Words, words, words

[Hazels]

So I've been thinking a lot about languages. Just the sheer diversity of them. Every single culture has had some sort of language to express ideas and pass down stories from generation to generation. How the very geography of the world affects how we speak to each other and how it can spring all new languages from it. With the best examples of that being French and Spanish. With how during the expansion into north and south America still being very related but having their own dialects and words that would be completely different from the home countries.

Which brings us to the modern age of hyper connectivity that we are currently enjoying. With the worlds greatest sum of knowledge in our pockets and ability to talk with anyone anywhere in the world in the span of a few seconds and increasing every year. But, despite this, languages still play a heavy part in the way we communicate locally and globally. with the most common of all of them being English. With other languages playing their part but not anywhere near as catered to as the English portion.

So, with all that out of the way, I ask of you: Do you know other languages outside of English? Have you found places like this in your travels that were in other languages besides English? (Staying within sight rules.) We are a global, lewd, community coming from all places on the globe and all different age ranges.

To start it off I myself am a primary English speaker with a fair understanding of self taught french. I have gained a pretty much as good as it's going to get grasp on english. Both written and spoke. French though I'm still learning how to read and understand the grammatical structures of it as I slowly break into writing and speaking more often. With an eye on japanese in the coming months to help a friend learn it too so they aren't doing it alone.

 

[Sync]

I "studied" a smattering of French, German and Latin in High School, and I once attempted to learn Russian (because of a girl I was dating at the time).

But, alas...I'm pretty much firmly English-only.

 

[Hazels]

I feel you. I went through three different french teachers during my four years in high school. With the class being cut completely after I had graduated. Still mildly upset it got cut but spanish did not. Surprise that you were offered, or interested in three languages in such a short period. Take it nothing really got its hooks into you?

I too once tried to learn a language due to a pretty girl. Was turkish though.

Kinda sad though there's whole languages that things are written in that we'll never understand or know exists. As much as being a English only speaker is nice in the worldwide business view I feel like it would be a boon to really enjoy something outside of it, ya know?

 

[ƒeral]

In response to your original prompt, I've never dabbled in the RP scene outside of English ones. However, when I was way younger, I was pretty active on a Chinese forum - mostly anime, gaming, fanfiction etc. And to this day I'm like, man, I'm missing out on so many quality fanfiction of my fav ships for not knowing all the languages in the world, lol.

 

[Doctor Manhattan]

I've written in primarily English ERPs and very rarely some Hindi ERPs. That's it. I do speak a bit of three other languages but two of those are dead and the other is Spanish because I live in Florida. Wouldn't really want to venture to write in those languages.

 

[MatchaMochi]

I myself am not a native English-speaker, but it's the only language I've used as roleplaying, and it's also language that I use at least as much as my native one.

Other languages that I can speak/write are Finnish (my native language), Swedish (since it's mandatory to study it in our schools like English. I'm extremely bad at it though.) and Japanese that I've been studying for half-a-year now. Contemplating on learning Korean at some point too.

Would I be up for doing a roleplay with any of these languages? With Japanese maybe. Currently I only know hiragana and katakana, so I think I need to step-up my kanji-game before considering it. I think that RP could work as a fun training tool to train my reading, but manga and reading exercises online and from the school also do the job.

As for my native language I think there's nothing I want less than roleplay with it. All kind of lewd-talk in Finnish sounds absolutely horrible and cringy. If it's non-erotic one then hard maybe.

 

[Hazels]

In response to your original prompt, I've never dabbled in the RP scene outside of English ones. However, when I was way younger, I was pretty active on a Chinese forum - mostly anime, gaming, fanfiction etc. And to this day I'm like, man, I'm missing out on so many quality fanfiction of my fav ships for not knowing all the languages in the world, lol.

Right? There's so many wild and awesome thing out there that we aren't going to get to experience thanks to not speaking more than one language. The amount of creative potential and idea sharing that's lost is quite sad thanks to language barriers.

