Languages

Languages are primarily a tool to transmit concepts and information via verbal communication, non-verbal gestures, and written text. So many of them have popped up globally.

They’re akin to windows into different societies.

Different concepts, slang, shorthands for the same everyday objects and events everyone around the globe experience. Different ways to internally think and converse inside your own head. These are the languages I wish to become fluent in, disregarding the amount of time it would take. It was a goal to become a polyglot, however that really seems impossible at this age.

Japanese / 日本語

For a long time, I've been slowly familiarising myself with this language almost exclusively through music. I really like how it's going! I can generally understand the general concept of most sentences in kana, and know a low amount (200~300) of kanji. Most of my issues with reading Japanese stem from not knowing which reading of kanji to use in different scenarios, or with the grammar, which I've never actually formally learned at any point.

I only started to try to learn this language after a friend from school wanted to see if they could import a Japanese-exclusive game console that could not be set to English. That was all the way back in 2014. In ten years, realistically not much has progressed aside from a general familiarity with Japanese. But I'm not rushing it.

Spanish / Español

I don't have a natural instinct or desire to learn this language, but with being the second most spoken language on the globe, alongside living in a Hispanic-dominated area of the country, there's no reason not to learn. My competency at Spanish is not drastically higher than most other English-natives, though.

English

…lol

Many of these errors legitimately make reading difficult to me as they make parsing text inconsistent. Having to stop in the middle of a sentence to decipher the meaning of the sentence breaks the flow of conversation. I can only imagine the grammatical tragedies that exist within other languages. Some structural differences do mitigate many of the errors that occur in English, which is another reason I am interested in learning more languages.

A few examples are listed below.

It's spelled "no one". Who is Noone? Do they only come out at noon?

It's spelled "lose". How do you loose money? Can you tighten money?

Apostrophes do not make words plural in any case. Apostrophes either show possessiveness or missing sounds: for example, in "can't" (can^not). It's not "Eating a few slice's of pizza's". I will probably [likely] process that as "Eating a few slices is of [the] pizza's {object}" and get confused about the missing object that is possessive to the pizza and what "slices is" is supposed to mean.

• Just because words that end with an 's happen to make the same as sound as a plural word, it doesn't mean they are the same.
• Use es for most words (except proper nouns) ending in s.
• Don't pluralise proper nouns; pluralise the common noun, using the proper noun as a descriptor. [Not Nintendo "Switches", but Nintendo Switch consoles.]
• Names are a special case. An s or an es can be simply appended, regardless of the last character of the name. You won't need to change a y into an ies, that is never done for proper nouns. "Perrys" is valid for the Perry family. Perries is not.

"It's" is always a contraction for "it is". Its pronoun homophone, "its", shows possession.

• Possessive pronouns don't use apostrophes. It isn't "he's water bottle", therefore it's also not "it's water bottle" [which is read as "it is water bottle"].

These are a few things I personally do to enhance the sentences I use. It's of my opinion that these also should become more widely adopted.

• While English officially uses it or they for animals, using it remains a bit objectifying. For sentient organisms, I use they. "My dog, they greeted me at the door!"
• While English officially uses that or who when describing a person, using that remains a bit objectifying. To describe people, I use who. "My friend is a person who likes ice cream."
• Prefer er over re, given that re can r
• resemble the sound of ré, and due to the presence of e at the ending of a word modifying other vowels inrsard wo d. "Metre" = "meh-tray" or "metter". "Metr" is one syllable, therefore would usually be pronounced as-is until a second syllable arrives. In all cases, the e at the end is very incorrect to me when preceded by an r.

However, there are indeed actions I do that sometimes contradict the aforementioned goal of consistency.

I will initially read haemoglobin as haymoglobin and foetus as foh-tus. Given that I pronounced it correctly with modern phonetics, I don't often see the need to correct a word that was willfully spelled incorrectly. Letters are stand-ins for phonemes. To have letters exist for decoration, or as a byproduct of outdated characters [æ/œ] is counterintuitive to the modernisation of a language.

I generally use the shorter and most truncated forms of words, such as dropping redundant Us or AEs.

Alongside this, I also use Commonwealth spellings of suffixes such as -ise and -se, instead of -ize and -ce. This may lead to some uncommon spellings such as colorise.