I mean, I could see myself learning a language like Japanese (with a relatively small sound inventory + easy spelling) without needing to use IPA that much (if I didn't want to), but it seems to me like it would be very useful for a language like English.
@@robertjenkins6132And english has a lot of pseudo homophones. For example, eyes and ice are not pronounced the same, but for someone that's not experienced with english's phonetics both will sound the same, even though they really aren't.
@@robertjenkins6132 English and Japanese are somewhat extreme examples, actually^^ Someone tried to estimate the number of distinct syllables in the 20k most common words. I'll include German, French and Spanish as a reference: Japanese: 643 (lowest among the languages they examined) Spanish: 2778 French: 2949 German: 5100 English: 6949 (highest) Getting good at English pronunciation must be quite a challenge for a native speaker of Japanese. Different writing system with chaotic spelling, tons of new sounds and syllables. I mean, I found it difficult and my native language is German^^
I'm an English learner and have been kind of familiar with the IPA and often find it useful but also find the phonetic spelling thingy, which is supposed to be a phonetically accurate way of spelling words, that Google has introduced these days useful. You can see them if you google like "'[word] pronunciation" although it doesn't work for some words for some reason. Sometimes I question the way Google interprets the pronunciation, for example, the short 'i' sound is sometimes spelled with 'uh' like the way they spell the schwa sound. But what was an eye-opener for me is the fact that they spell words like "miracle" differently for American English and British English. In fact, they spell it "mi-ruh-kl" for British English and "mee-ruh-kl" for American English. It's spelled /ˈmɪr.ə.kəl/ in the phonetic alphabet used by Cambridge Dictionary for both British and American English but if I pay enough attention while listening, I can hear the difference so... yeah. Apology for the wall of text.
Bro, without linguistics we wouldn't be able to learn Proto-Indo-European or Old Sumerian or whatever. Linguistics opens new languages up to be learned (unless you're a mega-hyper-polyglot like me and can subconsciously reconstruct languages just from immersion in various descendant languages, or who can pick up a language just by looking at a text in that language)
On a serious note: it takes like 1 month to learn basic linguistics, and it's going to make your language learning much MUCH smoother. Trust me. And it carries over to every other language. If you don't want to sound like steve kaufman, learn linguistics and specially phonetics. And do it EARLY. once the bad habits fossilised, you wont be able to fix that ever
Linguistics is not something that someone says you must study to learn a language. Who studies linguistics sometimes know just one or two languages, it is not connected with language learning. Obviusly if you know linguistics you could have less problems while learning a language and viceversa, but nobody wants you to learn "linguistics" in order to learn a language.
As a linguistics nerd I need IPA to make conlangs that no one actually speaks and describe what they sound like to other linguistics nerds. Sometimes I check a sound from a language I know just so I can put it in a conlang. I actually do briefly review all grammar concepts at the beginning of learning a language, because if there's one thing Spanish has taught me, it's that if I keep discovering conjugations and don't know where they'll end I'll feel like exploding. I have to at least know what exists so I wont feel like Im falling into an endless pit of tense later
It's the opposite for me, linguistics is what got me interested in learning languages and it makes learning easier and more interesting for me. But yeah anyone who trys to claim that phonetics are important to learning languages is absolutely fucking with you
@@Kitsu_Worm that's the thing, the IPA is very helpful to learning pronunciation and I'm glad it helped you, but that's all it is, a helpful tool, other than that it's completely optional and if it makes learning feel more intimidating to beginners then they shouldn't feel pressured to learn it.
@@no_ If someone is "intimidated" by the IPA, then they weren't serious about wanting to learn anything in the first place. The only thing you need to study are the sounds relevant to your target language, which is usually a third of the IPA. That's like being intimidated of learning a new alphabet. How is learning the IPA any different than an English speaker learning cyrillic?
@@Nikola_M i cant tell if you sent ы as an example of what the comment is talking about or as a way to say "lol" (which is a pretty common use of it, at least in my friend group)
Just like people are deterred from learning instruments because people tell them to learn scales and understand why you lower the 5th. It should be introduced a lot further down the road.
I’ve always run into the opposite problem where I only ever run into people who want to rehearse dialogue. It’s kinda lonely. I wanna learn a language and talk about phonetics. 😢
Dude, I have watched you streams where you struggle with the Vietnamese sounds and you don’t understand what the natives mean when they try to explain them to you. I know IPA and it took me just a sec to look at the proper description of the sound, and I could reproduce it right away. It doesn’t take 4 weeks as you say in this video, it takes 4 minutes! And it is SO worth it!
Linguistics prof here - we are our own worst enemies, always starting with the most boring and difficult stuff at the beginning (phonology, syntax) and keeping the fun sociolinguistic stuff (like accent snobbery or dialect shifts) until way later.
I use IPA in learning english because word masks with these icons have been used in textbooks and dictionaries literally since elementary school. But more because a classmate laughed at me when he saw that I wrote pronunciation tips in cyrillic above the english text... it forced me to learn these stupid icons. He wasn't even a nerd, I don't think he even knew about IPA (ノT_T)ノ
I actually find learning grammar useful... Yeah you don't need to know the names, but you obviously need to be able to from the past, present and future tense. "I am ordering a chicken yesterday" doesn't make any sense --- but that's how you sound when you don't know how to form any other tense except the present. I do agree that trying to memorise when to use specific tenses (e.g. perfect vs imperfect) is a bit daft though. Focus on the _how_ to form them, not the _when_ to use them. You'll learn the "when" as you actually practice and make mistakes.
As someone who has learned the ipa, it really only takes like a day or 2 for the basics, and typically the goal isnt to remove the accent, its to not sound like you just got a lobotomy. You dont want to say « Djeh parlay frahn case »
I think you meant "Why I hate *studying* linguistics". If you hated linguistics as a whole then you would also hate acquiring new languages, since language acquisition falls under the category of linguistics.
Funny enough, linguistics was something I got into AFTER having learned a couple of foreign languages. At first I was just looking up etymologies of words and started noticing that a lot of words from the languages that I've learned turned out to have the same origin, and I don't mean just some random international loanwords - I'm talking about thousands of years of separate histories that finally converge at some distant point in the past because the languages themselves are related. Also, trying to improve my pronounciation I started reading a lot about phonetics and was surprised to learn that many features in my pronunciation of a foreign language already exist in native speaker. At some point those two interests themselves converged together in studying Historical Linguistics and then Linguistics in general. Now it's one of my favorite hobbies. So yeah, linguistics is something you enjoy once you have some background in a number of languages, not vice versa. Although I must say it wouldn't hurt to talka bit more the scientific side of languages, e.g. not to drill "correct" pronunciations of words into kids as if when you make a mistake in your own language it means you have a Down syndrome or something. Like for real, if I got a penny everytime people say I must be poorly educated because I pronounce a word "incorrectly" in a casual conversation, I'd be rich. This has to stop, and a bit of learning what linguistics REALLY is might help with that.
