Update

human_language.md

@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ Human language is a social construct so according to [pseudoleftists](pseudoleft
 
 Languages are sadly often what easily divides people into groups and so fuels [fascism](fascism.md), specifically [nationalism](nationalism.md).
 
-Let's also add that human languages don't have to be just spoken ones -- in a wider sense we can also include sign languages, visual languages etc., but in this article we'll implicitly assume spoken ones. These languages are also often tightly connected to their writing systems and scripts, but we should be aware of the fact that a language and the way it is written are two separate things.
+It's worthy of reminding ourselves that human languages don't have to be limited to spoken ones, we mustn't forget sign languages, visual languages etc., but in this article we'll be predominantly concerned with the spoken ones and assume them implicitly. Spoken languages are also often tightly connected to their writing systems and scripts, but we should be aware of the fact that a language and the way it is written are also two separate things.
 
 **Why are human languages so hard for computers to handle?** Well, firstly there are minor annoyances like syntactic ambiguity, irregularities, redundancy, complex rules of grammar -- for example the sentence "I know Bob likes computers, and so does John." can either mean that John knows that Bob likes computers or that both Bob and John like computers. Things like this can be addressed by designing the [grammar](grammar.md) unambiguously, but analyzing already existing natural languages suffers by this. Furthermore in real life there are countless quirks of playing with language, things like sacrasm, parody, exaggerations, indirect hints, politeness, rhetorical questions, fau pax, memes and references. For example when we think of imperative, we imagine sentences such as "Close the window." -- in real life we'll rather say something like "I'm cold, it wouldn't hurt to close the window.", i.e. something that's semantically an imperative but not syntactically, a dumb computer would deduce here we are stating a fact that closing the window will not hurt anyone; it takes human-like intelligence AND experience in how the real life works and abilities like being able to guess feelings and plans of others to correctly conclude this sentence in fact means "Please close the window." Just try to talk to someone for a while and focus on what the sentences mean literally and what they actually imply. So things revolving around this are pose the first issue, but yet a greater issue dwells in how to actually define meanings of words -- human language is not just "text strings" as it might seem on the first glance, behind the text strings lies a deep understanding of the extremely complex [real world](irl.md). More details of the issues of semantic will be given below.
 
@@ -42,7 +42,9 @@ This issue is very hard to solve, maybe impossible. It seems that due to the ext
 
 UNDER CONSTRUCTION
 
-This section lists some of the most notable human languages. In the brackets there will be additional information about the language such as the number of native speakers, translation of the sentence "What's your name" (in *italics*) or three most common letters/sounds (between [ and ] brackets).
+Recommendation for a [fun](fun.md) activity: a cool hobby for long winter nights is to compare various passages of text in different languages, you get to discover hilarious words this way. A way to do this is to take a famous movie (Pulp Fiction for instance) and download subtitles in many different languages, or do the same with a famous book, or take a look at some translations of [libre](libre.md) games etc.
+
+This section will now list some of the most notable human languages. In the brackets there will be additional information about the language such as the number of native speakers, translation of the sentence "What's your name" (in *italics*) or three most common letters/sounds (between [ and ] brackets).
 
 - **Indo-European languages** (~3 B native speakers): Most common language family, originating in Eurasia.
   - **Germanic languages** (~500 M native speakers): Come from Scandinavia.
@@ -138,6 +140,7 @@ Here are some tips for learning foreign languages:
 - If you want to get super serious and git gud even at pronunciation, there are techniques such as shadowing (trying to speak over native speaker recordings, imitating them) etc. But this is not needed if you just want to communicate or if you don't even talk to people [in real life](irl.md), it's just for nerds who wanna flex probably.
 - **Necessity teaches best**. Literally needing the language, e.g. due to having moved to another country, reliably leads to learning it.
 - Especially if you're learning your first foreign language: be ready, make no assumptions about the new language based on your native language, different language may break all the rules of your language and importantly: different language is not just different words and grammar, it is also a **different [CULTURE](culture.md)**, reflecting the needs and necessities of the people using it. Forget EVERYTHING you think you know and that you assume should hold, many words and sentences will be UNTRANSLATABLE. There will be many rules that make ZERO logical sense, for example a word may have different spelling in different contexts just because, or there will be many words for something that in your language only has one name, just don't ask why, it simply is so. The new language may for example have various politeness levels -- different ways of says "you" for instance, depending on whom you are addressing -- which will have no counterpart in English; there may be completely different tenses and cases, grammatical concepts you never heard of, words may have unclear translations or unexpected connotations, it may be uncommon to make [jokes](jokes.md) you're used to make (for example in [Czech](czech.md) it's not common to make [puns](pun.md) as much as in English), certain phrases will be used much more or much less frequently (e.g. in English it's pretty common to hear family members say "I love you" to one another, but this isn't common in many other languages), in some languages it's very common to greet strangers with many different phrases etc. Don't try to understand these differences logically, these are historical and cultural features which are sometimes untraceable leftovers from something that's already gone, you just have to learn it all by listening and using the language, you can't memorize it.
+- **The difficulty of learning a language depends on how close it is to the closest language you already know**. This is just a fact that can help you decide what to learn or understand why a supposedly "easy" language is very difficult for you -- if you're Italian, you'll learn Spanish very easily, if you're German, you'll learn English very easily etc. This is also why polyglots learn languages with seemingly low effort: it becomes easier and easier to learn languages the more of them you know because they somewhat overlap.
 - ...
 
 ## See Also