Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine is a translator, and similarly "earns money with" over a dozen languages. Apparently once you've learned a few it gets a lot easier. It's kinda fascinating that someone can learn so many languages.

My own experience with it is a it more organic and less deliberate, but I find similar things. Once there's a sort of logic to each language that you've acquired it gets easier to learn stuff, the holes kinda fill themselves. I've never reached full confidence -say enough to do a degree in a non-language course- in all my languages but a couple, but there's enough to build on for most of them, and a lot of everyday stuff is okay. I also don't beat myself up over grammatical issues like keeping loads of gender/subject/etc agreements.

On the software side it's maybe similar. You can group languages by various traits like declarative/imperative, GC/manual, static/dynamic types, and a few others. So that allows you to in gross terms translate a program from one language to another, but it's not quite the same as knowing a language inside out so that you fully use all the useful features.

I merely speak English and have been learning Spanish. (Enough so that using capital letters for languages seems soo weird to me now!) In doing so, I've learned at least as much about English and Latin. I wish I'd set out to learn the other Romance languages at the same time[0], as learning one sheds so much light on the others. e.g. in French, most words are recognizable as either similar to their English or Spanish/Latin equivalents. And the verb structure (the hardest thing about learning Spanish, although it almost seems natural to me now) is very similar in all Romance languages. ('Je sais' may look very different to 'yo sé', but (in some spanish-speaking regions at least) they're pronounced almost identically. In spanish you usually don't say 'yo' because the verb endings tells you who, but in French enough of the different endings have become the same that you do always have to say who.) Romanian looks crazy with all the words ending in -u, but all those words ending in -o in spanish came from Latin nouns ending in -um; the -m was gradually dropped, and -u became -o. (I can kind of read Portuguese - it's like Spanish with extremely bad spelling - or vice versa.) I made a page a few years ago comparing common words, verbs etc in those languages http://www.adamponting.com/romance-languages/

[0] Well, maybe not - getting on top of one Romance verb system was enough, it seemed soooo weird and complicated in the beginning. Although I'm still a novice at using the subjunctive.

> 'Je sais' may look very different to 'yo sé', but (in some spanish-speaking regions at least) they're pronounced almost identically.

I speak French natively and Spanish fluently. I also listen to a fair amount of Reggeaton, which is quite often in Spanish spoken with a Puerto Rico accent.

I always find it interesting how the Puerto Rican pronunciation of "Yo soy" sounds so very close to the southern French pronunciation of "Je suis".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syGLsyTQwW4

"Si tu eres un caballo, je suis el dueño del hipódromo"

Ah, fascinating. They're both surprisingly similar, since I guess the spoken language evolves not just differently but faster than the written. (I don't think I even knew that Latin continuously evolved into today's Romance languages until I read about the history of spanish..) My colombian friends got me into reggaeton - I'd love some more links to your favourites please! Thanks :-)

Check out "Calle 13" ("Residente" nowadays): he moved from reggaeton to rap but the lyrics are decent and slow enough for a Spanish learner.

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