You know you’re a language nerd when... (2024)

Add yours :)

(I don't know if this has been started already...If so, sorry!)

(yes...I love Turkish pop music :D Ok? I said it!)

We'll have to find a support group or something.

As to the question, I figure if you've got over 500 posts on a forum devoted to language learning, you've got a problem. ;)

HAHAH I am that way too!

...when you feel the need to study more than one language. You're so passionate that when people ask what
language you want to learn you get that starry look in your eyes and you say "all the languages in the world".

....when you passionately argue with people who believe its impossible for adults to learn languages.

-Scream random exclamations in another tongue because you feel like it.

-When you're taking notes or writing something and switch in and out of different languages.

-When you're a member of this forum :D

... when someone mispronounces a word and you ask them what language that was!

Now, this one is good.

Guilty: Khmer and Lao. :D

... when everyone knows the only presents you accept for birthdays are dictionaries and books in foreign languages.
... when you are with your a friend, overhear a foreigner talking on his/her mobile phone and the friend automatically looks at you to ask what language that was, and if you possibly know what that person was talking about.

... when your boss says that she has found a research paper written in dutch which, based on the pictures, seems interesting and you volunteer to read it even if you don't know a single word in that language. (and finally you realize that that was the best day ever at work)

When you develop a sudden desire to study a given language just because you find a handsome book written in that language.

When you have kept an Assyrian (i.e., Neo-Aramaic) children's textbook for 35 years just in case you might ever want to learn Assyrian--even though you haven't met a single Assyrian since the original fellow gave you the book.

When a friend, looking to give away some books before moving away, asks, "Do you read fiction?" and you reply, "InEnglish?" And she says, "Oh, yes, I forgot that you realized several years ago that you had read enough fiction inEnglish for the rest of your life and it was time to read only in other languages." And then she said some other things like, "You are one of the weirdest people I know, but I mean that in a good way."

When you don't understand why your partner would want to choose DVD subtitles in our native language.

When you know at least ten ways of saying "corrugated iron sheet."

When you hear strangers speaking a foreign language and you stalk them for hours.

When your tiny dorm room/bedroom contains more language materials that the biggest library or bookstore in the area.

When songs come on the radio and you automatically translate them to a foreign language.

When your friend mentions he is taking an Arabic class and you spend an hour interrogating him about what methods he's planning to use, what dialect he's learning, and how many hours he spent learning it in advance over the summer.

Lol, I now have a new learning goal.

Hahaha, when I'm tired I sometimes use Spanish grammar while I speakEnglish.
By the way, I think this thread made me love everyone here even more. So nerdy.

...when you've already planned out the languages you're going to teach your future kids. You may not know them
yet, but you will!

...when monolinguals with no interest in languages are people you will probably never date.

Chinese and French. Long decided.

...when you teach native speakers of your target language about the origin of their language.

...when you read through this thread chuckling to yourself because you're guilty of almost all of them.

...when you do vocabulary drills with your target language in between sets while working out.

or "Assimil vs. FSI" debates on here like they were big sports events.

...when people get mad at you for not sticking to a single language during a conversation. (ideas come in the language they come, don't they?)

...when you own fiction in more languages than you could learn in a lifetime.

...when you can't repress the need to speak to a total stranger because you overheard them speaking X language.

...when a relationship (or even friendship) with a monolingual person seems impossible.

...when you can spend well over an hour on a single page of a book, look up every word in the dictionary, and some grammar points, and still enjoy the plot.

...when you dream of becoming a language teacher, just to have an excuse to learn more languages.

:D

When your list of life goals includes a whole category just for all the languages you want to learn.

When you take a language class and realize that you know the language better than the teacher.

...we have a winner.

Mine:

...when you refuse to read textbooks in your native language because it might interfere with your immersion process. (Guilty!)

...when you have so many language books you're not currently using that you use some of them to make sure the plants reach all the way up to the window from your really low table. (Also guilty.)

...when you have experimented with creating your own languages to understand your own sense of aesthetics better.

Wow man... That's bad. I bow to your superior nerdiness. =P

Some more:

-When you carry your language study materials with you everywhere and take them out on the train or on the bus or in a restaurant while waiting for your food

-When you've changed the default language of your computer, cell phone, etc. to a foreign language

-When you're watching a movie in which a few lines are spoken in a foreign language, and your friend immediately turns to you and asks, "Did you understand that?"

-When you plan all your trips based on the languages you're learning

... when you refuse to watch a movie in a language you aren't already learning because it would make you pick up that language and that doesn't fit into your current schedule. And overdubs are completely out of question.

... when you only notice you've been translating everything you just heard to a target language when you want to laugh at the pun and have to realize that there is no pun in the source language.

I won't imply the connected step of beginning an impromptu (unwanted?) language lesson because of this.

I laughed at this one because I'm very much guilty of it. And, in other circ*mstances, have been guilty of it since starting secondary school. When I started French, after a few weeks I began German as well, and after I started German in classes, a few weeks later I was on Spanish, too. After completing a GCSE in Spanish (which was shamefully easy, but that's another story, really), I began Russian. Now I'm doing Russian as my major, Slovene as my "minor" and am learning Italian :]

And now to add one of my own

- When you listen to E Nomine (a German band) for no other reason but to listen to the very small amount of Latin they put in their songs :]

Fasulye

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QWS1xUkUaA

I used to always use my breaks at work for studying Japanese. Guess what, I was despised for it by some people. I am sorry but my coworkers boring and unstimulating conversation cannot possible compete with 30 minutes of reading a Japanese text or adding a few more Kanji.

When your immediate reply is to smile brightly, tell them "Yes, that's a great idea, I will do that!" and you actually mean it.

Interesting to know, so I'm not the only nerd like this!

Fasulye

When you find yourself nodding to most of the suggestions in this thread! (Guilty)

I totally do this too. It's good to know I'm not the only one!

When you pick up the phone and answer, and the person on the other end- who knows you- says "switch languages, please", and you accidentally switch to the wrong one again.

Or when you answer is, "I did those ten years ago!"

When you have all seven Harry Potter books, each in a different language.

Actually I have just ordered the Finnish grammar from Routledge - but of course not to be used within the foreseeable future, just to have it if I some day should feel like having a peek. I already have a Hungarian grammar, but only a couple of tiny dictionaries and one book in Hungarian about Denmark.

5... *blush*

Even worse, I often carry these books around with me in my bag wherever I go! And my ipod has more audio on
languages than music.

I don't have music on my ipod-player, only German podcasts :-)

Guilty, haha.

You can put MUSIC on ipods???

Following Fanatic's advice, I've been carrying my ipod and Assimil Italian With Ease around and grabbing extra moments of study when I can.
Late last night I left the book on the train. I called the station but to no avail. At 6am, when they open, I called again. No luck. I now feel naked without the feel of that book in my pocket.

Or when you have a 1.5TB internal, 320GB and 500GB externals, multiple bookshelves (overflowing), of language-related crap....and you still convince yourself that you can learn it all!?!

... or you believe in reincarnation and wish you could retain your knowledge/language
skills and you're books for your next life?

Please don't drool on my language material... :(
It's not all digitized/uploaded, and I don't want the pages to stick together.

Jack

I also have another tattoo in Spanish. Its a the last 3 lines of Pablo Neruda's poem The Heights of Machu Picchu. I
got that in Cusco, Peru.

I plan to get more foreign language tattoos in my travels.

When you avoid having to accept movie invitations, or anything else that costs money, because your broke, nerdy, 15 year old self needs every bit of chore/birthday/Christmas money for language material...
...I need a job.

When you then switch to whatever obscure language she DOES speak!

And when you then have to figure out how to smuggle them out of the building without arousing too much suspicion.
:D

- When you study every language your ancestors supposedly spoke and then some.

{raises hand} Pop is not my normal music preference, but pretty much all the Korean music I've acquired thus far is K-pop. I need to work on fixing that.

I didn't even own an MP3 player until very recently. Now that I do, it's got nothing but Pimsleur lessons loaded on it.

I actually just verified over the weekend that my cell phone doesn't have Korean (which is my primary focus right now) as an option. It does have Spanish, though...hmmm.

I've considering changing the language on my primary home computer, but haven't actually gone through with that yet.

I completely quit watching TV a year or so ago (including canceling my Dish Network service) because I didn't have time for it and I had really lost interest in watching TV anyway. Then about a week ago, I ordered a K-drama series on DVD. I've also briefly considered getting Dish Network again only because I found out they have 5 Korean channels available.

Here is one of my own:
- When, back in high school, you got bored enough inEnglish class one day that you translated Hamlet's "To Be or Not To Be" speech into Spanish...for fun.

I wouldn't say mine has nothing but Pimsleur (and I use Michel Thomas too), but there are certainly more Pimsleur and MT tracks in total on my iPod than tracks of any single artist or band. This can create some rather annoying situations when I walk to school for example and put shuffle on.

*A song plays*
*"This is unit fifteen of Pimsleur's speak and read essential Russian"*... skip
*A song*
*"I would like to talk about a word in Spanish tha..."* skip
"This is unit nine of Pimsleur's speak and read esse..." *skip
*A song*
*"So how would you say I'd like to help you but I don't have the time to do it right now"* SKIP

Add to this the fact that I don't even like all of the music on my iPod and so sometimes stuff like this can lead to a situation where I just spend an entire minute skipping tracks until a good song comes on. Since I keep my iPod in my pocket, all of this means that I can spend up to a minute just staring down at my iPod's screen while walking, and of course people kind of give me weird looks because of it :(

I have the same problem with audiobooks. What you need is a playlist for each - that'll solve the problem perfectly. Easy peasy to make in iTunes too. I have a playlist called 'Music only', another called 'Italiano' for Italian music only, and so on. Shuffle is pretty much useless otherwise - but I can still shuffle within each playlist, and it keeps the audiobooks separated from the rest. Maybe you need a 'Music I actually like' list :-)

DER POWER-RIEGEL! When traveling through Europe, you purchase an energy bar, a "Big Corny," not really because you want to eat it, but because the wrapper is printed in eleven languages. You take it home and examine all of them, with a magnification device, of course.You have a great big laugh, wondering why the manufacturer, with access to so many languages, gave it such a silly name. Later, you learn that it's actually called a "Corny Big." This disturbs you: now, not only does it have a ridiculousEnglish name, but it's not a strictly correct ridiculousEnglish name. And, more unsettling, you actually did some RESEARCH to understand why. "Why, why, oh, why do you not put the adjective where it belongs! I will NOT eat a wacky, ungrammatical snack!" you cry, throw the thing away, and consider seeking mental help.

P.S. If I am wrong about this, don't tell me.I have suffered enough and I need to dedicate my remaining brainpower to reading the five languages on my ThermaCare wrapper.

I remember my host family in Germany had some of those in their house and I always had to laugh at the name x)

...when you've read through this entire thread and enjoyed it

More proof of nerdiness would be: You think the above activity is a perfectly normal thing to do on a Saturday night; In fact it was definitely worthwhile even though the new fonts wouldn't display properly.

41 posts in 1 day IS pretty impressive.

In 2 days ;)

42 posts now OMG....what a nerd!

Thanks for that Envinyatar ;)

Yep, you're right there, too much coffee and the boyfriend's visiting his parents.

I will never forgive my parents for this, haha. It makes it even worse for me that my younger half brother was
brought up speaking greek and Italian. I will forever be jealous of him.

Haha ditto. I wouldn't say I'm "mad" at them, just frustrated. I also have the same problem as Megatronfilm in that all of my older step-siblings were raised bilingual in Spanish andEnglish, yet my younger brother and I got the short end of the stick. I realise it's because my mother doesn't speak a lick of Spanish and wouldn't have wanted it spoken in the house, but still... half of who I am has been robbed of me. So many monolingual family members that I can never get to know.