Thank you so so much for making this video! I completely agree. I’ve fallen way too deep down the linguistics rabbit hole. And I think it’s gonna take me much time to save myself and climb out. Trying to fit natural language which is infinitely nuanced into neat and tidy analytical categories is highly impractical. I appreciate you immensely for spreading this soteriological doctrine of language learning!!
Yeah I tell people "I studied linguistics" and they immediately ask how many languages I know. I tell them "about 5% of all of them, unless you mean *actually speak*..." That said, having studied linguistics in university made me 1000% better at learning any language I would want to know (and I lied, i *actually speak* several languages). So. YMMV.
4:10 I saw a video of Steve talking about this, how impressive it is to see someone that has a strong accent, speaking perfect english After that moment I stopped caring so much about my accent in english
You know, stumbling upon this video really got me thinking about linguistics. It's fascinating how certain aspects of linguistics can steal the spotlight, overshadowing the more practical sides of language learning, and it's interesting how people jump on that bandwagon. Take pitch accent in Japanese, for instance. There's this whole frenzy around it with paid courses from Dogen, Matt vs Japan drama, and apps. But here's the kicker: after splurging on one of those apps, I think you really only need to grasp what an Odaka word in Japanese is, and you're pretty much set. Good listening skills can get you about 80% of the way there. And with tech getting better, even Duolingo seems to be stepping up its game. Imagine if they added some pitch accent correction when you speak! That would silence the naysayers. To expand on my theory, I don't think you really need to stress about memorizing four different pitch accents (stress is the enemy of learning). If you know if something is "Odaka" or not, you will know how to fit the words in sentences, the only missing part from regular anki learning, because the pitch of the word itself should be ingrained in your brain, both from adding audio to flashcards and shadowing correctly pitched audio. One cool thing I learned from this is that syllables (or moras or whatever) interact with music. Japanese pitch accent gives pronunciation this unique melody so the singer can choose to respect this relative change in melody or not, creating this beautiful fusion of language and music. But also cool is it seems English songwriters play with rhythm in a similar way, using strong beats for accents in words. I wonder if there's a video on songs that heavily do and don't this in Western music. At the end of the day, phonetics in all languages is cool to give structure to things, to arrive at some universal truths. Some years ago I tried to learn IPA, but it was also because I really like learning alphabets. But selling certain theories as keys to native level is really just wishful thinking, and mixing correlations with causations. As of now, it can't really be proven with hard science and experiments. Also, it's not like sounding like a native speaker is the endgame for most anyway. Some people just want to get exposed to different ways to think and process the world. For me, it's more about enjoying media in its original language or hopefully one day navigating daily life abroad in a more natural way. (I hope haikus are better in Japanese because to me in English they kinda suck vs. poetry.) Yet, with all the buzz around certain TH-camrs and apps, it's easy to get lost in the language-learning jungle. Final part of the rant, let's talk about books for a sec. Sure, having a physical book to mark your journey is nice, but recommending them like they are so superior to Duolingo feels a bit old-school. Those books really feel alien when you aren't in a classroom, like 4 pages just to explain how to use it... It's high time the Genki folks turned their book into an app, making learning more natural and really helping people cement for the long term the information they put into the book. Also, reorganizing things, 10 ways to say hello as your first week of language learning is just using the old way to approach language learning. At least they already have apps (mostly for memorization) but hopefully they transform them to the output side of things where I feel there's a lack of offering. Hopefully AI starts to help here also.
I’ve always found it’s helpful to learn the grammatical rule, then speak with it. When you first speak, you do have to think about it, but over time you stop thinking and it just comes naturally. If you’re doing it right, eventually you’ll even forget the name of the rule and if you want to explain it to someone else you have to look it up. Adults are not like babies when it comes to language learning, we’re not sponges. But we do possess abstract thought and it’s useful to use it in learning a language. Just so long as, by the end, you think/don’t think instinctively like a native does, rather than in the abstract.
I just had an amazing time explaining to a streamer on twitch what the Russian word 'Внимание' means. She was playing an old video game where every NPC speaks Russian and she was wondering what it meant, so I saved the day. You're welcome, Kate, it was fun chatting with you in my broken English
@@rare_hilfsemantics is an area of linguistics concerned with the meanings of words. The russian word "Vnimaniye" will usually be translated as "Attention" but has a different meaning than the English analog. The differences in meanings between words are studied by semantics
As a fellow linguistics student I have to say I am very much dissapointet in you Mr. L. Simp. Linguistics is about being descriptive and not prescriptive so if you encounter someone who corrects you while learning a language that person is not welcomed in the secret organization of Linguistic S-Tier Males. And sorry to say but I love learning a language in itself and all about it AT THE SAME TIME that's how Alpha we are. I guess there's a reason your name contains an L 😔
tbf learning the basics of ipa and using anki to memorise the most important parts takes at most a day. From there you can apply it to every language. You just type in the word you want to know the transcription for into wiktionary and it likely gives you it back. You then read it aloud and you get a pretty decent approximation👍
That's true, linguistics itself might not be an efficient way to learn a language, but it can be helpful tho. When I was learning English, seeing phonetic symbols in Google Translate helped me realize there were sounds that I didn't know, seeing them in several words made me recognize them and their sound. So you don't have to focus on learning the whole phonetic alphabet but having some phonetic symbols alongside the word can be useful.
As the English-Russian applied linguistics student I approve that it sucks and it made me question my skills and once in a while fall into a short depression of how little I know
I would not recommend learning about the IPA if you are learning Hebrew, Arabic, Polish, Ukrainian, Georgian or Chinese. I would however recommend getting the gist of it if you intend to learn Hebrew, Arabic, Polish, Ukrainian, Georgian AND Chinese.
As a teacher of German as a foreign language, I have observed the following over the years: Not a single student has managed to use the cases correctly without knowing the grammar. Now, if that matters depends on what you want to use German for. If you just intend to spend some vacation time in Germany and you want to communicate with people, nobody will look bad at you for not using the cases correctly. But if you have been living in Germany for a number of years or you are interacting with German speakers on a professional level regularly, it's different. If you're a nice person, people will still like you, but it tells something about you if you don't bother mastering something as essential as the cases after years of speaking the language. That kind of people usually don't notice their errors and they don't bother, but others do. Pronunciation is a different topic: In general, there are very few people who can pronounce a foreign language without at least a slight accent. This will only be depressing for yourself if you want to pass as a native speaker and realize that it's not possible.
