#moy mother legit could not understand Terry and it was amazing

[docholligay]

Forgive me, I have a hobby level interest in some aspects of linguistics* and can’t shut up.

So, phonology is the first thing you pick up as an infant. How the SOUNDS are made. Not words, SOUNDS. All languages can be broken down into a series of sounds, all of which are made by moving your mouth a certain way, to oversimplify it. We learn those mouth movements very young. FIRST. Words come next, morphology, syntax, etc. BUT, to my point, phonology is what we learn first and this is the building block of a language. So, some people ‘keep’ this longer than others, but for most of us the sweet spot is birth-10 or 12 (And frankly, some people lose it earlier). I started hearing and learning Spanish casually when I was...6? I started studying it in earnest, as much as I could, by 8, and I of course went on to minor in it at school, I was a Spanish lab teacher for a few years, until recently I volunteered in the summer to do translation for migrant workers with the clinics. But all this started because I learned the trill early enough. I sound ‘right’ in that pronunciation way. My pronunciation of Spanish is pretty good, but it has nothing to do with me being ‘smart’ or whatever stupid thing we’ve assigned it.

This is true of all languages. There are sounds in Chinese I cannot make. Xhosa is right out, for me.

If someone is an asshole to you about you not being able to roll your R, it’s roughly the same as me being an asshole to a Japanese person at not being able to pronounce the hard R at the beginning of my legal name. You never learned the phoneme! Your mouth is like, “You want me to do what now?” and some people can retrain their mouths, but it’s very very difficult, and this idea that smart people have flawless pronunciation and can all flawlessly imitate any accent and dumb people just can’t hear it or whatever shows a ridiculous misunderstanding of how language works.

I mean this makes sense when you consider that Duolingo is an American company and what reason would we have to learn peninsular Spanish, and also one of the founders grew up Latin America so of course LA Spanish is going to be the go-to, but if it makes you feel any better I find Duolingo nigh-unusuable, because I know enough Spanish that I know there is more than one right answer. If that makes sense. I have learned enough Spanish that I have my own way of speaking, too. I ended up just, before I had the baby, auditing upper-level courses at the college because it was the only way to get that exposure to speaking while also being allowed some...flexibility? I guess? With how things are said. Computers ain’t everything, basically, and they’re bad at teaching language. Also, you know, what’s ‘correct’ and what’s ‘done’ are different. A lot of thing English spoken in the rural community I’m a part of isn’t GRAMMATICAL, but it is RIGHT, you know? There are variances in language and just because ones of privilege win the grammar war--and I have an English degree, I’m not even opposed to a ‘central grammar we all agree upon for say, the news--doesn’t mean that the way things are said in other communities is wrong. Duolingo tries to tell me “Seen you come over here” is wrong and I’m like, “eat my entire ass, owl, that’s how “I saw you come over here” would be said in my circles” ahaha. But I have a hick accent no one is interested in defending but me, that is often the butt of the joke, so.

ANYWAY, all this to say that Duolingo has its uses but it has exceptional limitations. I’m not really a ‘online language learning’ gal, but I do prefer Babel, generally. It was easier for me to skip ahead to the higher-level shit I needed to be engaging with, at least, though it occasionally frustrates me as well.

*It’s just, a huge field. And there are a million ways to be ‘into it’ I would say the VAST majority of my interest is in English, particularly American English in all its variants, but I do have a lot of affection for other English-speaking countries versions of the language--Kiwi English is very fun, I have loved the tightness of the East End/Cockney accent for a very long time, which tracks with the fact that most of my favorite American Englishes are also very working class, any way the point of all this is that the linguistics of, say, Spanish is not really my knowledge base but most of this is pretty broad anyhow