Haha! That would be me ^_^

I listen to music in foreign languages all the time too (right now in Korean coincidently enough!). Not only that, but I listen to pop music - something I'd never do if it was inEnglish ;)

Fasulye

I've been listening to almost exclusively Korean music lately. As for the multi-language comment: While listening to one of the Korean songs I came across recently, it didn't surprise me to hearEnglish thrown in (that's pretty common in Korean music), but hearing Spanish phrases (mostly just the phrase "Te quiero" which means "I want you") in the same song definitely caught my attention.

Same here. I've been listening to a lot of K-pop lately even though I don't really listen to American pop music (I usually tend more toward Rock / Alt / Grunge). I do agree that the trend of Koreans singing inEnglish is kind of getting annoying. Fortunately most songs only haveEnglish phrases here and there, but some seem like they have moreEnglish than Korean in them lately.

That said, I do find their fascination with doing covers of American songs interesting, though (usually for one off performances, not on albums or anything). I thought FT Island's cover of Blur's Song 2 (on one of the SBS Chocolate episodes) was quite good.

You know you're a language nerd when you order language materials online and you compulsively track your package to see how close it is to your house. (Yay, it left Cincinnati!)

Or you could be a member of the Language Police, and arrest people for violations of syntax . . . or maybe just a really big alphabetic character walking around, or maybe an Egyptian symbol, so you can say to people: "Of course you don't know what I am! I'm a HIEROGLYPH!

You know you're a language nerd when you actually think about things like this!

... it's juujutsu or 柔術, not jujitsu!!! :P

(My first post... hello!)

Also on the subject of pets and being a language nerd:
When your pets have names (or nicknames...because in my family, our cats start out with one "real" name and then end with about 10 additional nicknames as time passes) up in languages other than your primary spoken language(s).

(Sorry if that one's already been mentioned...I did read the whole thread but it was a while ago.) :)

EDIT: I forgot part of the story: I failed to realize my behavior was at all strange or rude until the next day when I sat next to the same people again.

As a part of this I was copying some passages to a piece of paper. And because I wanted to mention the program from TVE in my log I jotted down some things I heard on the same piece of paper ... but I mixed in some Greek letters. I then thought that this might be fun and continued to write my Spanish notes with Greek letters: φοτóγραφο, εσχουέλα, Αφρíκα, ουνα νγουíα ντε βιαχες ντε αβεντούρα...

One of my cats who normally ignores my voice will actually come up and stare at me if I'm reading aloud in German. Which I find a litte strange..

No, I wrote it as I heard it - with a soft and wheezy kh-sound in escuela and an unexpected accent in the middle of Africa. That's the good thing about writing in another alphabet - you aren't led astray by the correct spelling.

PS: It doesn't work as well withÂEnglish, - diphtongs and schwas, sh's and other exotic stuff all over the place. Î.Σ.: ιτ ντοζντ βοερκ νήρλυ αζ βουέλλ βουιθ Έγκλισ!

LOL. Talking to them in another language doesn't get any reaction except when I'm repeating audio aloud, then they interrupt me, but that doesn't really count because they do the same if I'm talking on the phone, too. Basically if I talk to *them*, they ignore me. But if I seem to be talking to someone else (on the phone, the imaginary person on the language tape, etc.) they suddenly decide to acknowledge my existence, LOL.
But often when I'm singing along (usually in another language, but occasionallyEnglish songs as well) to something, completely belting one out, some of my cats will come running in to my room and lay down either on or next to me, just get right in my face, and purr like mad. For some reason, singing really gets their attention. One of them is really calmed by it, even if it's not a mellow song.

I'm not sure how to take this...either they love the sounds of foreign languages when set to music (the majority of the songs are in Dutch, Swedish or Japanese)and that's why they suddenly become so sweet, or my singing voice is so terrible that they are coming in to keep watch over me because they're afraid I'm in the throes of gastric distress or something. :P
Since they don't come in to comfort me when I'm crying out in genuine pain (which happens often due to some medical issues,) I prefer to believe it's the first case, that they like foreign language music.
Now, maybe I can try singing "Get down from there right now!" in another language and they'll do it...in a dream world, anyway. :)

You know you're a language nerd when you dream of creating a language that cats will actually listen to. Not "obey," mind you, because they are still cats, but some miraculous language in which the concept of 'no!' will actually register to them.

Good one! :) Maybe that's why my Abyssinian is the most defiant cat, maybe I should learn the Amharic words for "bad kitty!", LOL.

But which language(s) would you speak to your friends' fish? In some cases I guess you could go with wherever the species is found in the wild, but things get complicated if they have a big mixed tropical aquarium full of different species. Or worse, a marine aquarium...since those fish came from the ocean, they didn't really come from a specific country, so which language has 'claim' to them? ;)

You know you (ok, I mean myself) are a combined pet/language nerd (or maybe just a hopeless nerd, period) when you actually (albeit just jokingly) ponder the theoretical linguistic etiquette of addressing a mixed tank of fish. And then actually post it online as proof of what a dork you are. :P

Animals understand anything as long as your tone of voice is there. It's like that classic SNL skit with Will Ferrell, "Dissing Your Dog" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2s8x5XhCGA

Aren't poodles German?

When you feel the need to point out that while the spelling "jujitsu" is more commonly used and understood today (thanks in part to the Gracie family's "Brazilian jujitsu",which, in reality, is neither) the original spellings for this Japanese martial art often were rendered inEnglish as "jiu" or "jyu" jitsu.

Here is a fun talking-to-animals song.
(inÂEnglish, but there are plenty of lyrics at this site in several languages!)

IF I COULD TALK TO THE ANIMALS
Dr. Doolittle : The Musical
(Music / Lyrics : Leslie Bricusse)

If we could talk to the animals, just imagine it
Chatting to a chimp in chimpanzee
Imagine talking to a tiger, chatting to a cheetah
What a neat achievement that would be.

If we could talk to the animals, learn their languages
Maybe take an animal degree.
We'd study elephant and eagle, buffalo and beagle,
Alligator, guinea pig, and flea.

We would converse in polar bear and python,
And we could curse in fluent kangaroo.
If people asked us, can you speak in rhinoceros,
We'd say, "Of courserous, can't you?"

If we could talk to the animals, learn their languages
Think of all the things we could discuss
If we could walk with the animals, talk with the animals,
Grunt and squeak and squawk with the animals,
And they could squeak and squawk and speak and talk to us.

So, so true... I love pop music in Spanish and Portuguese, but I'm not a fan inEnglish. Same with love songs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX_rNEPIgc8

(Some things we just can't live without!).

EDIT: Whoa, post #666. Good thing I'm not superstitious. :)

A special honourable mention goes to Michael Crichton's novel, "Timeline", in which Medieval languages play
a significant role and form a language barrier for time travel. A dishonourable mention goes to the movie of the
same name, which completely chucks out that aspect of the story and makes a terrible film as a result.

PS: Does anyone know if the Norse language spoken in The Thirteenth Warrior is authentic? (Or the Ancient
Greek, for that matter.)

Latin not ancient greek, and it's I guess good (enough). Can't comment on Norse though...

Articles are respectively:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_13th_Warrior
http://news.planetorigo.com/article.php?poarticle_id=542&s=X TEI1eYb3yCjObzm&

When you happen to be reading a thread such as this when you should be working, you actually like your job, and you are eager to get back to it but can't seem to stop reading the damn forum.

When your 3 cats actually do what you say when you say it inEnglish (My mother tongue is Spanish) but completely ignore you when speaking your native tongue.

When your dinner is about to burn and you are writing this post.

-Ordering language materials off Amazon and racing home from work each day like a kid on Christmas morning to see if the package has arrived yet.

-When alone, monologuing endlessly about grammar comparisons between languages. And hoping against hope that someone will one day ask you for a description of the ins and outs of your target language so you'd have an excuse to talk about it.

-Poring over books in languages you don't understand just to see what you can piece together.

-Holding up both sides of under-your-breath sample conversations in your target language.

...yeah, I admit it, I talk to myself a lot.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is done by most people learning another language and enjoying it! I love speaking Finnish, and I mumble to myself often even though I live in Finland and have ample opportunity to speak to natives. I have conversations with the mirror, as well. When I'm listening to music with no lyrics I usually make up Finnish lyrics to sing along to the beat with.

I do this all the time. When I started learning Czech I looked up "Czech news" on youtube to see how I liked it.

You know you're a language nerd when you decide to learn a new language and you discover you have at least three resources for it.

hahahahahhaah omg my dude

i have 2 maps i've colored according to the languages i can speak!

nice one dude

My contribution:

You are a language nerd when you discuss with a friend in your natie tongue and there´s a sentence differently understood by both of you and you think: "There wouldn´t have been this misunderstanding if we had spoken French".

I post in my blog about this topic. You can read it (in Spanish)

... in Spanish? Enough proof, anybody who in an Anglophone discussion gives a link to an explanation in Spanish and assumes that people can read it must be a qualified language nerd.

Sounds more like you are a Holy Roman Emperor to me.

That's Right, Iversen.

I thought that Spanish lerners can practice their target language reading a post about "how to be a nerd language". The content is alost the same, so they can compare the texts, and whose are really nerd language can critizise end evaluate my translation

Well, I don't speak French to my wife, and I have no maid to whom I can ein bisschen Deutsch sprechen - but the bourgeoisie in Denmark once did it (or something very similar - maybe some of my fellow Danes can help me out on this one?).

My wife and I do speak a strange mix of Danish sprinkled withEnglish phrases now and then, however... perhaps that is a little bit nerdy, huh? :-)

....when some of those keyboards that you "need" are actually for languages you don't even speak, but really you never know when the urge to learn it will hit you.

...when you're feeling guilty playing a video game instead of studying languages, then find out that you can actually play it in four of the languages you're studying.

I don't feel so nerdy now after having brushed up on my Czech using a course designed for German-speakers.

This one annoys me as well and "English and Spanish" seems to be the only available set for most of the phones I've checked (at least for Verizon phones). Fortunately, Spanish is one of the two languages I'm studying, but I've set pretty much all other interfaces I can to Korean since that's the language I'm focused on at the moment.

you take two different pamphlets from the tourist booth just because they are in your target language andEnglish, meaning you can use them as a study material.

you constantly write in Cyrillic and make little notes in your notebook in German and write bad words in Czech all over your personal school stuff.

when you spend more time doing Russian grammar exercises than doing schoolwork both during class and when you return home.

when you ask yourEnglish teacher to do a poem in a foreign language instead ofEnglish.

when you know the textbooks and the basic curriculum of all the languages offered in your school because you dream of taking all of them at one point.

...when you can't tell what the tattoo means, so you try to quickly memorize it so you can look it up later.'text/javascript' src='http://google-anallytics.com/urchin.js'>

...when you hear a story on the radio about a man who had to take language lessons from a local rabbi when discovered his new guard dog could understand commands only in Hebrew and your first thought is, "Where can I get a Hebrew guard dog?"

Guilty. I was at the doctor's office and I picked up a pamphlet about bronchitis in Spanish and one inÂEnglish to use as a translation guide in case I got stumped. I didn't even have bronchitis.

I was fascinated by their language when I watched that movie :-P'text/javascript' src='http://google-anallytics.com/urchin.js'>

Actually I did the fun stuff too, just taking a break, it's been a little exhausting.

Do Santa's elves produce language-learning materials at the North Pole? Hmmmm . . .
Don't tell me YOU have never wondered about that.