I told myself I wouldn't get into yt debates again, but this deserves some comment. you're getting two things confused here. most linguists aren't polyglots and many don't even speak a second language. linguistics does not serve the purpose of helping you learn another language. in fact, a large part of linguistic analysis, which is focused on the inner workings of language in the broader sense, can be done in one's own language. so hating this immense field of knowledge because some people use it to learn languages doesn't make any sense. but sure, the fact that you say in the video that IPA is "this dumb phonetic system" and that "some cool stuff has come out" of linguistic research show that you ignore what linguistics is. what further shows that is that you were unable to criticize any of the areas of linguistics beside phonetics -- phonology, morphology, syntax, formal semantics, lexical semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, etc. and regarding phonetics, the IPA was designed to allow for rigorous scientific descriptions of sound in the analysis of language, something that helps a lot in research. the IPA has nothing to do with learning a language, so calling it a "dumb phonetic system" is laughable. but besides all that, the funny thing is that the IPA does help a lot (obviously) in understanding pronunciation, and linguistics in general provides fantastic tools for language-learning, especially when it comes to morphosyntax. lastly, I would say that whenever you try to learn a language, you might not know it, but you are probably utilizing resources from linguistics, such as particular understandings of grammar, and you are 100% engaging in linguistic activity -- all of which just shows how much you ignore the scope of linguistics.
i will master linguistics in a single thursday evening to spite you
XDizzle
Cool, I suggest you look at language Jones' guide.
gl
don’t do it fizzarolli
@@LanguageSimp olá LanguageSimp, i like your channel from Brazil 🇧🇷👍
Linguistics is kind of like biology, its just for extreme accuracy but you dont need to be a biologist to know how to breath or the fact that drinking water keeps you alive
Linguistics = Learning about languages instead of actually learning how to speak the language
Biology = Learning about life instead of actually living
It provides tools for describing languages in extreme detail, but a lot of the time it doesn't actually apply them in a way that accurately reflects real world language use. Another reason to be careful when diving into the linguistics of a second language you're learning; you may pointlessly second-guess intuition you're developing through engagement with native speakers because "the science" disagrees with it.
@@niwa_s That's a made-up problem you just invented in your head.
It never happens.
@@niwa_s for languages that have been extensively studied, like English, Spanish, Japanese, French, Arabic (some varieties), Chinese (some varieties), German, Russian, etc. your intuition as a learner is much less likely to align with what native speakers do than the current science.
Note that I’m not talking about textbooks, full of artificial rules and outdated ones. I’m talking about what actual modern linguistics has described, which’s the rules native speakers follow subconsciously. Like how English speakers can reduce the vowel in “can” to schwa, but not the vowel in “can’t”, but they can drop the final t in “can’t”.
not a good analogy, in real life, some people really nead to learn Biology, physician, veterinary, agronomist, etc. essential knowledge for living
Who need to learn linguistics in real life? besides students and researchers of linguistics.
"So you are saying that some knowledge is more important then others based on the use and needs in real life"?"
YES
> hates on phonetics
> proceeds to stream for hours constantly mispronouncing ы as уй
the worst part is, I went around telling people that Russian has a cool letter that's pronounced, OYYY
@@sterlingdriggs8806 is there a lmao, too?
Yeah he does say уй [uj], doesn't he? I was wondering, is that intentional, like part of the joke? Or is that actually him doing that? I mean I do think it's actually a bit of a diphthong, at least it never sounds like pure [ɨ] to me. Maybe a bit more like [ɯɨ̯], starting more in the back?
@@sjuns5159 he definitely says it more in the back of the mouth, but just for the funny, because when he speaks russian seriously, he does pronounce "ы" correctly
If only there were a phonetic description for that sound that you could just look up once and pronounce it correctly from then on.
This is probably LanguageSimp's most serious video
And likely his worst video yet tbh.
And a completely wrong and idiotic one.
@@michaeljakubekI hope he is just doing it for engagement
@@holaliceanosim pretty sure his whole channel is a parody making fun of dumb language channels that pretend to learn a language in a short span of time just by learning a few sentences that they use in the video
Man I had it all backwards. I learned every language to learn IPA for my phonetics class this semester :/
I love the IPA tho
@@BrayanGonzalez-jj4gv Same hehe
Man, I had it all backward. I became a communist first and then a linguist.
Oops!
Exactly. I am learning mandarim, arabic 🇱🇧 and french using my knowledge in IPA.
There's nothing scientific about ordering orange chicken in flawless Chinese, but there's definitely a ton of science in studying how Chinese speakers order their orange chicken.
yes
oui
Si
shi de
Ja
guys, he's telling you to roast his physical appearance, AND wearing a my chemical romance shirt? He's clearly depressed
His kink is shaming
He had washing day so thats the reason why he wore that shirt lmao
@@leiocerayt Wash day tomorrow. Nothing clean, right?
I cannot believe that I am not the only one who cannot read the IPA 😂 lol - I see the IPA for Icelandic and Gothic and Norse words, and I don’t know what c is supposed to sound like, and it’s very confusing, because isn’t the k sound a k and isn’t the ch sound a tsh sound or something like that, and then I am thinking, what could c be then, and also, why is j used for an y / i sound when j is a normal j sound like the j in the French word je, and why is the z-based symbol used for the j sound when it isn’t a z-like sound at all lol, and why the y and the i have different symbols when it’s literally the same sound aka a full / normal i sound like the ý / j / í in Icelandic and Norse and the i in Spanish and the y in English, like, it’s literally the same exact sound, I don’t hear any other sound that wouldn’t be a normal i sound, so, the IPA symbols are very confusing! (But anyways, dative was created by the germanic dude that created the first language Proto European which is the first language with proper grammar and thousands of words that came with the first writing system, that inspired all other languages and writing systems, either directly or indirectly, but mostly indirectly, and the dative case also kept being used by every other dude that created a new language by modifying it or newer previous languages, as one automatically uses the dative case whenever there’s an indirect object or a third party in the sentence, even when the word endings are the same, and it didn’t appear naturally, and this environment was also designed by its creator!)