I've written in primarily English ERPs and very rarely some Hindi ERPs. That's it. I do speak a bit of three other languages but two of those are dead and the other is Spanish because I live in Florida. Wouldn't really want to venture to write in those languages.

I can completely understand the avoiding ERP in spanish. I, for one, don't want to hope I'm using the correct gender of whatever body part I'm describing. GEtting bogged down in some obscure rules that neither party can get past in use.

It is both awesome and sad that you know two dead languages. Here's to hoping they don't go extinct and are passed on to someone knew.

I myself am not a native English-speaker, but it's the only language I've used as roleplaying, and it's also language that I use at least as much as my native one.

Other languages that I can speak/write are Finnish (my native language), Swedish (since it's mandatory to study it in our schools like English. I'm extremely bad at it though.) and Japanese that I've been studying for half-a-year now. Contemplating on learning Korean at some point too.

Would I be up for doing a roleplay with any of these languages? With Japanese maybe. Currently I only know hiragana and katakana, so I think I need to step-up my kanji-game before considering it. I think that RP could work as a fun training tool to train my reading, but manga and reading exercises online and from the school also do the job.

As for my native language I think there's nothing I want less than roleplay with it. All kind of lewd-talk in Finnish sounds absolutely horrible and cringy. If it's non-erotic one then hard maybe.

Impressive! Did you learn all, or most, of them through schooling or some on your own? Because that is awful impressive and I would love to learn the secrets of doing so.

Thinking of doing some Japanese learning at some point after a few months of battening down the grammar and writing for french. So many good manga and games come out from japan and would love to see how it really reads from the original writing instead of the translation of it.

I've honestly never thought of lewd talk in another language as possibly being horrible. Maybe it's just being raised and learning english natively but I can't think of one that I've ever heard that wouldn't sound good. Was that something you realized once you started to speak/learn something else or just always thought? THat is another concept to me that just sounds wild. Though, I guess it's semi related, I don't like the way I sound when I practice speaking Japanese. I can't really put it into words but something about how my mouth feels and changes the tone of my voice just feels wrong.

 

[MatchaMochi]

Impressive! Did you learn all, or most, of them through schooling or some on your own? Because that is awful impressive and I would love to learn the secrets of doing so.

With English I started to passively learn it before it became a subject at school (which in here is in 3rd grade) via video-games, movies, tv-shows and anime. At first it was just me suddenly realizing that I understood what some iconic catchphrases in movies meant without the translation and from there I got some kind of basic grasp of the language. When all the grammar and vocabulary-stuff started to appear it was pretty easy for me to grasp them since I constantly consumed medium in that language. Things just sort-of "clicked" and I honestly didn't spend too much time to study the language outside of school, and when I started junior-high I could watch English content without subtitles and understand it clearly, read English text quite effortlessly .

With Swedish I couldn't really do this since only Swedish content I consume is music, and aside from few exceptions most of the music I consume that is sung in Swedish is extreme metal, so a singer growling or screaming the lyrics on your face doesn't really help you get the grasp of the language that easily hah hah! Mandatory Swedish starts here in 7th grade and honestly almost no-one ever learns it outside of the basics. It's a beautiful language, but it being mandatory doesn't inspire the majority of the 7th graders to learn it since today there isn't any good reason to keep it a mandatory subject. It's definitely a plus if you can speak it especially in coastal regions, but it should be elective with other languages if you ask me. But since ranting about Finnish school-system wasn't the point of this thread I digress. So yeah with Swedish 99% of my knowledge comes from junior-high and high-school.

My tip is to consume the medium in the language you want to learn, but I assume you're already doing that at least to some extent. That combined with the want to understand what the characters or people are actually saying were basically my keys to learn English.

Thinking of doing some Japanese learning at some point after a few months of battening down the grammar and writing for french. So many good manga and games come out from japan and would love to see how it really reads from the original writing instead of the translation of it.