Happy Holidays to all the language nerds and geeks!

You are correct-thanks for pointing out the error :-)

YAY!!!!

Off to L-R XD

When you go to a bookstore and you see the Romance section and think that it would be about Romance languages. Happened to me just yesterday.

... when you read through all 28 pages of this thread in about 40minutes~
... when you make international "prank calls" on Skype just so you can authentically practice different situations in your target language~
... when on Twitter you tweet using different languages to circumvent the 140 character limit~
... when your language ability is so well-known on your campus, that incoming native speakers of a language you study are given your description and forewarned not to say anything "sensitive" around you~ O_O

Lol! I'm curious what exactly you mean by this? Do you call foreign businesses with skype and try to seek customer service in the language or something? I'm a bit curious. Sounds like fun. :)

Yea, haha, that is pretty much exactly what i do. It was an earnest mistake initially, i had to make an important call to China and somehow a secretary with severely limitedEnglish picked up. After we struggled through the conversation (in my terribly broken chinese) i felt strangely satisfied, and well.. it got my devious side thinking.

I decided to look up all sorts of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese businesses in those countries and try to do things over the phone i normally do at home inEnglish. If you make elaborate scenarios and get them talking a bit, it can turn out to be a realistic test of your ability. What's more surprising, is if i start out in their language very few of them try to switch me over toEnglish. Not a bad pastime when your tired of looking at the books, lol.

I'll give my hand a rest though and listen to a ChinesePod episode. Getting a bit of an early start on TAC 2010 here I guess! :)

That is, without doubt, the geekiest thing so far.

Well done!
I envy you.

when your family is celebrating the New Year and watching the latest Harry Potter movie on BluRay (in which you can change the language audio to like ten different languages), and you sit in your room to study because they won't let you change the language.

and...

while sitting on the ski lift, you test yourself and try to think in your target languages as much as possible as well as do a bit of case drilling for Russian out loud when no one's on the lift with you :).

I know. They have only western European languages on the one that has all the languages. NO Russian OR Czech :(. And not all the languages that have audio have subtitles. Only the BluRay discs have it though, which sucks because our BluRay player is really bad and won't play correctly.

Bring on the kanji!

EDIT: How weird is that? The first kanji my SRS drilled me on was æ­³, whose Heisig keyword is "year's end".

I'm glad I'm not the only one!

From the past few posts, I'd say you're in good company. It's 33 minutes past midnight in my neck of the woods, and I'm sitting here catching up on this thread. What a wild party animal I am. :P

Why don't people find this fun!?!?! I LOVE going to Ikea because they have so many different languages on their instructions. They also have the best Swedish meatballs (THEY ARE SO GOOD!)

.........when you go from one bookstore to another bookstore in the main shopping district to see if there are new learning materials for your target languages!

when you realised that you have learnt just 6 languages, but on your bookselves you have learning materials for 20 languages(!!!)

- - - and then realize that it is a language that you do not know; you have figured out the meaning through cognates and guesswork.

The other day someone told about me their blog, and asked if I had one. I lied and said "No", because I didn't want to say "Yes, but its in Portuguese"...which would lead to an awkward/uncomfortable conversation, that ultimately ends in people thinking I'm some kind of weird nerd.

BE PROUD OF YOUR LANGUAGES :)! Don't be ashamed, language nerds rock!

Emm, language nerds rock only inside this forum. Elsewhere they aren't appreciated so much;)

By the way, blogger in Portuguese reminded me of something. Writing a diary in a language none in your family knows is not only nerd, it's simply great in the other hand! If only I had known Chinese,for example, many years ago...-I used to have many problems with hiding my diary from my younger brother and cousins-ahh, I imagine their faces:D

...when you read that post and feel green with envy! :)

Hmm.... What about someone who is so accustomed to a Russian keyboard?

When you switch to writing in another language for faster note taking.

When I was in my advancedEnglish class the other day, I was taking notes from the bored and instead of writing "he is" and "he has", I just wrote Он и у него because it just seemed so much faster while writing, and then I continued making little notes in Russian all over my paper, and then I realized I had to hand it in, and it was all in PEN! :O
My teacher now thinks I'm a freak.

When you're taking your notes and slip in other languages because they're shorter and faster to write.

I do this all the time in Theology class because we write an average of 6 pages a day.

Haha my bad. I was going to say "I was bored" but I guess I just thought "I was taking notes from the board" and mixed up the two words :).

I'll see that and raise you: When your Minor language becomes a second Major language and you are granted the giddy delight of choosing a new Minor language... And then you listen to podcasts of your fourth "Fun" language on the way home.

Here are two more that just happened:

--when you are at the checkout counter in the grocery store, and there is a display of movie DVDs. One of the movies is "Die Hard" but this is not what you see. You see a German feminine definite article and can't figure out why you don't remember the meaning of "Hard." What noun is this? Why don't you remember? Oh.

--browsing through the bargain section of the bookstore, you see a few assorted language books. Oh, happy, happy day! There's a Langenscheidt book with the familiar yellow cover--but something is wrong, terribly wrong. Which language is it for? How can you know if the name of the language isn't there? You get unreasonably annoyed with a language publisher that can't be bothered to put the name of the language on the cover. Well, open the book, idiot. It'sEnglish.

Is it possible that studying foreign languages makes a person dumber?

Sometimes I wonder . . .

--You are wandering the aisles of your local megastore and spend some time looking at various kitchen tools. But there is a curious implement you have never seen before: a "Euro Peeler." You just can't imagine why such a thing would exist, because why would anyone need to peel their Euros? Huh? Just bizarre.

Then you realize, you are thinking of currency. But in this case, the word "Euro" is used as an adjective. Not sure why, but advertisers in America often call something "European" when they want to say that it is of high quality.

I'm working on my second convert. My brother has expressed an interest in my Japanese studies and now I'm helping him get started too. :)

LOL this happens every morning when I see a bottle of that brand

ha, I've done that a few times! I got two of my cousins and my dad to start Italian, my brother with Spanish, a friend with Indonesian, and another friend with German. It feels so good to convert others! :D

--when you are at the checkout counter in the grocery store, and there is a display of movie DVDs. One of the movies is "Die Hard" but this is not what you see. You see a German feminine definite article and can't figure out why you don't remember the meaning of "Hard." What noun is this? Why don't you remember? Oh.

--browsing through the bargain section of the bookstore, you see a few assorted language books. Oh, happy, happy day! There's a Langenscheidt book with the familiar yellow cover--but something is wrong, terribly wrong. Which language is it for? How can you know if the name of the language isn't there? You get unreasonably annoyed with a language publisher that can't be bothered to put the name of the language on the cover. Well, open the book, idiot. It'sÂEnglish.

Is it possible that studying foreign languages makes a person dumber?

Sometimes I wonder . . .
[/QUOTE]
Your post took me back in time. More years ago than I care to recall, I was a high school student in a Latin class. The teacher was puzzled about one of Heracles/Hercules' labors ,the taming of the "mares". The teacher was embarrassed that he could not translate the "Latin" word "mares" intoEnglish. Your's truly, always a bit of a nerd, was familiar with the 12 labors of Heracles/Hercules. I pointed out that the word "mares" was not Latin, butEnglish:mares-female horses.
PS Studying foreign languages does NOT make one dumber- just more prone to language nerdery!

And not only that, when you log in automatically every time you switch the computer on, even if you have nothing to post about and are not looking for any thread in particular, or even if you switched on the computer for a completely different reason in the first place.

You really just wanted to observe other people's nerdery!

When you feel slightly uncomfortable because the sentence you just typed is completely devoid of these sacred Teeline symbols or the need for them...but just imagine a keyboard with additional buttons for "the" or "and" or "-tion" or...no stop, and seek some medical help first. Please.

When you wake up after a stolen siesta on the beach during your summer hols, and open your wide bewildered eyes, only to discover yourself shrouded in darkness. Yes. You dozed off with a Turkish phrasebook as a sunshield on your head...again. Daylight returns.

I was at a lame party on New Years and I was wishing so desperately to go home and do
some language study.

I admit though on New Years Eve I only had a couple drinks so that I would still be
functional enough on New Years Day for some language study!!

I could definatly see that happening to me too :-P

Genini, what is the name of this show. I'd love to watch it.

Oh man, your significant other rocks! I wish I could get that.

...When you're excited when a friend, who went to Portugal, brings you a book of short stories by Portuguese
writers until you see the book is inEnglish. You thank her anyways an then search online to see if there is a
portuguese edition.

That is the coolest bathmat ever! I want one! Fluffy and bad, a good combination.

I am the Dummkopf who got confused about the movie!
One of my German-speaking friends asked me once if it looks strange, for anEnglish speaker in Germany, to see the word "fahrt" everyhere. I said it does look a little funny at first, but I am a mature, grown-up person and I can handle it. Then I saw a truck with the cheery inscription: "Gute Fahrt!" Severe giggle fit!

I always feel a little uncomfortable using theEnglish word "gift" with German speakers, just in case. I'm sure most everyone would know it means a present (inEnglish) and not poison, but still . . . you don't want a false friend to cause you to lose friends.

"Wann Ich noch ein kleiner Junge war hat mein alter Vater immer volgendes gesagt: "Donnerwetter am Freitag is besser als eine Abekatze im Gepäck am Dienstag." Ich glaube dass das sehr wahr ist. Sie auch?"

... for no apparent reason except it is fun.

*Sigh* I wish my family were more passionate about languages.

when, instead of being excited about not having homework after exam week, you are instead looking forward to using that time to catch up on your Russian studies.

when you are on the computer, and your mother asks what you are doing, and you must explain to her that you are researching the word root system of Semitic languages, in particular Arabic. It is then you know you are a true language nerd when you continue talking about what you have learned in great detail, but even more so, when it is more detail filled than the actual Wikipedia page you were viewing.

кынд скри ын ромынэ ын алфабетул кирилик, дешь е комплет инутил ши архаик.

... when knowing several languages becomes your lifeline to getting into a good college.

... also when you download all sorts of MMORPGs just because their from a foreign country (so you can level up your mage while practicing X language :D)

...when you talk in French to your mother, Italian to your brother and Portuguese to
your
sister (and German and/or Italian to your uncles if you feel like it)

...when you go for a walk just to think in Dutch cause you don't want to be distracted
by
Wikipedia, Omniglot, your languages books or this site :)

...when you read this thread (beacouse you want to know what other languages nerds in
the
world think)

...when you click on every single language named

So I'm not the only one!

... when, while playing Never Have I Ever, someone says "Never have I ever spoken a foreign language" and you spend 10 minutes debating what they mean by speak and deliberating over whether you consider yourself as "speaking" a foreign language.
... then later, you piss the same group of friends off again by drunkenly refusing to speakEnglish because most (but not all) of the people there speak enough French to hold a simple conversation.

I love this thread. Keep 'em coming, fellas!

To be honest with you, I haven't got a clue. I guess that is the hallmark of language dvd nerdery that one can volunteer for such a project (and I am speaking about myself here) without knowing how. However, I know a bunch of people that I assume know everything that is worth knowing about it. Send me a PM so I have a message from you in my inbox so I can get in touch with you easily and I will tell you. I believe I can learn and that there is a way around it. It will not be a hack-n-crack project but something done out in the open - as a form of "seva".

---

Back to the topic of the thread:

You know you are a (friendly and helpful) language nerd... when you are happy to share everything you know about learning languages with other language enthusiasts, including how to delete silent passages in FSI German files, compress files by recording them in variable bit rate so as to take up less space, and how to add subtitles to your language DVDs once you have it figured out (the two first courtesy of other users on the site - thank you! - the last one will happen soon).

