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Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

theweek.com

41–50 of 95 posts

Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

#41
Some of my Chinese friends use の instead of Chinese equivalent 的 just for fun. Personally I distinguish them by just going and learning the languages. It's easy to distinguish them by noticing Japanese has curvy characters mixed with blocky complicated Chinese ones, where is Chinese is 100% complicated blocky characters.

Also I just want to put it out there randomly that if you want to learn a language but believe you can't, you are almost certainly wrong. If you are able to read this text, you have demonstrated possession of a wet sack of neurons capable of learning a second language. I've witnessed or read about all sorts of people learning a new language; old people, shy, autistic, even while dealing with brain cancer. It is a myth to think children can learn faster than adults. The only time this happens is when the adult is hindered by there own reluctances. Go get some beginner materials with audio, not just text, and dive in. Don't waste time torrenting 12312^23 TiB of learning materials. Glossika, Teach Yourself X, Xpod, Xclass101, whatever. Learn how to ask some trivial questions relevant to your life, write them down because you will forget, then go chat with a native speaker somehow. Read out your questions because you're nervous and forgot, and then fail to understand anything they say, but just pay attention and listen to the sounds of the language. Then go home and learn a bit more, but don't worry too much about memorising anything, just listen, and comprehend a little bit. Then meet up with a native speaker again with some more questions prepared. This time you might understand 0, 1, or a few words, still be nervous, but you'll be a little bit better than last time. Basically you just keep this up without giving up and you will pick up pace. For inspiration, look at blogs like Benny Lewis' and others. It may take 10000 hours to master, but it only takes hundreds of hours to find yourself understand and contributing to group conversations comfortably. If you can enjoy the process, you'll be able to study for N hours for any N as the clock keeps ticking regardless. Just set N=1000

Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

#43
post #4
post #2

This is all very helpful, but how do you spot English?

If the text contains only plain, boring letters and you see the word "the" being used a few times... you're looking at a text in English.

Though æ is used in English, too.

Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

#44
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the text contains only plain, boring letters and you see the word "the" being used a few times... you're looking at a text in English.

Though æ is used in English, too.

Quite rarely, however. Especially in American english (British English still uses it for some spellings, like "encyclopædia").

Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

#45
post #22
post #2

This is all very helpful, but how do you spot English?

No diacritics, and generous use of apostrophes.

> No diacritics

An understandably naïve view of things whose errancy could easily be corrected through your coöperative perusal of The New Yorker.

Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

#46
post #31

Persian will have three dots in a triangle above a single upward stroke or below the line. Arabic only has the three dot combo above the script on a multiple upward stroke grouping (sometimes a flat line between upstrokes).

The same is true for Urdu as well, so if you want to distinguish Urdu from Persian: look for a backward moving (i.e. towards the right) horizontal stroke at the end of a word. This stroke will always run under the preceding letters of the word, except that some dots of the preceding letters may be moved beneath the stroke in order to avoid collision.

Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

#48
Ð/đ may also be Croatian, where it sounds like a "dj". Technically it could also be Serbian (which is pretty much the same spoken language, called Serbo-Croatian), but Serbian is usually written using the Cyryllic alphabet while Croats chose Roman letters.

Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a meta level I find that just a little troubling. It sounds to me like "Crap, I agreed with this until I noticed it was an opinion from a tribe I don't identify with - so I can't agree with it". Maybe theweek.com is some uniquely evil thing I haven't heard about?

"Upvote" means something different than "agree"; one of the things it means is "I endorse people visiting this". I can imagine quite a few sources that I wouldn't want to direct traffic to even if they published something where I agree with the sentiment.

This is the first time I heard of the week, a quick glance around failed to raise any problems; what's wrong with them?

Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though æ is used in English, too.

Quite rarely, however. Especially in American english (British English still uses it for some spellings, like "encyclopædia").

Yes, I have noted the American difference. Pedophile means something quite different!
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