Hmmm. I have a slightly different experience to you. I am bilingual—English/Afrikaans—though my Afrikaans was never a language I used a lot and I have a very poor grasp of it in comparison.
This has led to something interesting—if I try to think in Afrikaans, I notice a distinct difference in my thoughts. Normally, my thoughts take the form of an internal monologue (almost, but not quite, exclusively). If I try to think in Afrikaans, which has a different grammar (and importantly, a different word order) to English, then I get the distinct impression of parts of my thoughts queued up and waiting for their part of the sentence to happen. This tells me that there are more complicated things going on inside my head than I had previously thought.
...though interesting, I have not as yet found any practical use for this knowledge.
I don’t know Afrikaans, but Russian is very much unlike English in a lot of things—most notably, the order of words in a sentence usually plays next to no role whatsoever in terms of actual meaning (you may sound somewhat posh or dramatic if you randomize it too much, but Yoda still sounds pretty normal in all Star Wars Rusian translations I know). Given all that, I don’t feel anything like you describe when I think in Russian.
Hmmm. Looking it up, I see that English and Russian are both broadly categorised as subject-verb-object languages, while Afrikaans is a subject-object-verb language.
Hence, if I were to translate directly word-for-word from grammatically correct Afrikaans to English, without changing the word order, the result would be something along the lines of “He did to the shops go” or “He did a bit of milk at the shop buy”.
I’ve never come across an Afrikaans translation of Star Wars to listen to Yoda in (to be fair, I’ve never really looked, either).
You can probably get a similar effect without needing to learn another language if you convolute your grammar to the point of putting the verb at the end of each and every sentence.
I think I wouldn’t. It is the way that questions are asked in Russian in the most widespread version (“Did you take my gun?” → “You my gun take?” (there is nothing like ‘did’ in this sentence)), and I sometimes speak affirmatives that way just as a habit (nobody makes a deal out of it).
Say, is Afrikaans an easy language to learn the basics of? Just out of curiosity.
Say, is Afrikaans an easy language to learn the basics of? Just out of curiosity.
I think it depends where you start from. I grew up in a place where both English and Afrikaans are widely spoken (South Africa—to my knowledge, still the only country where Afrikaans is widely spoken) and so I had some idea of the basics of both from a very young age, which helped me immeasurably.
Afrikaans is also very close to Dutch (to the point that a Dutch and an Afrikaans speaker can communicate using their respective languages with only minor difficulty, and I’ve managed to leverage my knowledge of Afrikaans to be able to understand most of an article written in Dutch) - so if you know Dutch, it’ll probably be fairly trivial to learn Afrikaans.
Starting with Russian and English… I have very little idea of what Russian is like, so I don’t know what sort of starting point that gives you.
But I think I can safely say that, all else being equal, English would be significantly more difficult to learn than Afrikaans.
Hmmm. I have a slightly different experience to you. I am bilingual—English/Afrikaans—though my Afrikaans was never a language I used a lot and I have a very poor grasp of it in comparison.
This has led to something interesting—if I try to think in Afrikaans, I notice a distinct difference in my thoughts. Normally, my thoughts take the form of an internal monologue (almost, but not quite, exclusively). If I try to think in Afrikaans, which has a different grammar (and importantly, a different word order) to English, then I get the distinct impression of parts of my thoughts queued up and waiting for their part of the sentence to happen. This tells me that there are more complicated things going on inside my head than I had previously thought.
...though interesting, I have not as yet found any practical use for this knowledge.
I don’t know Afrikaans, but Russian is very much unlike English in a lot of things—most notably, the order of words in a sentence usually plays next to no role whatsoever in terms of actual meaning (you may sound somewhat posh or dramatic if you randomize it too much, but Yoda still sounds pretty normal in all Star Wars Rusian translations I know). Given all that, I don’t feel anything like you describe when I think in Russian.
Hmmm. Looking it up, I see that English and Russian are both broadly categorised as subject-verb-object languages, while Afrikaans is a subject-object-verb language.
Hence, if I were to translate directly word-for-word from grammatically correct Afrikaans to English, without changing the word order, the result would be something along the lines of “He did to the shops go” or “He did a bit of milk at the shop buy”.
I’ve never come across an Afrikaans translation of Star Wars to listen to Yoda in (to be fair, I’ve never really looked, either).
You can probably get a similar effect without needing to learn another language if you convolute your grammar to the point of putting the verb at the end of each and every sentence.
I think I wouldn’t. It is the way that questions are asked in Russian in the most widespread version (“Did you take my gun?” → “You my gun take?” (there is nothing like ‘did’ in this sentence)), and I sometimes speak affirmatives that way just as a habit (nobody makes a deal out of it).
Say, is Afrikaans an easy language to learn the basics of? Just out of curiosity.
I think it depends where you start from. I grew up in a place where both English and Afrikaans are widely spoken (South Africa—to my knowledge, still the only country where Afrikaans is widely spoken) and so I had some idea of the basics of both from a very young age, which helped me immeasurably.
Afrikaans is also very close to Dutch (to the point that a Dutch and an Afrikaans speaker can communicate using their respective languages with only minor difficulty, and I’ve managed to leverage my knowledge of Afrikaans to be able to understand most of an article written in Dutch) - so if you know Dutch, it’ll probably be fairly trivial to learn Afrikaans.
Starting with Russian and English… I have very little idea of what Russian is like, so I don’t know what sort of starting point that gives you.
But I think I can safely say that, all else being equal, English would be significantly more difficult to learn than Afrikaans.