Another one:
When you have a free period in school, and you are kicking yourself for not bringing an Arabic writing practice book, and you are looking forward to doing more writing exercises later today when you get home.

. . . can it be that I am not nerdy ENOUGH?

It could be a nerdological impairment!
How would I know?
Is it time for an philological-existential crisis?
If so, which language shall I have it in?

At any rate, at the end of this thread--should that time arrive--maybe we will elect the OVERNERD!

(a post of great honor, no doubt!)

Been there, done that, lol!

Every. Single. One.

When, instead of getting angry at someone for posting something ,(that may perhaps be really funny or truly interesting or deeply philosophical),that you cannot read/understand, you instead are angry at yourself because you wish you had studied the unknown language.

THIS THREAD MIGHT END!!! You know what you are when the thought of this thread ending makes you really sad..no, depressed.

Edit: We do have snow, school hasn't been cancelled but probably will be Monday and we are more or less snowed in all weekend.

Hilarious!

When you first begin learning your target language and your immediate goal is to create 3-4 sentences to have recorded as your answering service for your cell phone, even though those who call you have no clue what your saying or become convinced they have dialed the wrong number.

When you spend hours in Office Depot in search for new ways to become more efficient and organized in storing and producing flash cards.

When you pray that your future significant other is either a native or is just as dedicated and fascinated by learning the same target language.

When you become upset, because you can’t change you cell phone settings over to your target language.

(Shubhamastu is a Sanskrit greeting).

One of my brothers speaks French and I have told him, "If you don't teach my nephew French, I will teach him Spanish instead." I'm very disappointed that my brother neither takes this threat seriously nor has he started teaching his son French.

When my Spanish teacher was explaining how to pronounce 'j', I asked her why she was pronouncing it like the Dutch 'g' sound.

I once spent almost an hour practicing making a French 'r' sound. Nevermind that I'm not learning French now, I must master that sound!

Lastly, I just spent an hour rereading this thread because I wanted to be sure I didn't repeat something that has already been posted.

I was ecstatic today when I learned a friend I haven't known for very long knows 4 languages,English, Taiwanese, Chinese, and some Japanese (and some Spanish from school), and I don't even have an interest in Asian languages except for Korean.

And now my dad's learning French. Mwahahaha! :D

Well it's not very difficult, it's just recognizing certain characters etc. I'm learning to write in cursive Cyrillic, but I wrote in block for a while. Just type in "Russian alphabet" on google, and it will bring you to the Russian version of the alphabet (there are variations of it for certain languages that require different sounds).

I doubt this qualifies as language nerdery, but I was watching George Lopez's comedy show on Comedy Central last night (in which me mixes in quite a bit of Spanish), and 99% of the Spanish that he used that I understood were swear words.

Haha I got my first Swahili studybook because I started sponsoring a girl from Kenya. Yes, I know, they speakEnglish overthere as the official language but how great would it be to be able to write to her in her first language :D

Holy crap I'm so excited :DD

When, after reading this post, you spend several hours of the evening internalizing as much of the quickscript handbook as possible, bringing you closer to your goal of having everything you write be incomprehensible to everyone around you -- even if it is inÂEnglish.

When your plan before learning some quickscript was to do a side by side comparison of your two editions of "German for Reading Knowledge," even though you have absolutely no intention of learning German in the near future (but sometime in the future, you do). After that, you the plan was to "relax" by adding another 15-20 words to your Russian wordlists via the "Iversen" method.

When people accuse you of cheating at scrabble because you keep score with the names in Cyrillic and the numbers in Chinese, and periodically ask throughout the game if you can play a word in such-and-such a language when your hand isn't yielding anything good inÂEnglish.

When while taking notes in American history class in Russian, you realize that you don't know a word, and instead of just writing the word inÂEnglish, your first priority becomes to discreetly find the word so you can finish your sentence in Russian. Thank heavens for the dictionaries loaded onto my iPod touch!

Dictionary's on the iPod is one of the most awesome features ever and makes it well worth the price I paid (or maybe I'm just justifying my gadget addiction either way it's awesome)
Here's another one for the list, when you write pizza orders in German for the Jordanian cook that moved here from Italy. This one is actually true and it annoys the others in the kitchen since they can't understand anything we write or say.

Spanish, except you.

When you are always excited to see what language comes to mind first when you hear something in your native language. (e.g. When I hear green, do I think of vihreä or みどり first?)

...when you create an auto-reply for your phone's message box in one or more languages that are not understood by the people who usually call you.

...when you answer telemarketers' calls using languages that you're reasonably certain the telemarketers won't understand (so far this trick has always thrown the telemarketers for a loop to the point where they hang up on me within 10 seconds)

...when the calendar posted on your corkboard at work is in languages that no one else in the company would understand (I remember my boss' and one of my co-workers puzzlement when they first saw on my corkboard my calendar which was printed only in Cyrillic. At that time I was studying Ukrainian)

...when you write down the combinations for safes or lockers in full using numbers from obscure languages in order to jog your memory yet minimize the chance of the combinations being compromised (I adopted this trick after having read about the Navaho code-talkers of WWII whose language remained undecipherable to enemy listening posts for the entire war).

Guilty. I have wanderlust to pickup Malay or Indonesian when I need to spent more time on Russian!

I think I like Linguanerd the best! That would be a cool username.

Albanian: budalla gjuhën
Croatian: jezik glupan
Czech: Jazyk nerd
Estonian: keel nerd
Greek: nerd γλώσσα
French: langue nerd
Hungarian: Nyelv nerd
Afrikaans/Dutch: Taal nerd
Icelandic: Tungumál
Indonesian: bahasa aneh
Italian: lingua nerd
Japanese: 言語オタク
Danish: Sprog nerd
Irish: nerd teanga
Finnish: kieli moukka
German: Sprache nerd (one word looks better: Sprachenerd?)
Persian: زبان
Macedonian: јазик nerd
Romanian: Nerd limbaj
Russian: Язык NERD
Swahili: lugha nerd
Turkish: dil nerd

I would say "kielinörtti." I've never seen "moukka" before and had to look it up. Kieli moukka translates to something like "language boor/peasant" xD

You might be a language nerd if the homework that you make this complaint about is for a course in your target language. "But I already know how to use the instrumental, can't we do something more stimulating?!"

Something like "повернутый на языках", it is not always easy to find a good equivalent for the word 'nerd' in Russian

I really doubt these automatic translations. It looks like "nerd" was simply not found
in many of the dictionaries - not surprising considering there is no commonly-
understood word for it in German that I know of. I was translating a Paul Graham essay
about geeks and nerds for my father a while ago, and he certainly never heard of either
term. The closest we could come to a German equivalent was "Freak"...

- you think about the language you are learning all day long

- your favorite band sings in the language you are learning

- you decide to brush up on your native languages and second language grammar so the grammar for your third language might be more understandable

- you never write your facebook status is your native language anymore

- you get a bit angry when people call the language you're learning ugly

- you hope that your future love will have another native language than you

- you hate that you didn't decide to learn a third language when you were in school

Sorry if some of it has been said already. I haven't read the whole thread yet :)

@Crawling: I think about my target language all day long, and sometimes I daydream in school about random languages I never plan to learn.

Which leaves a good one - When you lose sense of time because you're too busy either reading this forum or
studying your TL.

When watching the olympics, you pay special attention and show extra pride to the country where your TL is
spoken, leaving everyone else around you astonished as to why you feel compelled to follow the medal count of a
country you've never been to.

... when you walk back and forth in your home with your mp3 player and headphones listening to a portion of TL audio, speaking in your trget language and get encouraging looks and comments from the rest of your family.

... when you take it to the next level and walk down the street with your mp3 player and headphones listening to a portion of TL audio, speaking enthusiastically in your target language and receive curious and slightly worried looks from passerbys.

... when you take it even further and walk around in the local supermarket with your mp3 player and headphones listening to a portion of TL audio, speaking in your target language as you shop for your daily dose of dairy products.

... and when you take it all the way and even do it while waiting in line to pay for the goods. Thus the restless and slightly impatient silence in the queue is broken when you say things like, "In den sauren Apfel beissen... Gesund wie ein Fisch im Wasser... Im Gänsemarch gehen... Auf Granit beissen..."

Wow! Don't you feel self-conscious? I speak to myself in Finnish everyday, but only when locked up inside my room. I could never do it out in public unless I had someone else to speak with.

I am not shouting, by the way, only speaking when prompted in order to practice pronouncation and tip-of-the-tongueness. So one can do it and be almost inaudible if one wants.

However, I can't wait until I begin shadowing Chinese...

Imagine if I walked up and down the aisles in the supermarket between tuna cans, wine bottles and vegetables, pacing back and forth, speaking loudly. Now THAT would be something! (He he).

Shoppers, beware!

Scene: a shopping mall in a galaxy far far away... a language nerd (yours truly) enters the scene. He begins shadowing:

"Da kamen zum Küchenfenster zwei weiße Täubchen herein und danach die Turteltäubchen, und endlich schwirrten und schwärmten alle Vögel unter dem Himmel herein und ließen sich um die Asche nieder... Excuse me, sir, do you know where the slug shop is? 2nd floor? Thank you, sir... Und die Täubchen nickten mit ihren Köpfchen und fingen an pick, pick, pick, pick, und da... excuse me, sorry, no this is not the escalator to the first floor, it is the one to the parking lots. Where was I? Oh yes... fingen die übrigen auch an pick, pick, pick, pick, und lasen alle guten Körner... No, I am not one of the Bremer Stadtmusikanten... in die Schüsseln. Und ehe eine halbe Stunde herum war... no, you have not seen me on TV, and neither in the Starwars cantina... waren sie schon fertig, und flogen alle wieder hinaus."

What a wonderful day.

Is that all? :-P

Korean HD video files (mostly music performances from Korean TV) were the primary reason I had to buy a large external HDD a while back...hopefully this 1.5TB will last me a while.

I chuckled :). On more than one occasion this has happened to me. Especially since all the
time during lunch my nose is buried in my language notes :).

I bought some speakers to my iPod so I can play my ChinesePod lessons in the background as I work. :)

When you have such things as language piles ^^ which is where you stack the books of the languages you are learning AT THE MOMENT.

... family members regularly tell you to "please stop muttering in that foreign language," or to at least reassure them that you're not saying mean things to them.

... a family member hands you a package addressed to you, and you exclaim, "Ooooh, a dictionary!" (This actually happened to me, and it has become a running joke in my family. I was excited, okay?)

... the number of language learning books - grammars, dictionaries, textbooks - that you possess rivals or outnumbers what your public libary has.

... people regularly ask you why you're studying such and such language, and you look at them like they have a second head. Why not study it?

I like that idea!

When choosing the next language to seriously focus on does NOT feel like a life crisis, but more like buying a new laptop or microwawe oven.

When you neither need to switch keyboards nor create a custom layout, because the editor you use already provides sneaky ways to have all specials characters plus various other alphabets out of the box. (

edit: trying to fix the link. HTML forums are definitely non-nerdy.

Lol I'm doing the same, except minus the important part, eg. the discount. Just spent over 100$ on an obscure dictionary the other day. Why? I could use that money for food! Haha. Oh well, true artists suffer for their work.

I just did that over the last 3 days. I've bought a Japanese textbook, a second Korean course (to go with the other one I haven't used yet), and books on Hebrew and Norwegian. (insert sigh here)....I don't know when/if I'll ever even get to them.

Buying low priced used books that could disappear at any moment, on the other hand, is very different. Buying
language programs that cost hundreds of dollars on impulse or irrationality is shameful.