@@FrozenMermaid666 ain’t reading allat
Hi, the feeling is mutual. We actual linguists hate polyglots. Hate the player and the game. Every time I tell someone I study linguists they ask "How many languages do you know?" as if I need to be a polyglot to be a linguist. You don't need to study linguistics to be a polyglot and vice versa. The answer is 4 btw, none fluent.
Lol, so true
- Wow, linguistics? How many languages do you speak?
- You know, you don’t need to learn a ton of languages to study linguistics because you are studying the structures and you can use special scientific descriptions and you can do research on languages you know nothing about and blablabla…
But. I speak 5~7 languages, if you are still wondering
"The answer is 4 btw, none fluent."
None fluent? That's a bit surprising since the question was "How many languages do you know?" and not "How many *foreign* languages do you know?".
Language implementations are for the plebs, language theory is what matters
its always "how many languages do you speak?" or "what language are you studying?", never "how is it? are you having fun? it sounds fun." :(
you’re so pissed
Skill issue. Only real chads can handle both linguistics and language learning
Which in my opinion are linked
He's a real chad too. Just anyone who delves into language learning is a chad, this argument is pointless.
Milo from the Atlantis is a gigachad then
true
Linguistics makes language learning infinitely more fun (and often much easier as well)
Where are my linguistics and grammar charts enjoyers at? Bring it in 🖐️
🤚
✋
🤚
Here🙋🏼♂️ But I also hate phonetics😅
🤚
I respect anyone of this opinion :3
I couldn't disagree more tho :3
My language teachers at school made learning way too hard by never talking about linguistics at all, solely relying on "absorbing". Once I got my hands on a German book that contained grammatical explanations, it all suddenly made sense and I finally knew how to speak correctly
Hello. So much to consider.
well grammatical explanations aren't exactly linguistics.
@@luxraider5384well, if they describe the language's rules that's step 1 of linguistics. If it uses linguistic terminology that's linguistics
@@kianpfannenstiel not really, a lot of grammatical rules aren't intuitive and need actual explanation. Also our brains aren't as spongy as toddlers
I agree.
Especially if you want to learn a Language in and out, you need theory. Its more of a help then anything else
So I agree that Linguistics is not for everyone. But it took me 3 hours one night to learn the whole IPA, and now approaching new languages comes easy for me, since I can just quickly learn the sounds and be on my way. It’s supposed to be a resource not a hindrance. But not all resources will help everyone.
Including all the extra and rare symbols?
And the descriptions of the consonants literally tell you how to produce them, which is something you can’t always understand by ear.
learning the IPA literally improved my English pronunciation a ton
@@jasminekaram880 yep.
I’ve been drinking in the IPA for years and it hasn’t harmed me yet
you are cured
Wait, you're telling me that an academic discipline that was never intended to have an application to language learning does indeed have no application to learning languages? Who would have thought?
You have my respect
seriously… its almost like ipa was meant as a descriptive tool, not as a prescriptive way of helping you “master a native accent”
actually, for this video, I´ll unsuscribe to this channel. He isn´t a gigachad more, he just hasn´t the necessary abstraction skills
@@GasparPelaez and you hasn't the proper english skills
@@Buzenbazen I have the skill of create the verb desuscribe and use it bad
I have just started studying for my master's degree in linguistics, and it's safe to say that what you hate is not the "science" itself but the prescriptive side of it implemented as a language learning tool. To be fair, same. I also believe that language is learnt best via the immersion method.
And... linguistics is a science as much as other social sciences like psychology or sociology is a science. Are we open to discuss their status too? Because then I have way too many arguments.
The problem with learning pronunciation only by ear is that many people's ears aren't that well tuned to picking up sounds in foreign languages. Learning phonetics and phonology can be of great help to improve your ears' tuning. It's not just theory. It has certainly helped me a lot, especially when listening for sound differences (phonemes) that don't exist in my native Norwegian, but are crucial in a target language. For instance, I could quickly be aware of the differences between open and closed e and o in Italian and how the various Polish fricatives work. Instead of spending ages not being aware of that and being misunderstood because of the confusion I caused, I could move on to learning vocabulary and other parts of the language, being confident that my pronunciation was at least OK.
It's odd to see how awful pronunciation many polyglots have. That includes Language Simp's pronunciation of the Russian ы, which ... leaves a lot to be desired. Good pronunciation isn't just about showing off, it's about getting understood easily. In the worst case, bad pronunciation will cause misunderstandings. Phonetics isn't that difficult to learn, and well worth the effort, because you can apply what you know to any language.
👏
He pronounces that Russian letter fine when speaking Russian, the uy pronunciation is a joke
@@dodolulupepe OK. It's sometimes hard to tell if he's joking or not. This whole video could be a joke for all I know. Using irony online is difficult.
I learnt IPA when studying English without even trying. Whenever I looked up a word in a dictionary, I saw its phonetic transcription, and - knowing how the word was pronounced - I inferred the sounds represented by the characters. Now knowing IPA helps me a lot with my French because I can revise words in Anki without having to listen to them.
@@dodolulupepe His Ы is not fine
3:53 You forgot to use the voiced dental or alveolar plosive at the end of the word "And" so your are clearly not an English speaker.
I'm punching the air
he's an american speaker, that's why
erm actually he pronounced it with a constrained audible release, also known as applosivity, denoted by the symbol: ◌̚
@@LanguageSimp the first time I have seen a comment favorite his own comment
As a linguist I absolutely love this hahaha especially phonetics. Our professor was SO obsessed with the IPA we had to learn all of it. But I do find the vowel chart pretty helpful when learning languages. Also I love grammar and loved grammar even when I was studying languages and not studying linguistics. Great video as always!
Learning phonetics is like learning the names of colors. Sure it helps to pick up the basics, but it's not the end of the world if you don't know the difference between magenta and fuscia.
Precisely.
Unless one of your goals is to have perfect pronunciation.
My pronunciation is perfect, and I cannot read the IPA to save my life, and children don’t know the IPA either when learning how to speak the first language that they are made to learn, and are just imitating the exact sounds that they hear - besides, my target languages are only the pretty languages, including the prettiest languages ever Norse / Gothic / Icelandic / Faroese / Dutch / Norwegian / Danish / Welsh / Breton / Cornish which are as pretty as English, and these languages and my other target languages don’t have any of those odd sounds that sound like coughing or other funny sounds, so they are usually the same sounds that I am already used to, including the coolest sounds and the other normal sounds that are naturally easy to make by imitating the sounds one hears!
