this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2025
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I don't understand how Europeans pretend to not understand each other, like you have to be lying if you don't understand it instantly
Writing is much easier than speech
I think partially it's that people's eyes just sort of glaze over when they see a foreign language, because they're afraid a false friend or wrong context-based assumption will screw them over, or because they're otherwise just expecting it to be harder.
Not to mention that being able to parse French like this for me is making use of knowledge of several different languages which loaned different French words at different times and might use the same loans differently; as well as making use of my past exposure to French; so a text like this might be harder to parse for someone with less exposure to French, and fewer other (esp. Western European) languages under their belt.
My native language is a romance language, so I can make an educated guess in one of those most of the time and be 80% accurate, more or less. Same with germanic languages, but that's because I know English and studied German in college. But from there to confidently translate stuff or be certain I'm not falling to the traps u mentioned, there's a really long way.
Then, trying that with the linguistic lacunae that are languages like Basque, Balkan languages, Finnish, Russian, Polish, and so on, it's impossible.