• SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Someone I know who is learning English just told me yesterday after a difficult task that he’s on his last few cell brains. He meant brain cells. The order in which words are spoken are often reversed from Spanish to English and the results from a new speaker are often quite humorous.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        When I was starting to learn dutch I commonly said the dutch word for “doctor” when I meant a medical doctor, because in every other language I knew at the time (my mother tongue and 2 other languages I learned at school) you could use the same word for both “medical doctor” and “somebody with a doctorate” (though in English you can also use “physician”).

        Dutch does NOT use the same word for both and in fact it’s quite different (“arts” for the medical one, “doktor” for the other one), which was a really hard one to adjust to because of just how uniquelly so (within my experience) that was.

        When you trip on something like that again and again you definitely just have to roll with it and mentally go “Oops, I did it again” ;)

        • BigAssFan@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          In Dutch you can generally replace ‘arts’ with ‘dokter’ whenever you like. ‘Arts’ is a bit more highbrow though.