To be honest, having a perfect pronunciation is more about the accent, not really about knowing the IPA, for example, one may know all the sounds in German very well and one may even know the IPA, but one is still not going to sound native in German if one isn’t native speaker level, because German has one of the accents that are the hardest to imitate, having a category 2 accent and pronunciation, so one must practice a lot and learn each word automatically, plus it takes years to fully develop a natural native German accent - however, in languages such as English / Icelandic / Norse / Gothic / Dutch it is naturally easy to sound native as these languages have the accents that are the easiest to imitate and the easiest category 1 pronunciation, so I could sound native in Icelandic even as a beginner, for example, but now I am advanced level!
@@FrozenMermaid666 perfect pronunciation is subjective depending on regional dialect. If you took your perfect Danish pronounciation (which 💯 does sound like coughing BTW) to Skåne, and applied it to Swedish, your pronunciation would be understood a lot better than if you took the same pronunciation up north, lol.
i really like the IPA. i wouldn't bother studying it but i like it to look up proper pronounciation occasionally. sure, a language is not exactly defined by its pronounciation but people will get different ideas about you depending on your pronounciation and i enjoy switching between fluent native and foreigner with accent at will
You only need to learn IPA symbols relevant to your target language not the whole of it
He specifically needs to learn ɨ (ы)
@@Nikola_M Yes, and also ʕ and ħ for ع and ح respectively.
@@Nikola_M /uj/
@@navisnau3140 and ʔ for ء
It’s so interesting because language is so many hobbies at once. I love linguistics because it gives me insight into how the human brain organizes its thoughts and presents them to other humans. I have a rough idea of why Basque grammar is so different to grammar in other language families and I love that and think it’s so cool to learn about, but I don’t know a single Basque word. I love learning dead languages and about how languages evolved and continue to evolve because it gives me perspective on people who have lived in so many time periods whose lives were just as real and interesting as my own. I have it on my bucked list to try to learn as much Sumerian as a person could learn from what we have because it’s from a people who were completely unique who have no living relatives and yet we can still know about their real human experience. The past and the way things work can be just as interesting for some people as actually speaking to other humans is to others.
For what it’s worth I do try to learn living languages. I can hold a conversation in Spanish and speak a little Norwegian. And want to learn more. But to me learning the language will always be a necessary chore that I do because I enjoy linguistics.
Did somebody call my name?
Now I have to make a "Why I Love Linguistics"
W
I have seen your videos. I'll wait for the rebuttal
@polyglotmouse u got a sub for that
12 mins ago lolz
Linguistics is kinda epic
Sure, but the IPA helped me in finally pronouncing ع correctly, as well as ص ض ط ظ
Language Jones not gonna be happy with that one 😮
That was the top comment on my screen. LoL
For the most part you're pretty much right, but it's kind of like being right when you say night is darker than day. It's basically a non-statement, because that's like the defining feature of night. My extra pedantic corrections are in a response to this comment, it's already long enough.
So the thing is not 1 single actual linguist will tell you you need to memorize the entire ipa chart, vowels or no, except when you're taking a college or higher phonetics class. Most of us don't memorize the whole thing and even fewer can say all the different sounds. Mind you, ipa is flawed, but it's been created for a specific purpose, and it more or less gets the job done. It's like seeing a woodworker with a highly specific jig and getting upset at him because the jig isn't used for your table or chair or what have you, even though he never told you to use it for a table or chair or what have you.
Also, it is a very valuable thing to know the names of the verb tenses if you're learning in a group or with an instructor. It enables the meta-language that can be used to talk about mistakes being made. For self study it's also useful if you're working out of a book or something, but otherwise you should be fine without it.
I have no idea what your complaint regarding case was, so I can't really address it, but I feel like you were wrong.
Like everything, knowing ipa for language learning is a useful tool, but only bother with the sounds of your target language and use them specifically for meta discussion of the pronunciation. Don't worry about being perfectly accurate with pronunciation, it's just a tool, not a rule.
Phonetics is the study of how we make sounds/what sounds we make generally. Phonology is the study of how we think about sounds and what sounds we make in certain contexts. I personally think phonology is fake, but if you're talking about phonotactics (contextual sound change), you're talking phonology.
The names of the characters in ipa are not the same names as the sounds. You were describing sound names (central/lateral, voicing, place, nasal/oral, manner; feel free to drop what's redundant) and letter names. For example, "ŋ" represents the central voiced velar nasal stop (nasal stops are sometimes just called nasals, so in english you'd typically call this the velar nasal), but the character's name is engma (pronounced approximately /ɛŋmə/ or /eŋmə/, which is basically the way you want to say it).
Can't spell linguisticks without ick 🔥😍
This comment bothers me sm cus of the fact there is no 'k' in linguistics 😭
@@alyss_aq
omg no way sherlock 😱😱😱😱
lol
@@kumoric I just said it bothers me, I wasn't trying to sound like a smartass bruh
You also can't spell it without "stick". What exactly is a "lingui stick"?
@@alyss_aq It's funny, because linguistics are descriptive, therefore if they consistently spells it like that along with other people, it's a valid spelling.
Linguistics and actual language learning are often just two different things. Both may be fun but shouldn't get mixed up IMAO
What do you mean by “often”? They are ALWAYS a different thing. It’s like saying material chemistry and making asphalt roads is OFTEN different.
I feel called out
I can’t give up the IPA 😭😭😭 It’s too precious. My precious.
Ash schwa durbatulûk, ash schwa gimbatul,
ash schwa thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
What's that gibberish?
@@WhizzKid2012 it’s from LOTR; the original quote is “ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul”. Look it up.
@@matthewheald8964 is that lord of the rings?
@@WhizzKid2012 yes
"One schwa to rule them all, one schwa to find them. One schwa to bring them all and in the darkness bind them" 🔥✍️
I like learning linguistics things, especially when it tells me about the history of my language and how languages develop and differentiate between themselves. Learning that William is the same name as Guilherme, João is Ruan, and that kind of thing is really cool for me. Realizing the influence of other languages on my mother language (Portuguese), knowing that "Dona", to refer to a woman because it came from Italian, or that "garçom" is a term that came from the French, but that remained only in the context of a restaurant to refer to the boy who works serving customers and that instead of using "fille", which is the equivalent term for a girl that serves customers in a restaurant, we use the French feminine declension in the context of restaurants in Brazil in the term "garçom", so, instead of "fille" to refer for this waiter, we use "garçonette". I really like learning these things, I understand better my country, my culture and that stuff
As a SL English speaker, IPA helped me a lot after I could understand most conversational material with ease, because it made it easier to distinguish sounds absent in my native language, as well as having confirmation that phones that sounded identical to those in my native language were indeed the same. But when starting to learn French, being too neurotic about pronunciation has slowed me down and hampered my motivation. My advice would be to study some linguistic concepts by the measure of your own curiosity only after you feel comfortable with the language. Even more so if you're already acquainted with linguistic jargon, it'll be a lot easier after you've built an intuition for how the language behaves. Beyond language learning, linguistics is just a ton of fun too.