The ability to read untranslated games, manga, visual novel, light novel and doujin , watch anime and J-drama without subs and the want to know the lyrics and be able to sing them properly were my main drives to learn it. This combined with the fact that I just love how the Japanese sounds and the fact I want to be able to speak and read it when I eventually visit the country drove me to learn it. With this I again had the advantage of passively learning it ever since elementary-school, but unlike with English there are so many grammatical rules that are different from English or Finnish + hiragana, katakana and kanji-signs so the hurdle to get around it was much larger and where I understood the context of a sentence somewhat I couldn't make heads or tails of the grammar. In that regard starting to actually study the language has helped a lot and now after half-a-year I can say I know a lot more about the language and how it's structured... Though I still have a lot to learn.

Even before I started to go to Japanese-lessons I could spot a lot of translation errors or different interpretations for some words and phrases that translators did in anime, so I know that there's a lot to uncover with manga as well once I get reading it. One huge plus-side is that Japanese word-plays and comedy relying on it will land much better now than when it's translated in English or Finnish.

I've honestly never thought of lewd talk in another language as possibly being horrible. Maybe it's just being raised and learning english natively but I can't think of one that I've ever heard that wouldn't sound good. Was that something you realized once you started to speak/learn something else or just always thought? THat is another concept to me that just sounds wild. Though, I guess it's semi related, I don't like the way I sound when I practice speaking Japanese. I can't really put it into words but something about how my mouth feels and changes the tone of my voice just feels wrong.

With Finnish lewd talk it boils down to synonyms to genitals, erogenous-zones and the acts either sounding incredibly crude, funny, corny, or usually all at the same time. There's a lot of beautiful words in Finnish and you can describe things extremely beautifully like in any language, but I have never heard Finnish lewd-talk or seen an erotic writing that wouldn't make me laugh out loud or think it's extremely corny-sounding, and one thing that it certainly hasn't achieved is to make me excited or hot lol.

This was something that I've just realized over time. However the real eye-opener was when I was getting an NSFW-commission of my OC from a Finnish artist and I typed the whole message in Finnish. I didn't really pay too much attention to it until I got their reply, and they said that after getting so many commissions in English reading Finnish description of sexual things sounds so weird and funny in a cringy way, and after reading my message again I had to agree with them and promised to type out my next commission in English.

As for speaking Japanese I myself haven't really experienced that. Only thing that I don't really like is my French-R-sound pushing through as I speak it. I can sort-of hide it when I speak English (or I think I can lol), but with Japanese it's much harder since I'm still learning the basics.

 

[Tassu]

I'll drop by just to note that I perfectly agree with MatchaMochi - there is no way to write lewd Finnish that won't make your cringe, laugh or both. I don't know why it is like that, but that's how the cookie crumbles.

 

[Friendly Allien]

Swedish native, I've had that experience as well as primary school teaching English at grade 4 to 9, mandatory, with extra classes for a couple years into our equivalent of high school. Half the course material at political science in uni was in English too.
On top of that, Sweden has like every country several dialects, often tied to regions. Mine is fairly far away from the major cities, and has a bit of a "country" twist to it - which culturally can be compared to the American South (but historically left leaning, many labour party foundational areas, anti-clerical, quiet types). Often looked down on as sounding lazy and uneducated, while many of the words and phrases have a late medieval origin as the settlers from southern Sweden migrated further north settled here.

So, I speak a dialect, and standard "Realm Swedish" when I need to sound more professional. Being a fan of history, some basic grasps of Latin has made its way into my dome as well, but being Scandinavian has also lent is a limited vocabulary of German as well. Europeans at large know a bit of other European countries and such more than most expect.

But when it comes to RP'ing, in my life I have only had two in Swedish, the rest have all been English. One part of this is simply a question of rarity, the other is that there is a general view among middle-aged and younger people that Swedish "sounds dweeby". Trying to talk dirty either makes you sound like an overexcited fuckboy, or like a porn mag writer from the 1960's.
The latter I say because I have been accused of that