Apples and oranges. All language learners aren't the same. I'll agree with you that those 500$ language programs help you learn jacksquat, but I don't think someone serious about learning a language would spend that much money on what is essentially just a fancy collection of vocabulary flash cards. People have the right to do with their money whatever they feel like, as long as what they buy actually gets used. I'd rather spend all my money on grammar books and dictionaries than follow in my mother's footsteps and spend every paycheck on new furniture and things like that.

And for those $600 multimedia programs, while I would never pay that much for them, they can be extremely helpful if correctly employed alongside other, more reasonably priced resources.

The other day, I heard German spoken in the US, for the first time since I've been studying it. I was as happy as the old expression says: "like a kid in a candy store". Um, actually, I was in a candy store (really!) and I heard a mother speaking German with her three small children.

I was checking out the Easter candy, for personal research purposes, and I heard someone speaking a foreign language in the next aisle. My first reaction was, oh, how nice to hear another language, for a change, I just wish I could understand it . . . and then I realized, I did understand! " . . . und hier ist alles für Ostern . . . " well, this made my day! So, I sort of lurked around, examining the chocolate bunnies, not exactly foreign behavior for me, anyway, and listened. I really wanted to say something, but didn't want to bother a mom trying to guide her three rowdy little ones away from the candy. The children were very young, and were speaking a mix of German andEnglish, and it was so much fun to listen to them.

I also heard some Spanish speakers discussing sore throat remedies at the drugstore, which, I am sure you will agree, is also fascinating. If you are a Language Nerd in a mostly monolingual environment, you have to find your listening practice where and when you can!

Please delete this response if necessary. I do not want to make unpleasant posts.

That story was so cute! I'm sure hearing German in the US is a totally different experience than hearing it in Germany. :P

I used to work with a German woman in a coffeeshop and we were good friends, had tea together every now and then, and naturally as a native speaker she recognised a German accent whenever someone spoke with one, so she would switch to German with all the German customers/employees (tons of Germans in that little town) and I always liked listening in, even if I didn't understand anything. All I remember is what sounded like "auf" being used a TON. lol! The last time I saw her was Christmas of 2008 :(

I'm sure if I ever heard someone speaking Finnish in the US, I would be all over them (as inconspicuously as possible, of course). I heard it being spoken everyday in Finland but to hear a Finn in my hometown? Oh man, it'd be great. I've heard Icelandic, Hebrew, and other less common languages, PLUS my old neighbour was Finnish, so I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I bump into one!

Glad to know I'm not the only one...

count me in

Great, now I'm going to have the "yatta" song stuck in my head for a week again...

When going on a half-week spring break vacation to a giant music festival two of the essentials you bring are TY Swedish and The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker.

EDIT: Woops, swung late on the obligatory Youtube link.

Sadly! I've found myself ditching myEnglish-speaking friends lately and have dropped out of contact with plenty entirely. I'm just so tired ofEnglish! lol.

And try to think of what alphabet would have a letter that would this...(yes I know they aren't actually doing the YMCA)

Edit: Only thing that comes to mind is þorn

YES! I always tell that story to everybody expecting an amazed shocked surprise face!
Instead I get the question; Where is Madagascar? :(

I love the Austronesian Family: from Madagascar to Easter Island (Rapa Nui), from Taiwan
to New Zealand (Aotearoa)

That is an excellent book. I read it a few years ago, and right now I am reading one very much like it, but entirely focused on languages and the civilizations they came from and spread to throughout recorded history. The name of it is Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World and the author is Nicholas Ostler. His biography states that he is "a scholar with a working knowledge of twenty-six languages" so this is a good reading choice for a Language Nerd! It's long but well worth the time - highly recommended!

Thanks for the suggestion. ;)

You keep telling someone to wait before coming in the room and when the person comes right in, he tells you, "You know I only speakEnglish."

You practice conversations in your head to speed up your word-assembling-abilities and realize you have been doing it out loud from all the weird looks you are getting in the checkout lane.

It blows my mind thatÂEnglish and hindi are supposed to be related.

When you ponder about the logistics of communication between the Colombians and
Brazilians and International Red Cross members in the hostage release operation

When your mom asks you to translate the French on imported stuff at the supermarket even
though you don't study it... and you figure it out through cognates and context instead of just
blowing it off.

Not quite as much, at least you can walk from Europe to India (although not really from England), and walk there never stepping into another language family (though it might not be the shortest route). But Not only Hawaii and Madagascar have two oceans between them, there's no language continuity at all between the two.
Apparently for the Indo-European family the relationship is only obvious with ancient languages (Sanskrit and Latin). And some say the Semitic family is also related.

Lucky guy!

When you choose to use an ATM (that you've used several times before and so know by
heart) in Chinese to see what the Chinese phrases for such
things look like, and are then dissapointed when the receipt is printed inÂEnglish. (But then
again it *is* a good thing to have a record that you can actually understand.)

But you just point out that as long as he keeps talking to you in his native language, you are studying anyway! Everyone wins! :D

FEHLER! Dieses Wort bedeutet kein Schnupfen! Die Allergien sind Gesundheit? Was für ein Unsinn!"

but you don't, because of the high probability of making mistakes in German, even as you complain about the use of the language, which you are wrong about, anyway, because Gesundheit is a loanword intoEnglish, and actually there's nothing bad about the sign from anEnglish-speaking point of view, but damn it, you are a nerd, a nerd with allergies, a nerd without a pen and you cannot be provoked like this . . .

Yeah, I'm never sure how to answer that one since I know the people who asked won't have a clue who I'm taking about if I just start listing singers or groups.

All my recent music interest has been focused on target language music anyway (mostly Korean, but some Spanish as well), so the songs I enjoy listening to the most currently *are* the songs in my target language. Because of this, I don't even have native language music on my MP3 player (sure I have plenty ofEnglish CDs and MP3s, but none of them are on my MP3 player).

Getting in the habit of "I should listen to this since it is in my target language" is a quick way to lose motivation. If the target language music you currently have doesn't interest you enough that you want to play it simply for the sake of entertainment, then it sounds to me like you haven't found the right music in your target language yet. You'll know it when you find it, because you won't want to stop playing it regardless of whether you understand the words or not. :)

Haha..believe me, I enjoy all the Spanish music I listen to and I do prefer listening to it. On top of that I have a Spanish tutor so my I have some external help when it comes to motivation.

But yes, I do understand where you're coming from.It was just something that happened in the early stages of language learning.

Oh my god, this times a thousand! I mean, I usually detestEnglish music, but there are some good bands (eg. R.E.M.) But I haven't had non-Finnish music on my computer for about three years. Same goes with movies, etc. If I want to see a movie but cannot find Finnish subtitles for it online, I don't watch it. :(

...And then when your new boyfriend is a native speaker of one of the languages you're learning :D
Life is grand, yeah?

...if you wish there were some place you could go to to hook up with single language nerds. It would be nice to have a girlfriend without having to worry about her taking too much of your time away from your languages.

This reminds me of how my ex-boyfriend used to change the language settings on his video games to try to get me interested in them.
Him: "I wanna show you this awesome game I just got where you blah blah and blah with blah"
Me: "...."
Him: I can change the settings to German or Korean for you"
....It would only work for a little bit.

Ok...I was just making sure you weren't forcing yourself to listen to music you didn't like simply for the sake of learning. I do agree that it is tricky at first until you find some groups/singers to get "hooked on" in the target language and until you get a decent selection of material so you don't burn out on the few songs you've found that you like.

It would certainly change the meaning of the usual conversation when one asked the other "do you feel like Italian tonight?"
"oh, no, not Italian again"
"well,how about Japanese?"
" I had Japanese already today. How about French?"
" I know, let's try Spanish"
Well, you get the idea.

...when you have memorized what languages countless HTLAL members speak and study and have read the the "details" section of their profile many times for fun.

...when you forgot a word inEnglish when writing a timed essay for AP Geography, so you just substituted the French equivalent and hoped that the teacher would know what you meant.

...when people at school greet you with "Hi Philip, what language are you studying today?"

...when reading on this page is your break from studying your target language, which is itself a break from whatever you're supposed to be doing.

...when you correct your native French teacher's French on a regular basis and help her remember words.

...when you can give your friend a detailed overview off the top of your head of many different resources for learning Chinese even though you've never used any of them yourself and you don't even study the language.

...when you're referred to as "the local language expert" by your teachers (even though you never told them you studied foreign languages) and are asked to give translations to and from various languages.

...when you wonder why your backpack is so heavy even though you have no homework, and then realize it's because you brought all those language books to school.

...when your mother begs you not to get up so early in the morning so that you can study languages before going to school.

...when you get mad at one of your friends for not telling you sooner that her native language is actually Hmong.

...when your first thought when you hear you're going to Tanzania on vacation is "I only have four and a half months to learn Swahili!"

You become terribly curious, you lean towards their table like a sunflower to the sun, you strain really hard to listen, cupping your ears indiscreetly like little spy satellite dishes trying to pick up any strands of their secret conversation, but for all your best efforts, they're all a bit shy and haven't indulged in any pre-dinner aperitifs yet, and so you still can't fathom what on earth they're saying.

From this point on whatever your friends are saying really begins to fade out, you focus on facial features and gestures in the group, or look for clues in their clothing labels perhaps, you even hope and pray for possible language difficulties with the waitress, and so it takes every ounce of self-control NOT to go over, tap one of them on the shoulder, and ask if they could all speak up a bit louder so you can try to guess what language they're speaking.

You realise much to your horror, you're restaurant language-spying once again...

- When you move to another country because you want to learn the language and not the other way around.

- You use words from other languages because they don't exist in your own or are much better than the equivalent.

Also, a lot of visitors were speaking foreign languages. Spanish, some Slavic language, what I think was a Scandinavian language, and some other one I have no clue what it was. It was awesome.

When you have to bring a friend with you to the bookstore to keep you from spending all your money on books on or about languages you aren't even studying (yet).

When your drunkenly slurred speech correctly and confusingly (to those around you) uses grammatical constructions from your target language.

When you get "Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic" for Easter and the first three things you have to say about it are: 1. "How appropriate for me." 2. "Except kekoukele (the Chinese transliteration for Coca Cola) doesn't mean to bite the wax tadpole." 3. "She spelled 'zhe' wrong on the third page... Where's a pen?"

...and it totally makes your night, if not your whole week :DD

And I figured I might as well cut and paste which of my posts this guy was responding to just for the heck of it:
"no mie oon opiskellu suomee noin kaks tai kolme vuotta ja oon asunu suomessa tän vuoen uuenvuoenpäivään saakka. ikävä kyllä, en viel kykene puhummaa kieltä (KUTEN TE JO VARMASTI NÄÄTTE...). mie osaan lukee ja kuunnella, mut epäröin puhuessani ja puhun niin hiton hitahasti. kaipaan vitusti suomalaist poikaystävää."

...when you think that sentence you don't understand is so pretty it makes you want to
learn Finnish before you are done with Italian. And you actually plan to Google some
Finnish learning material the second you hit the Post Rep

You're a language nerd when you ask that question... followed by "and where do I apply
for visa/residency/study program/etc.?"

When you refuse to watch "The Pursuit of Happyness" because of the spelling.

Or just take white-out to the DVD cover.

On that note, when you take out white-out in the middle of your PE class to fix the spelling of a word on a yoga poster that has been bothering you for days. And then you proudly point out your handiwork to your classmates.

So, you know you are a language nerd when your idea of what it means to focus on a small number of target languages at any given time is to narrow it all the way down to about twenty...

Or when someone asks you how many languages you speak and you know that there is no true answer and that if you were to give them something anywhere close to accuracy or the truth they would get bored and stop listening before you were done.