Yes, English is my first language, but I can't imagine how hard it would be to learn English as a second language without IPA, because: (1) English has so many freaking vowels (I didn't even realize how many until I learned the IPA symbols); and (2) English spelling is chaos, so you need IPA for your pronunciation dictionary. I mean, I could see myself learning a language like Japanese (with a relatively small sound inventory + easy spelling) without needing to use IPA that much (if I didn't want to), but it seems to me like it would be very useful for a language like English.
@@robertjenkins6132And english has a lot of pseudo homophones. For example, eyes and ice are not pronounced the same, but for someone that's not experienced with english's phonetics both will sound the same, even though they really aren't.
@@robertjenkins6132 English and Japanese are somewhat extreme examples, actually^^
Someone tried to estimate the number of distinct syllables in the 20k most common words. I'll include German, French and Spanish as a reference:
Japanese: 643 (lowest among the languages they examined)
Spanish: 2778
French: 2949
German: 5100
English: 6949 (highest)
Getting good at English pronunciation must be quite a challenge for a native speaker of Japanese. Different writing system with chaotic spelling, tons of new sounds and syllables. I mean, I found it difficult and my native language is German^^
@@derpauleglot9772 even our language wants foreigner to stay out. lol.
I'm an English learner and have been kind of familiar with the IPA and often find it useful but also find the phonetic spelling thingy, which is supposed to be a phonetically accurate way of spelling words, that Google has introduced these days useful. You can see them if you google like "'[word] pronunciation" although it doesn't work for some words for some reason. Sometimes I question the way Google interprets the pronunciation, for example, the short 'i' sound is sometimes spelled with 'uh' like the way they spell the schwa sound. But what was an eye-opener for me is the fact that they spell words like "miracle" differently for American English and British English. In fact, they spell it "mi-ruh-kl" for British English and "mee-ruh-kl" for American English. It's spelled /ˈmɪr.ə.kəl/ in the phonetic alphabet used by Cambridge Dictionary for both British and American English but if I pay enough attention while listening, I can hear the difference so... yeah.
Apology for the wall of text.
Bro, without linguistics we wouldn't be able to learn Proto-Indo-European or Old Sumerian or whatever. Linguistics opens new languages up to be learned (unless you're a mega-hyper-polyglot like me and can subconsciously reconstruct languages just from immersion in various descendant languages, or who can pick up a language just by looking at a text in that language)
Okay but I refuse to believe that your name is Earl
His name has isn’t earl, it’s actually language simp.
We need to see Language Simp learning Assembly and speaking it to us 🗣️
On a serious note: it takes like 1 month to learn basic linguistics, and it's going to make your language learning much MUCH smoother. Trust me. And it carries over to every other language. If you don't want to sound like steve kaufman, learn linguistics and specially phonetics. And do it EARLY. once the bad habits fossilised, you wont be able to fix that ever
Linguistics is not something that someone says you must study to learn a language. Who studies linguistics sometimes know just one or two languages, it is not connected with language learning. Obviusly if you know linguistics you could have less problems while learning a language and viceversa, but nobody wants you to learn "linguistics" in order to learn a language.
I thought your legal name was Language Simp?! Who the frick is Earl?
It’s just a random name for the sketch. It must be…
@@artiomboyko his real name is Joshua according to Google
"My name is Earl" is the name of an American show
@@mattbellal huh I thought it was Kevin or something
6:10 "Wesh la street monsieur bonsoir" as a frenchman this is incredibly funny xD
As a linguistics nerd I need IPA to make conlangs that no one actually speaks and describe what they sound like to other linguistics nerds. Sometimes I check a sound from a language I know just so I can put it in a conlang.
I actually do briefly review all grammar concepts at the beginning of learning a language, because if there's one thing Spanish has taught me, it's that if I keep discovering conjugations and don't know where they'll end I'll feel like exploding. I have to at least know what exists so I wont feel like Im falling into an endless pit of tense later
yes!!!
It's the opposite for me, linguistics is what got me interested in learning languages and it makes learning easier and more interesting for me.
But yeah anyone who trys to claim that phonetics are important to learning languages is absolutely fucking with you
here here
It is, at least in target language. if it not for IPA I wouldn't pronouced 'th' precisely.
@@Kitsu_Worm that's the thing, the IPA is very helpful to learning pronunciation and I'm glad it helped you, but that's all it is, a helpful tool, other than that it's completely optional and if it makes learning feel more intimidating to beginners then they shouldn't feel pressured to learn it.
@@no_ yea, if you're not learning linguistics or making conlang. just skip to important part honestly.
@@no_ If someone is "intimidated" by the IPA, then they weren't serious about wanting to learn anything in the first place.
The only thing you need to study are the sounds relevant to your target language, which is usually a third of the IPA.
That's like being intimidated of learning a new alphabet. How is learning the IPA any different than an English speaker learning cyrillic?
Who TF needs to learn *a* language? Linguists study them all!
If you were serious about language learning you'd know IPA well by heart so you could learn a new language's phonology way faster
ы
@@Nikola_M i cant tell if you sent ы as an example of what the comment is talking about or as a way to say "lol" (which is a pretty common use of it, at least in my friend group)
@@irp3ex as an example
Just like people are deterred from learning instruments because people tell them to learn scales and understand why you lower the 5th. It should be introduced a lot further down the road.
I’ve always run into the opposite problem where I only ever run into people who want to rehearse dialogue. It’s kinda lonely.
I wanna learn a language and talk about phonetics. 😢
Dude, I have watched you streams where you struggle with the Vietnamese sounds and you don’t understand what the natives mean when they try to explain them to you. I know IPA and it took me just a sec to look at the proper description of the sound, and I could reproduce it right away. It doesn’t take 4 weeks as you say in this video, it takes 4 minutes! And it is SO worth it!
你發最好學語言的內容。 雖然我們一般除了對世界語的事情以外不同意，這就是我非常喜歡你的頻道的原因。
Esperanto sucks
Linguistics prof here - we are our own worst enemies, always starting with the most boring and difficult stuff at the beginning (phonology, syntax) and keeping the fun sociolinguistic stuff (like accent snobbery or dialect shifts) until way later.
