5 ms·

How long did that take?

markvdb 6y ago
It was complicated quite a bit by the fact I never lived there full time: - started summer 2013 - kept up the anki thing for about half a year - spent about 30% of my time there in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 15% of 2017 - regularly had Latvian friends visit since 2018
- ACS_Solver 6y ago
  I'm impressed! I'm a native Latvian speaker, and am not used to the idea of foreigners learning the language, let alone someone who doesn't live in Latvia full-time. As speakers of a small, globally unimportant language that's not even mutually intelligible with its only surviving relative, we tend to be very impressed with foreigners that can put even basic sentences together.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    > not even mutually intelligible with its only surviving relative Wikipedia lists four surviving descendants of the Eastern Baltic branch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_languages#Eastern_Baltic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_languages#Eastern_Balti... : Latvian, Latgalian, Lithuanian and Samogitian. Though apparently Latgalian and Samogitian are frequently considered dialects of Latvian and Lithuanian respectively. So in a way it's tautological that related languages don't have high mutual intelligibility since otherwise they'd likely be considered dialects of the same language.
    - ACS_Solver 6y ago
      It's not necessarily tautological because of how fluid the language/dialect distinction itself is, and often related to politics. The treatment of Latgalian as a Latvian dialect is certainly at least somewhat political, there's a case to be made for it being a different language. But for a counter-example, take the Scandinavian languages. They're always treated as different languages, even though they're highly mutually intelligible. Then there are the Czech and Slovak languages, extremely similar but not considered dialects.
  - markvdb 6y ago
    Thank you for the kind words. It's incredible how many doors even basic language skills opened...

It was complicated quite a bit by the fact I never lived there full time: - started summer 2013 - kept up the anki thing for about half a year - spent about 30% of my time there in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 15% of 2017 - regularly had Latvian friends visit since 2018

ACS_Solver 6y ago
I'm impressed! I'm a native Latvian speaker, and am not used to the idea of foreigners learning the language, let alone someone who doesn't live in Latvia full-time. As speakers of a small, globally unimportant language that's not even mutually intelligible with its only surviving relative, we tend to be very impressed with foreigners that can put even basic sentences together.
- yorwba 6y ago
  > not even mutually intelligible with its only surviving relative Wikipedia lists four surviving descendants of the Eastern Baltic branch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_languages#Eastern_Baltic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_languages#Eastern_Balti... : Latvian, Latgalian, Lithuanian and Samogitian. Though apparently Latgalian and Samogitian are frequently considered dialects of Latvian and Lithuanian respectively. So in a way it's tautological that related languages don't have high mutual intelligibility since otherwise they'd likely be considered dialects of the same language.
  - ACS_Solver 6y ago
    It's not necessarily tautological because of how fluid the language/dialect distinction itself is, and often related to politics. The treatment of Latgalian as a Latvian dialect is certainly at least somewhat political, there's a case to be made for it being a different language. But for a counter-example, take the Scandinavian languages. They're always treated as different languages, even though they're highly mutually intelligible. Then there are the Czech and Slovak languages, extremely similar but not considered dialects.
- markvdb 6y ago
  Thank you for the kind words. It's incredible how many doors even basic language skills opened...