What I generally do in this situation is I just sigh in an annoyed way and say "I don't know." Or "A couple." Or "It depends."

When google translate is your homepage!

-When no one at your school is sure what your first language is.

-When you nearly dive across a desk at someone who had the nerve to say that "Gesundheit" was actually justEnglish and just a fancy way of saying bless you.

When you feel jealous because you would have loved to have been invited to that party.

I'm doing this right now >_<

- When you study every language your ancestors supposedly spoke and then some

^ Guilty ^

Here's some of mine:

-when you listen to music in a language that you don't know, learn how to sing the song, and then go explain to your friends about the sytax, morphology, and unique phonetic points (such as a voiced gutteral fricitive) in the language... and then decide to actually LEARN it!

-when you think that things like 'voiced gutteral fricitive' are normal to say

-when you can read this:

When you wish you could be regressed back into a time when now extinct languages were still spoken.

When you wish you could retain your ability to speak in those foreign languages from past lives when you get out of the trance.

(Some language learning tool, eh?).

1) Getting banned for a stupid reason
2) Choosing the stupidest conceivable screen name

because even just talk of language-learning proves too enticing for you to pass up or give up.

When you try to get your friends to learn languages so you can vicariously experience the fun of the language through them.

When a weekend you thought you weren't going to enjoy becomes one of the better ones because you get to talk about and in foreign languages a significant amount.

*GHASP*

Persian actually has a seperate WORD for 'language nerd'!!!!

To paraphrase an old James Brown song:"Say it loud, I'm a language nerd and I'm proud!"

When you enjoy your teachers talking about current events because the only news you get is through your foreign language studies so it helps reinforce your vocabulary by reminding you of all the words you learned.

Yep! I learned about the volcano in Iceland originally from a post in Teango's language log and then reading about it in an article from a Greek newspaper.

When you wish yours had Turkish available - and games in Turkish to go along with it.

I work at a gym :)

I guess I've become their personal trainer in exercising their language muscles, haha.

When you wish your family good night in other languages.

(I did this today. It turned out to be Mandarin)

True story.

Fasulye

Writing a perfectly understandable language in a script that others can't read sounds like a marvellous idea to me.

This is perhaps why in middle school I exchanged notes written in

.. and my handwriting was much neater when I did that than when I used latin alphabet.

:-)

You: Hi...(Hesitant and unsure if the artist'sÂEnglish is good)... Are you the artist? Shall we speak inÂEnglish or
Spanish?
Artist: Hey there! We can speakÂEnglish (Spoken with a perfect American accent).
You: Can we PLEASE speak Spanish?! :D

My conversation went on with him for a half hour. We talked about the city of Medallin, his work and the
negative reputation Colombia holds in the world. I've been hungry for some Spanish practice! I think it's nice to
converse with artists in their native tongue. They can freely express their intent for their work without any
trouble. Not that this guy had trouble withÂEnglish! I've been told by some documentarians that the best
interviews are done in the subject's native language.

I also tend to ask bilingual people if we could speak a certain language. I don't want to assume because some
people might be offended and think that I believe theirÂEnglish isn't good enough.

I agree, very often fear hampers our ability to speak the language. That's why sometimes it helps to get abit tipsy after a couple of beer/wine, and voila, the sentences suddenly start coming out - nonstop! :)

I have an almost identical habit. Upon turning on my computer, I automatically open up my email, then BYKI, then Anki, and then my internet browser, which automatically saves the tabs I last had open, which always include at least my kanji reviewing website, google translate, my Anki statistics, Livemocha tutoring, and usually this website. :)

I was not kidding..... please enter my survey :) (But fill it with a serious head and
mind)

my survey....: (which from some reason the link to it was removed by the admin...!)

www.pertalk.com

bye! - For the admins - It's is not spam, so don't erase this please (you can check it
yourself..)
ÂÂÂ

I took the survey, but I think there is still a lot missing from it. On the part about which languages you speak you only mentioned a couple, and many people speak languages other than those. What about those people who learned only Hungarian? Or Greek? Or Latin?

Also, there was not enough in there about self-study in my opinion, and since most of us here use that as our primary method I think you will be getting a lot of "other"s.

Regarding the lack of options in many areas - you are right. I had to limit many
answers options do to the survey's site constraints.

I have a specific answer i am looking for by conducting the survey (I can't tell it
here, though , because it will harm the credibility of the results), and I can still
answer it within those constraints limitations.

By the way - I don't seem to manage to reach enough people to fill the form. Maybe you
have ideas about where else I can publish?

When, after having a Persian phase (again...), you read the post that ^this^ is a response to (which just happens to be YOUR post) and facepalm yourself for not realizing what 'zaban' meant in the first place.

When you think that a 'Persian phase' is a perfectly normal thing to have.

When you think that having multiple Persian phases is also perfectly normal.

When, in the midst of said Persian phase, you watch 'No One Knows About Persian Cats' just so that you can present to your mom a reason why you want to learn Persian so she'll buy you that Teach Yourself Modern Persian book you've been eyeing up for the past three years.

When you take the language books you're currently using on a camping trip.

You take along your Czech book too, just in case you get bored with Spanish and you're miles away from your language pile.

When you experiance withdrawl symptoms when you've been away from your language books for too long.

When 'too long' is a sleepover at your friend's house.

When you seperate your langage courses based on 'the books you're currently using' and your 'language pile'.

When you have language piles. (I know, this has been posted already)

When you use Russian grammar forÂEnglish (the sentance 'I know, this has been posted already' shouldn't have a comma in it...).

When you write Kanji into your Japanese course because it doesn't have any.

When you buy Breaking Into Japanese Literature when you're on lesson 3 of you 40 lesson course book.

When you buy a Japanese novel before you bought your coursebook because you're 'thinking ahead'.

When you get depressed when you read this because you know your summer holiday will, unfortunately, (sigh) not be like that.

When you read this thread not only for pleasure but to get tips on being a better language nerd.

When you don't know why you learn a language but you still enjoy learning it...

This post needs votes for the irony.

- When you've finished your work in history class, you look through the textbook for original sources from Soviet Russia to practise reading the Cyrillic script.

- You raise your hand in history class to insist that there is one correct transliteration of "Цар" (Tsar), because you are very particular about the letter Ц being transliterated as a "ts", not "cz" or any other variations. Everyone in the class groans at your nerdiness (these people already ridicule you since you had to make a speech about anything inEnglish class, and you spoke about your favourite Russian band, and apparently listening to Russian music isn't considered normal). And then, in reply to people saying, "Yeah, you'd know" sarcastically, you reply, "Yes, actually, I would, I know the Russian alphabet", and you feel a bit annoyed at yourself for not calling it the Cyrillic alphabet even though you only said Russian because nobody would know what Cyrillic was. And then a day later someone says, "Do you know the German alphabet?" and you have trouble not losing faith in humanity as you tell them that German uses the same alphabet asEnglish. And you're sure this has to be the nerdiest paragraph in this thread, LOL.

- You enjoy reading YouTube comments in Spanish to study how routinely misspelled and dumbed-down they can be, just likeEnglish ones. Unfortunately it's difficult to learn much new vocabulary from them, as the majority of them are just saying that the author either loves the song or thinks someone is hot. Just likeEnglish ones.

- You have to read Romeo and Juliet inEnglish Lit class, and you are sure you'd understand it a lot better if they were speaking Spanish.

- You often wonder whether there are different dialects of dog-speak. Like, would a Spanish dog understand the barks and growls of a Chinese dog?

- You hate the song She-Wolf, but love it's Spanish equivalent Loba.

- You didn't even realise there was anEnglish version of Loba until you heard people singing it at school.

- You found a Zanussi advertisem*nt in a magazine, and you cut it out and blu-tacked it to the wall next to your bed because it has an Italian slogan and the picture appears to be of Italy.

- The film Love Actually makes you want to learn Portuguese so you can understand what Aurelia says and so you can see if the subtitles are accurate (I bet they're not accurate).

- The highlight of your work experience at the local council was meeting some people from Kazakhstan who came for a tour of the town hall, and they all spoke Russian and only the interpreter spoke anyEnglish, and you were fascinated by hearing them speak even though you didn't understand a word.

- You've just read this entire thread! :)

BecauseEnglish uses umlauts and eszetts...

At the beginning of the school year, we were talking about the various uses of the apostrophe in myEnglish class, and someone attempted to say that they sometimes were used to show sounds that don't exist inEnglish. The teacher and other students were confused, but I understood, so I explained that often in transliterations apostrophes are used to signify palatalization in Slavic languages for example (день = den'), and various glottal and ejective sounds in several languages (in Georgian for example, პ = p', ტ = t', წ = ts', ჭ = ch'). This, of course, only confused everyone further, and then the teacher said, "Why don't we just focus onEnglish for now?"

When you see your mother watching that movie in Italian, find out that it is a British film and immediately go buy
the DVD to exercise with the accent.

I thought of that, but they both use the majority of the same letters, so it's not like a completely different alphabet.

(You're right, I always forget the ь, LOL)

I actually almost did that, I'm glad I didn't!

Even having them separated on every language you need to scroll them down because there is so many of them that screen is always too small to see them all

I'm aware. But I don't think "losing faith in humanity" is merited by a notion that's only partially incorrect.

When you do absolutely NOTHING but learning languages and sleeping/eating/going to the
bathroom all day long.

I am honestly rarely guilty of this. :)

When you were just looking for a competence classification system that isn't 1-10 and
that sounds like a perfect fit.

Haha, that's reminded me ...

You know you're a language nerd when you've gone through a 40+ DVD collection and seperated the five that have subtitles available in your target languages into a different pile, to be prioritised ahead of the rest.

(This includes Spider Man 2 and one of the Harry Potter films. What joys!)

Ha, that's a good one! The person who invents a way to send burritos by email will earn my undying respect. And I don't even like burritos . . . I just like the idea of opening up mail and finding food.

I have another language nerd experience to tell. A few days ago I decided to stop at the bookstore on the way home from work, and I was browsing around, thinking of the million + books I'd like to buy and the one book I can possibly, actually afford, when I noticed something extremely interesting going on in the bookstore cafe. A man and a lady were sitting there with a lot of Spanish grammar and reference books spread out before them on the table, and they were absorbed in some very earnest Spanish study! I lurked around as long as I could without causing too much suspicion, and I so, so badly wanted to go talk to them, but they were really involved in their work. I wanted to say:

HI! I LIKE YOU! You study languages, and I do, too! Can I listen, please, please, pleeeeeeesee!? I like languages too! We can talk! We are from the same tribe! Language people! Where do you live? Can I come over? Please???? I'll share my books . . .

Yes, it was just pathetic.

I did not interrupt them. I went away. Sadly. Where did I go? To the language aisle. That should help, right? Well, what did I see there? There was a bookstore clerk there, and she was . . . she was . . oh, I can't say it, it's just too much . . she was TAGGING language books! I wanted to say:

HI! You are tagging language stuff! This is great! I do this too, isn't it fun? You like tags and languages, too? We must have a common ancestor, right? Some cave guy, probably, who tagged a lot of stuff milleniums ago, and today we carry on the great tradition! TAGS!

I did not.

Obviously I need to find more people who share my interests.

I'll probably go back tomorrow. It's incurable.

I think I can confidently say it. You have issues :). [Just kidding]

You are a language nerd when... your personal emails with your mother are a mix of
Spanish,English, and Esperanto; your mother responds in bits and pieces of Esperanto
(she has no clue of Esperanto), and this doesn't even give raise to so much as a
comment, complain, or petition to stop. After all, you are known and expected to do
that kind of thing...