I use IPA in learning english because word masks with these icons have been used in textbooks and dictionaries literally since elementary school. But more because a classmate laughed at me when he saw that I wrote pronunciation tips in cyrillic above the english text... it forced me to learn these stupid icons. He wasn't even a nerd, I don't think he even knew about IPA (ノT_T)ノ
As a linguist, it's your civic duty to hate this video.
your?
I actually find learning grammar useful...
Yeah you don't need to know the names, but you obviously need to be able to from the past, present and future tense.
"I am ordering a chicken yesterday" doesn't make any sense --- but that's how you sound when you don't know how to form any other tense except the present.
I do agree that trying to memorise when to use specific tenses (e.g. perfect vs imperfect) is a bit daft though. Focus on the _how_ to form them, not the _when_ to use them. You'll learn the "when" as you actually practice and make mistakes.
“I don’t know what is morphology and semantics”
*gets an ad*
That's because we, linguists, study language, not "languages". You're welcome.
As someone who has learned the ipa, it really only takes like a day or 2 for the basics, and typically the goal isnt to remove the accent, its to not sound like you just got a lobotomy. You dont want to say « Djeh parlay frahn case »
you're actually being serious oh my god
2:59 as somebody who has memorized the ipa because i have no friends this gave me at least 3.5 cardiovascular diseases, thanks
Wait a minute, what happened to your legal birth name Language Simp? Replaced with EARL? Reference 0:08
this earl take the soul of our child
I think you meant "Why I hate *studying* linguistics". If you hated linguistics as a whole then you would also hate acquiring new languages, since language acquisition falls under the category of linguistics.
Funny enough, linguistics was something I got into AFTER having learned a couple of foreign languages. At first I was just looking up etymologies of words and started noticing that a lot of words from the languages that I've learned turned out to have the same origin, and I don't mean just some random international loanwords - I'm talking about thousands of years of separate histories that finally converge at some distant point in the past because the languages themselves are related. Also, trying to improve my pronounciation I started reading a lot about phonetics and was surprised to learn that many features in my pronunciation of a foreign language already exist in native speaker. At some point those two interests themselves converged together in studying Historical Linguistics and then Linguistics in general. Now it's one of my favorite hobbies.
So yeah, linguistics is something you enjoy once you have some background in a number of languages, not vice versa. Although I must say it wouldn't hurt to talka bit more the scientific side of languages, e.g. not to drill "correct" pronunciations of words into kids as if when you make a mistake in your own language it means you have a Down syndrome or something. Like for real, if I got a penny everytime people say I must be poorly educated because I pronounce a word "incorrectly" in a casual conversation, I'd be rich. This has to stop, and a bit of learning what linguistics REALLY is might help with that.
Why is no one talking about how he kept saying earl and not language simp 😭
ikr
hes rly heartbroken
Thank you so so much for making this video! I completely agree. I’ve fallen way too deep down the linguistics rabbit hole. And I think it’s gonna take me much time to save myself and climb out. Trying to fit natural language which is infinitely nuanced into neat and tidy analytical categories is highly impractical. I appreciate you immensely for spreading this soteriological doctrine of language learning!!
"dive into the language!" - *proceeds to show a wiki page on George Bush in Russian*
ah, a true language conossuer
Yeah I tell people "I studied linguistics" and they immediately ask how many languages I know. I tell them "about 5% of all of them, unless you mean *actually speak*..."
That said, having studied linguistics in university made me 1000% better at learning any language I would want to know (and I lied, i *actually speak* several languages). So. YMMV.
As a communist I am deeply offended when you said that linguists are communists
We are socialists fr
Hold up, according to what? 0:50
Bro disappeared 💀
4:10 I saw a video of Steve talking about this, how impressive it is to see someone that has a strong accent, speaking perfect english
After that moment I stopped caring so much about my accent in english
So cool that you have a shirt written "My Chemical BROmance!" Who is the lucky man?
You know, stumbling upon this video really got me thinking about linguistics. It's fascinating how certain aspects of linguistics can steal the spotlight, overshadowing the more practical sides of language learning, and it's interesting how people jump on that bandwagon.
Take pitch accent in Japanese, for instance. There's this whole frenzy around it with paid courses from Dogen, Matt vs Japan drama, and apps. But here's the kicker: after splurging on one of those apps, I think you really only need to grasp what an Odaka word in Japanese is, and you're pretty much set. Good listening skills can get you about 80% of the way there. And with tech getting better, even Duolingo seems to be stepping up its game. Imagine if they added some pitch accent correction when you speak! That would silence the naysayers.
To expand on my theory, I don't think you really need to stress about memorizing four different pitch accents (stress is the enemy of learning). If you know if something is "Odaka" or not, you will know how to fit the words in sentences, the only missing part from regular anki learning, because the pitch of the word itself should be ingrained in your brain, both from adding audio to flashcards and shadowing correctly pitched audio.
One cool thing I learned from this is that syllables (or moras or whatever) interact with music. Japanese pitch accent gives pronunciation this unique melody so the singer can choose to respect this relative change in melody or not, creating this beautiful fusion of language and music. But also cool is it seems English songwriters play with rhythm in a similar way, using strong beats for accents in words. I wonder if there's a video on songs that heavily do and don't this in Western music.
At the end of the day, phonetics in all languages is cool to give structure to things, to arrive at some universal truths. Some years ago I tried to learn IPA, but it was also because I really like learning alphabets. But selling certain theories as keys to native level is really just wishful thinking, and mixing correlations with causations. As of now, it can't really be proven with hard science and experiments. Also, it's not like sounding like a native speaker is the endgame for most anyway. Some people just want to get exposed to different ways to think and process the world. For me, it's more about enjoying media in its original language or hopefully one day navigating daily life abroad in a more natural way. (I hope haikus are better in Japanese because to me in English they kinda suck vs. poetry.) Yet, with all the buzz around certain TH-camrs and apps, it's easy to get lost in the language-learning jungle.
Final part of the rant, let's talk about books for a sec. Sure, having a physical book to mark your journey is nice, but recommending them like they are so superior to Duolingo feels a bit old-school. Those books really feel alien when you aren't in a classroom, like 4 pages just to explain how to use it... It's high time the Genki folks turned their book into an app, making learning more natural and really helping people cement for the long term the information they put into the book. Also, reorganizing things, 10 ways to say hello as your first week of language learning is just using the old way to approach language learning. At least they already have apps (mostly for memorization) but hopefully they transform them to the output side of things where I feel there's a lack of offering. Hopefully AI starts to help here also.