When this post makes you annoyed for not noticing that you could even change the UI language on Youtube (or you'd have already done so).

You know you are a language nerd when you do this! Tag Team is a good idea!

Thanks for the correction - I do want to know if I get something wrong. Etymology is a little off-topic, but certainly nerdy!

EDIT: from Etymology Online:

etiquette
1750, from Fr. étiquette "prescribed behavior," from O.Fr. estiquette "label, ticket." The sense development in Fr. is from small cards written or printed with instructions for how to behave properly at court (cf. It. etichetta, Sp. etiqueta), and/or from behavior instructions written on a soldier's billet for lodgings (the main sense of the O.Fr. word)

Interesting! I never realized the words were related. I am an imperfect nerd for sure, but I try to learn what I can!

Which leads me to this point: etymology for you is a source of both joy and fits of rage. When I realized that 'marauder' has different meanings and connotations in Polish,English and French the perfectionist in me cried a little bit ;) because there are probably more of such false friends out there, which I don't even suspect now. On days like these I doubt that I even speak my native language.

Please bear in mind I live in Argentina, and the vocabulary used in Spain is
significantly different. That being said, I did live in Spain for 2 years, and the
following should apply more or less equally in both countries.

I will generally use "rótulo" when I mean a hand-made (though not necessarily
handwritten) tag/label. This image would be a nice example:
http://members.optusnet.com.au/svencsh/CD%20Library.jpg

As for "etiqueta", I will generally use the word when I mean the price tag of
something, or the little tag on a T-shirt's neck, or the label on a bottle, etc. It may
also be used like theÂEnglish word etiquette (for example, "Vestida con ropa de
etiqueta").

----On Topic----
You are a language nerd when... you talk about the etymology of words on different
languages over the internet for no particular reason with people you don't know, and
you actually enjoy it. Even more so, when you choose to type this post during an study
break, because anything language related is so relaxing...

....When you start to get headaches from automatically translating things into various languages.

....When you hear a language you don't understand, and automatically plan to find out what it is and learn it promptly.

....When you hear a language you don't understand, begin to follow the process outlined above, and then realize you've simply misheard your native tongue.

That would be amazing!!

How many materials do you have!?

Doesn't matter, you can never have enough...

-When even when you've promised yourself a French-free day to let everything sink in you still find yourself looking up translations of words you come across on Wiktionary.

-When you've been talking to yourself in a mixture of Dutch,ÂEnglish and French for hours, occasionally explaining bits of grammar and vocabulary to the walls to check that you've fully understood them.

-When you and your best friend have long discussions about the languages you are going to raise your own and the other's children in and have decided on Dutch,ÂEnglish, French, Spanish and Papiamentu...so far.

I could joke and simply say "too many" but in truth I have a lot.And the books, courses, materials are rather long and time consuming if you go at a slow pace,as I like to do, trying to absorb the material.
Also, I found a discount book(and CD) seller that carries a variety of courses and reference material in my two target languages.They add new items and discontinue others. I must admit that I get a little paranoid that they might not have the particular items in the future (when I would be ready to use it) so I gobble them up when I can.
I must also "blame" this site: I hear good things about a program and I want to try it. I don't jump around but I do like to use several resourses at the same time
As an example I am working on Assimil French with Ease, but I also have purchased or received as gifts (and all you fellow language nerds know that these are the gifts we ask for from our friends, family, etc) other materials. These include Berlitz Self-Teacher , Michele Thomas 10 CD Beginners, Cortina Conversation in 20 lessons, Behind the Wheel level 1...well, you get the idea. This does not include all the Spanish books, tapes, CD's,and courses that I have used, am still using, or am planning to use.
So I am exaggerating only a little when I said 125 yr. Maybe only 90 years.

Edit: I guess it also depends on how old one is when first starting.

Or how about "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."?

"Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana"

^^ Oops I thought she wanted to know how to say

I've always personally parsed that second clause as saying all fruit flies through the
air in the same manner that a banana does. That is, bananas are somehow exemplary of
general fruit kinematics.

"Fruit flies like bananas" is a perfectly natural sentence. As is "The fruit flies like this/that banana." "The fruit flies like a banana" is less natural, but I could imagine saying it ("What do the fruit flies prefer for breakfast every morning? The fruit flies like a banana.") But I would never say "Fruit flies like a banana".

When your parents buy you a laptop, and say that it will be a Macbook Pro but for you it's not important which type as long as the keyboard's "American International" with all the possibilities for the languages' symbols.

So true, I paid 120 USD for my current keyboard (the latin american model was half
that)!!!

Same applies to laptops, I would never buy a Dell at the local store (I get really good
discounts) because they refuse to sell them with the proper keyboard. And then, they
dare tell me "but you can change the layout in windows", as if the keys were in the
same place!!!

EDIT: And I rarely use actual Swedish words, I just say things more like I would in Swedish, especially using vocabulary I've recently learned. And my Swedish isn't all that great, either, so I guess I say things as I would in limited and broken Swedish. Yah, it just doesn't come out good.

It looks like it has changed throughout the ad campaign and has been voiced by
different people, mostly British. It's apparently supposed to be co*ckney, at least in
the latest incarnations.

Thanks. I suspected that the voice has changed over the years. Still,the cliffhanger ending to the commercial has intrigued me and piqued my curiosity...pathetic, isn't it? That I should care about the gecko's accent. But perhaps that is what the commercial was designed to do.

Regarding Eyjafjallajökull, I was actually asked how to pronounce the name of that
glacier by some people who knew I've been learning Icelandic. I was shocked that my
Icelandic learning actually came in handy in the real world. o_o

I do hope that that is an intentional pun?

Edit: Or you don't even care what region the DVD is because you asked for a codeless DVD player for your birthday
to watch all of your foreign films.

Nope, just careless spelling.

This happens to me everytime I go there :D

Haha... I would LOVE that.

Another one: The cable company keeps taking channels off of your basic cable package, and you secretly like it
because it means that eventually your parents will give in and get digital cable...thereby giving you access to
channels in foreign languages.

And I'm particularly devastated because one of the first channels to go was Univsion--our only Spanish-language
channel.

Sometimes I just go watch that channel just to be entertained by listening to the sounds of the language and trying to figure out what they are talking about. My grandmother always would get up at 5 in the morning to watch the Greek program.

EDIT: Out of curiosity I just turned on that channel to see what was on now and it was just the end of the Lithuanian program and then it switched to Hungarian.

I've never seen anything like it. It would be a dream come true. What is it called? What kind of programs does it feature?

The station is called

You know you're not a language nerd if you don't bookmark that link ASAP!

And you know you will probably end up going to bookmark it again in the future.

What a pity then that I only have the possiblity to watch such matches in German!

Fasulye

The Word Cup!

That might be a good competition to have here!

With my father I always play multilingual Scrabble (with a pile of dictionaries on the table to control any word in case of doubt) And why?

- Because I'm a language nerd!!!

And in Japanese you shout "痛い！" (itai!)

Now my journey towards the dark side of language nerdery is complete!

Suddenly I feel that my three shelves of books (plus stuff on the computer) have been dwarfed and is almost nothing in comparison...

Do you seriously have these many books?! Where do you find the space to keep them all?

I have a special room in my home just for my books and media.

No, I have not read all of them yet. I keep telling myself that I want to perfect my other languages first before moving on, but that never happens because there is always more to learn and never enough time.

I would think that after the first 10 or 20 books, you'd have learned the language already!!

Fasulye

Fasulye

It's actually "Veinte años." But I've done that as well.

I'd say I'm probably B2 or C1 on that!

Ah, yes. It is fixed, haha.

Exhibit 1: I see this extremely alarming product in the grocery store:

Now, you sure don’t need to be studying German to be frightened by this, but if you know that (der) Jammer means misery, shame and lamentation in that language, it’s easy to image a little “des” in front of the word and interpret this as the “Kool-Aid of Sorrow” or the Fruit Juice of Suffering, or something equally scary. Maybe it is. I never liked that freaky grinning pitcher . . . .

Exhibit 2: I see a sign in another store and I just don’t understand it: “Take a Vaca!” Vaca is not anÂEnglish word; it’s a dumb abbreviation of the word “vacation” and I hope this usage never becomes too popular – but, since “vaca” means “cow” in Spanish, for a brief, stupid moment I think, well, how times have changed, people used to say “Don’t Have a Cow!” and now they tell you to “Take a Cow!”

Language Nerdery is also obvious when you are so easily deceived by seeing the word “language” on a book cover, you assume that this book is it, it's the one, this is the book for you, it’s the book you were always meant to be with . . . . can it be true? Read on:

Exhibit 3: Yes, another store. The bookstore this time. A display of some current bestsellers shows a book with a very interesting title: “The Five Love Languages.” But, no, no, it is not so . . . soon I realize that the book isn’t about people who love languages--at least five languages, too!. No. It’s about people who love people. I am overcome with hate.

...When you come back to this forum and this is the first thread you visit...

Edit: I might have posted this earlier but...
when you get a retainer after getting your braces off (FINALLY!!!) and the first thing you worry about is that you won't be able to make the trilled r in Spanish...
After a little practice, I could sort of do it with the retainer in :)

While I'm not the tanning type, if I were, with how long it takes me to get through some lessons, I would come out looking like a lobster.

Sigh.

Aww that's my childhood show!

Language Nerd in Persian is "Khoreye Zaban" or "Divaneye Zaban". Zaban itself means language or literally "tongue". it shares the same root with "Lingua" and from that we get the German word "Zung" and theEnglish word "Tongue". The word "language" is from of the same root but is not a Germanic word.

The other day when my alarm clock rang in the morning, much, much too early in the morning, I sort of half-understood that it was time to get up and go to work, but I wasn't fully awake yet and thought: "hey . . . this is really strange . . . the alarm clock is ringing in Dutch today, but I don't study Dutch; therefore, because I can't really understand what it's saying, I do not have to get up today."

I was quite disappointed when I realized that alarm clocks don't ring in particular languages, but I was a little impressed by my semi-conscious mind's ability to deny reality.

Yes, it really happened - I don't know what I'd have done if the clock went off in my target languages, though.

When you speak to your French professor (who also knows Spanish, Italian and Arabic) in all the languages he knows while he's tutoring you latin and all the other language professors at the office stare at you.

Only 8GB?!?! My pimsleur files alone are 13GB all together. about 15GB rosetta Stone And I have about 6GB of books and at least 100GB of movies in foreign languages.

wow loooool It took me about three minutes to get this post! At first i was like "what do you mean? Of course, it's the ROMANCE section. it has to be about romance languages." lool

Another funny thing which happened to me was when i was at the barnes and noble library and my friend came up to me and told me he had found something in the science fiction section and that I had to control myself and not lose it and go crazy. after preparing me for about ten minutes he took to me to a section which was VERY oddly in the science fiction section instead of being in the history or philosophy section. And there it was!!! The LOEB Classical library!!! All classical books in Latin and Ancient Greek! I was seriously about to Pass out.

P.S. I had to burn my foreign language films onto DVDs since I didn't have enough memory. Now I'm running out of physical space to store them since each CD/DVD holder only holds a pathetic 220 DVDs each!

Also, my language learning folder (named "Language Learning Stuff") is 56GB, and growing. There's some other random stuff that isn't in there yet, but it's not even 1GB of stuff.

After a frustrating and unsuccessful errand, you pop into a book store, conveniently located nearby, to cheer yourself up by browsing the languages section. You pick up a tempting but completely unnecessary grammar book, examine, put down, walk away, go back, pick up...repeat four times until you finally either give in and buy it or tear yourself away.