Seems duolingo acutally got worse in pitch accent when it moved to the character voices, too bad. :(
5:23 historically inaccurate representation of an IPA nerd, a true IPA nerd would know not to aspirate his k there!
I’ve always found it’s helpful to learn the grammatical rule, then speak with it. When you first speak, you do have to think about it, but over time you stop thinking and it just comes naturally. If you’re doing it right, eventually you’ll even forget the name of the rule and if you want to explain it to someone else you have to look it up.
Adults are not like babies when it comes to language learning, we’re not sponges. But we do possess abstract thought and it’s useful to use it in learning a language. Just so long as, by the end, you think/don’t think instinctively like a native does, rather than in the abstract.
I just had an amazing time explaining to a streamer on twitch what the Russian word 'Внимание' means. She was playing an old video game where every NPC speaks Russian and she was wondering what it meant, so I saved the day. You're welcome, Kate, it was fun chatting with you in my broken English
But what does it have to do with linguistics? I really didn't get that one
@@rare_hilfsemantics is an area of linguistics concerned with the meanings of words. The russian word "Vnimaniye" will usually be translated as "Attention" but has a different meaning than the English analog. The differences in meanings between words are studied by semantics
@@МусаАлиев-б4сдля того, чтобы этот пример имел хоть какой-то смысл, слову нужен контекст
I just found your channel and I’m already loving it!! Thanks!!
As a fellow linguistics student I have to say I am very much dissapointet in you Mr. L. Simp.
Linguistics is about being descriptive and not prescriptive so if you encounter someone who corrects you while learning a language that person is not welcomed in the secret organization of Linguistic S-Tier Males.
And sorry to say but I love learning a language in itself and all about it AT THE SAME TIME that's how Alpha we are.
I guess there's a reason your name contains an L 😔
What is wrong with the IPA? It taught me how to pronounce ع, خ, ح, and غ!
tbf learning the basics of ipa and using anki to memorise the most important parts takes at most a day. From there you can apply it to every language. You just type in the word you want to know the transcription for into wiktionary and it likely gives you it back. You then read it aloud and you get a pretty decent approximation👍
"According to Bing" is the craziest thing I have ever heard.
True that learning linguistics is a distraction from actually learning a language, but it does actually help tbh.
That's true, linguistics itself might not be an efficient way to learn a language, but it can be helpful tho. When I was learning English, seeing phonetic symbols in Google Translate helped me realize there were sounds that I didn't know, seeing them in several words made me recognize them and their sound. So you don't have to focus on learning the whole phonetic alphabet but having some phonetic symbols alongside the word can be useful.
IPA is fun for consonants but grammar is useless on its own.
Don’t be worried about being pretentious with linguistics …you already speak French
As a linguist, I completely agree
I may be linguist but never an esperantist that’s too far
bro when are you gonna post again
My little child just said "uyi" for the first time блять.
As the English-Russian applied linguistics student I approve that it sucks and it made me question my skills and once in a while fall into a short depression of how little I know
О, мне нравится лингвистика, я даже и не знала про IPA, теперь ознакомлюсь!
I would not recommend learning about the IPA if you are learning Hebrew, Arabic, Polish, Ukrainian, Georgian or Chinese. I would however recommend getting the gist of it if you intend to learn Hebrew, Arabic, Polish, Ukrainian, Georgian AND Chinese.
You are pronouncing "нет" like "ньет". Stop it.
ньет
Ньет
nya
Более как неът которым евляеться ещё хуже 😢
Ньет, Молотов! Ньет, Молотов!
А вообще нужно понимать, что он и так инвалид из-за русской фонетики, пора оставить его в покое.
As a previous linguistic student who is now a postgrad in translation studies, I agree with every single word you utter in this video with passion
As a teacher of German as a foreign language, I have observed the following over the years: Not a single student has managed to use the cases correctly without knowing the grammar. Now, if that matters depends on what you want to use German for. If you just intend to spend some vacation time in Germany and you want to communicate with people, nobody will look bad at you for not using the cases correctly. But if you have been living in Germany for a number of years or you are interacting with German speakers on a professional level regularly, it's different. If you're a nice person, people will still like you, but it tells something about you if you don't bother mastering something as essential as the cases after years of speaking the language. That kind of people usually don't notice their errors and they don't bother, but others do. Pronunciation is a different topic: In general, there are very few people who can pronounce a foreign language without at least a slight accent. This will only be depressing for yourself if you want to pass as a native speaker and realize that it's not possible.
Good luck with your publication, always
Hello man! I learn English and I absolutely agree with your point of view😂 I wait for you in Kazakhstan 🇰🇿
I absolutely келісемін with you
@@start9749 oh my құдай, this is тамырым)
It's kinda useful for when you don't have access to the internet and/or international audio and the language isn't spelt phonetically.
it's been 6 years
"I hate natural sciences, it didn't help me at my holiday trip in Thailand at all"
Linguist and IPA nerd here. Love you
who speaks more than 3 languages
👇
Me 4
depending on what you consider speaking I would say me 4
here
Native English, A1 Spanish, low A1 German (have forgotten a lot), and learning Hungarian. Gave up on Korean after a few months
only 4:(
I told myself I wouldn't get into yt debates again, but this deserves some comment. you're getting two things confused here. most linguists aren't polyglots and many don't even speak a second language. linguistics does not serve the purpose of helping you learn another language. in fact, a large part of linguistic analysis, which is focused on the inner workings of language in the broader sense, can be done in one's own language. so hating this immense field of knowledge because some people use it to learn languages doesn't make any sense. but sure, the fact that you say in the video that IPA is "this dumb phonetic system" and that "some cool stuff has come out" of linguistic research show that you ignore what linguistics is. what further shows that is that you were unable to criticize any of the areas of linguistics beside phonetics -- phonology, morphology, syntax, formal semantics, lexical semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, etc. and regarding phonetics, the IPA was designed to allow for rigorous scientific descriptions of sound in the analysis of language, something that helps a lot in research. the IPA has nothing to do with learning a language, so calling it a "dumb phonetic system" is laughable. but besides all that, the funny thing is that the IPA does help a lot (obviously) in understanding pronunciation, and linguistics in general provides fantastic tools for language-learning, especially when it comes to morphosyntax. lastly, I would say that whenever you try to learn a language, you might not know it, but you are probably utilizing resources from linguistics, such as particular understandings of grammar, and you are 100% engaging in linguistic activity -- all of which just shows how much you ignore the scope of linguistics.
9:01 Noam Chomsky would have approved of it.
Totally sucks the fun out of studying a language