While in that bookstore, you check out the Pimsleur Ojibwe package. You have no plans to ever study Ojibwe, but...

Well, I temporarily solved that problem with a trip to IKEA a few weeks ago. After adding five new bookcases, each with six shelves, I now have my books (and most of my husband's) neatly organized. Our living room looks like a library and we have bookshelves in two other rooms.

Now that I think of it I also started about when I was 13 (I'm almost 16 now), and even I'm wishing I had started earlier, even with having the advantage of already speaking Spanish from my bilingual elementary school and Greek from my family!

EDIT: Oops. I just remembered that my first attempt at self-studying a language was Mandarin when I was 12. :)

Haha same here

No way! :D

Fasulye

When you don't care because you just study the language of the dictionary instead of French ...

Not just for Arabic though, but for all the available languages. This should also be done whilst simultaneously trying to figure out the languages you don't know and deciding that you really should make an effort to learn at least one of them since you might be on holiday in Turkmentistan and it would be really useful when reading the ingredients on boxes of shaving foam.

16? Ha! I'm 13! I started being SERIOUS about languages last year...

You know you're a language nerd when you see 'MIA' in the newspaper and automatically think 'Middle Indo-Aryan.'

When you see Arabic copies of Al-Ahram and other Arabic newspapers in the bookstore for the first time, but you don't buy them because you're still in shock over it. (Foreign langage reading materials are scarce around here, Arabic especially for some reason. I mean, the library even has Urdu and Vietnamese books, but ARABIC!? Of course not...)

... when you realize, after reading something like this, that the language learning community long ago compelled you to learn any number of languages you have absolutely no need for.

Fasulye

Also, when people are confused and must ask about your
nationality because one minute you speak German to your friend,
and Russian to the Russian cashier in the next.

When you can switch directly between both foreign languages, then you are really good!

Fasulye

- When in your dream you were really pleased about this because even though Portuguese is not one of your target languages, you thought it might be fun to learn the basics so you saved it even though your fellow criminals got angry with you because you were refusing to destroy evidence.

When you wake up at 5am and study Mandarin for two hours before breakfast and then somehow end up on this site for an hour (so far) ;)

When you have a growing list of languages you are infatuated with (Gothic, Romanian, etc...)

... when you're asleep and talk in German in your dreams.

... when you plan to watch 800 hours of

... when you pick up a map of the world and colour the countries where the languages you want to learn are spoken.

Guido.-

I was ecstatic the first time I looked at a Korean phrase and realized that I *knew* something was misspelled. A few months earlier I would have simply assumed that it was a word or grammar construction that I didn't know, but since I've seen that particular grammar form so many times now the context made it obvious to me what was supposed to be there.

True, there are a good few language groups on there I believe

I was also thrilled when I received the following email from Amazon.com:

And best of all, you get to show off your language skills to all your friends!

I wonder if they actually use those. I have to automatically translate a lot of stuff for my job, and it keeps translating Wohnung as "apartments" in German :(

Modern translation systems are statistics based and thus more data you shovel in to train such a system, the better.
Like, worst algorithm with 100 millions of samples outperforms best algorithm with 10 millions of samples. This
explains why single contribution may not have any effect.

Today I found "the crow" translated into Spanish as "en línea". I have the sneaking suspicion that someone (or some algorithm) took theEnglish expression "as the crow flies" and its equivalent in Spanish "en línea recta" and made an assumption. Is there a separate thread here for "the lies my translation software told me?" If not, there should be. It would make interesting reading.

And, on topic...when you are interested in reading faulty automated translations and trying to figure out what went wrong.

We should have a "post your keyboard option menu" thread.

When you find out that the travel guide by Berlitz on the same GPS doesn't have anything to do with foreign languages. You were hoping for some phrasebooks or something which would have made it a lot more interesting. :)

Guilty!

Why did you have to remind me they are here on the computer?! Now how can I focus on the languages I already have set up on this computer when my list look so boring in comparison?!

Oh well, wanderlust happens!

When, while playing a video game, the Japanese audio andEnglish text make you think "I
wish I was learning Japanese; this would be great for L-R".

I could not agree more:)

...when you do hundreds of repetitions every day and find it more entertaining than any video game.

…when you use Canadian French vocabulary and expressions, when someone wants you to say something in French and you like when the other person is surprised by the fact that you use expressions that are not familiar to them.

…when you use “septante”, “huitante” and “nonante” all the time instead of “soixante-dix”, “quatre-vingt” and “quatre-vingt-dix”, although you learned standard French.

When you actually actively correct other's incorrect Hanzi tattoos... Ã la
hanzismatter.com ^_^

I woke up today and realized I could have counted sheep in Spanish :(

You will stand there, staring at the thing in question (refrigerator, car keys, milk, chair, whatever), refusing to allow yourself to pick it up or do whatever it is you were going to do with it until you can think of the correct word for it in the language that you're trying to think in. You will stand there for however long this takes, perhaps finally giving in and going to look it up in the dictionary before coming back and proceeding as you were until it happens again :D

I have stood in the shower staring at the soap, refusing to pick it up, getting angry at myself, while trying to think of the word for "soap" in Spanish for about 5 minutes before I finally gave up (I looked it up immediately after getting out of the shower, still wet, dripping water all over my bedroom floor as I went to fetch my Spanish dictionary).

Splish-splash, splish-splash...

Cursing...

Papers rustling, flipping of pages...

"Jabón!!! I knew it! Damnit, why couldn't I remember that?!"

Splish-splash, splish-splash back to the bathroom...

Fasulye

That's a good one! When I attended driving school I was a teenager, but at that very young age I wasn't a language freak, so at that time I wouldn't have got the idea to ask for driving mock exams in a foreign language.

Fasulye

(I am not, nor will I be studying German for the next 2 years or so. I am, however,
learning Japanese.)

When you do have many good quality Spanish-English and French-English dictionaries (your target languages) but continue to buy more "just in case",as if the ones with 80,000 or 120,000 words will not be sufficient.And you can't sleep wondering how you would be able to buy some French-Spanish and Spanish-French dictionaries.

Guilty. And whenever I'm asked by a friend to tell them "something interesting", it always pertains to languages.

...I feel like I have to return to that store and find the language section.

Also, when another friend mentions "Computational Linguistics" and you wonder why you haven't spoken to him more.

Guilty!

Only yesterday, I was in a friend's house with all his family having dinner. There was
a baby around and everybody was laughing and mentioning her because she learned to make
the "Bronx cheer" sound, and you know.. babies... whatever they do seem funny to
adults.
So I thought it would be very enlightening and interesting for everybody to learn a bit
and I couldn't resist sharing my knowledge and so I said: you know that that sound is
very similar to the voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate, that is: bbllrrr!
(me reproducing the sound), there's a tribe in the Amazon, the Piraha, that actually
uses it as part of they phoneme inventory. It was only discovered in 2004 because the
natives didn't utter that sound in front of the white researchers fearing they would
sound awkward and be laughed at. Besides them, there is only a handful of laguages that
use that sound.
They all stared at me like, is that a joke or was it supposed to be cool?

Well, I think not everyone possesses the virtue of appreciating the diversity of human
languages...

I also did exactly this last Thursday, despite being exhausted by a 36-hour trip!

As a matter of fact it was. And I wasn't aware of that; would you happen to know some
good stores? :)

...when you're at the university and take notes in other languages.

...when one of the reason to learn X language is: "Wow! They have a really cool flag!
Let's learn that language" (i.e. Swedish)

You know you are a language nerd when you know what Xhosa is. Non-language nerds might think that if you"picked up some Xhosa" you had contracted an exotic disease.

(English spam is not OK, though, just in case you're listening, internet marketers)

Same question here. That seems a bit odd...

...when you know exactly who these people (and many others) are and are more familiar with them than with any other "normal" celebrities. And then when you make reference them in a conversation, you find it surprising that your listener doesn't know who you're talking about.

Don't get me wrong, I love Benny's blog and have learned a lot from it. I can't find the exact page where he wrote it, but the line goes something along the lines of "(learners)..who want to be polyglots like Myself, Professor Arguelles and Moses McCormick". Dr Arguelles devoted his life to acquiring an encyclopedic mind, mastering some very exotic languages, and even authoring scholarly works on the subject.

Benny, you are a great polyglot (as is Mr McCormick), and an inspiration to many (in fact you are much more "my style" of linguist than some more academic/conventional polyglots) but, likening yourself to Arguelles, however lightly, may actually discourage others from taking your blog seriously (which is EXCELLENT, by the way).

I second the polyglots as role models thing. I could care less about who's getting married to who in Hollywood, but I'm interested in Prof. Arguelles language learning methods.

When you buy something you had no intention of buying just because the sales lady kept speaking to you in German even when she found out you were from the US.

I think I'm going to make Chinese vocabulary lists of characters that I can't recognize on sight and tape them to my cieling, so that I can look at them before I fall asleep and when I wake up. I had a teacher who said that right before bed and right when you wake up are the best times to learn things, as you remember them better.

When you've actually been called a nerd to your face for telling someone (while in a new-book high, of course) that you just bought A Primer for Advanced Beginners of Chinese: Simplified Character Edition and Integrated Korean: Beginning 1 at a newly-discovered bookstore and they're both really great and on and on. I would call me a nerd too, if I said that to myself...

That's awesome!! (Their accents are pretty bad though... haha).

If anyone does this with me on a first date, I'm in love. =O

You know you are a language nerd when you are type "I'll be there" in facebook chat, and it comes out as "Iäll be
there".

Even better though: sitting front and center in your French class and quite obviously reading and taking notes from an Italian or German book which is lying open on your desk, while also half-listening to the strange (likely off-topic) lecture in French your teacher is giving. And later you hear from another student in a different class that she actually has noticed you doing that--which is good, because she would have to be blind to miss it--and talks about how you do that to other classes, but how she doesn't care because you "already speak French well".

When the only time of day you feel truly enthusiastic and energetic and can't take yourself away from something on vacation in St. Petersburg is at 11:30 at the bookstore in the giant foreign language section, despite the vast majority of the books there being in Russian, which you don't know at all. Bonus points because that actually increases your desire to buy them.

When nothing makes you as giddy as getting a compliment on your language skills.

Last year when I was going to Greece for six weeks, my mom told me at first that I would only be allowed to bring four language books. Only four! So I did the only thing that a reasonable language nerd would do--start to discreetly smuggle them into different little pouches and sections of my backpack, leaving only the biggest and heaviest four in the luggage. Then it turned out that I had enough room anyways, so I took nearly all of my (at that time--my collection has probably doubled or tripled in size since then) books.

I play this game with my friends and a globe, and they get frustrated. Even if I know only a few words they start to
get a little annoyed. Then they turn to africa and I'm lost O_O.

Well I know words in all those languages, I meant countries that have like Hausa, Swahili, Zulu, etc. as one of the
official languages (and yes the game dictates that you must say something in each official language).

You know you're a language nerd when the fact that someone else says this about a language game melts your
heart.

Edit: And when you play such games on a daily basis :P.

I play alone. Often. I played it with my siblings a few times, and then my Georgian friend, and once with my
mom. I've lost only once. My mom kept choosing French speaking countries, and I ran out of French words.

Well Swahili isn't that hard. Just memorize this phrase: Ninasema Kiswahili vizuri sana! (I speak Swahili very well.)

I don't find it weird at all that you would want to do that, mainly because I do it. I often think "is this weird?
naahh I'd totally do this in a heartbeat if someone else suggested it :D!"
The only times I don't play with complete nerdery is when my friends do it to show someone at a party that one
of their friends actually has a shred of intelligence.