Nice!
I should learn them all, since I didn’t even know their existence. 
So is a school of fish a thing?
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My favorite one is a murder of crows (thanks Justified).
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I’m quite sure this is an Indoeuropean universalism. Being a society of herdsman, they developed a rich vocabulary to describe their livestock accurately, like when trading it. Icelandic has different words for horses and sheep depending on colour and age, Rumantsch has a rich vocabulary for all kinds of sheep.
OTOH, Ancient Greek can just change the article to change a word’s gender: ὁ βοῦς ‘the bull’ ἡ βοῦς ‘the cow’.
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Certainly. In fact it’s a more normal and well known collective noun. My compendium of collective nouns also lists catch, haul, kettle and scale (a mistranscription of school/shoal) of fish.
However a lot of these things just seem made up to me. I’ve never heard used or used myself “a retinue of players” or “a neverthriving of jugglers” for example.
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It was a nice touch in the first episode of Walking with Dinosaurs that the narrator described a group of Coelophysis (superficially raptorlike basal theropods) as a “flock”, highlighting them as stem-birds. 20+ years later, paleo-art now often shows them with feathers…
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Hey there. I speak Russian, Ukrainian, English, some intermediate in Japanese,(although I haven’t used it for months and naturally getting worse) and actively learning German.
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I speak fluently German (my mother tongue), French (I live in France), English (I spend way too much time on the internet lmao) and I am learning Mandarin. If I ever get to it I’d love to learn Russian too. 
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Swedish and English fluently.
Some German, Russian and Chinese.
Beginner Japanese and Korean.
Next I will learn Greek, which seems like one of the most interesting languages in the world even though it is only spoken by a very small number of people. Persian is also high on the “want to learn but don’t really have time” list.
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I’d be up to learn Greek and Persian with you.
I have a history of repeatedly beginning and failing Japanese…
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I would be up for that. I can start at the end of April. It is not very structured though and has mostly consisted of Duolingo, Memrise, various other resources, translating random texts and attempting to talk to people.
The main thing that I found difficult in Japanese was the particles and when they are used, the verb endings and when they are used (verb endings in Korean = kill me), and some constructs like “if x then y”. The different use cases of は and が are particularly frustrating.
Some things are very similar to Chinese so I think it makes it much easier to learn Mandarin first (probably traditional rather than simplified). For example, you recognize much more than 50% of all frequently used kanji, probably 2/3 or even 75%. Some particles are also very similar to their Chinese counterparts:
の = 的
も = 也
The grammar is entirely different, though. Chinese has very little grammar, which mostly consists of word order and some recurring constructs – it is also “subject - verb - object” unlike the funny “subject - object - verb” as in Japanese and Korean. You very much get the impression that when the Chinese language came to the island of Japan at some point in history, they thought: “We can fix this!”
Try learning Mandarin before Japanese? 
In every language (and perhaps skill) that I have learned, I have encountered a big obstacle that seems impossible to surpass. It is not clear that this obstacle exists in the very beginning, but you reach it relatively early. Once you are past it, it seems easy when you look back, but it was really hard. But you can always do it as long as you persist, even by rote learning. Even grammar can be learned without really understanding it, in the “I know how it works but I can’t describe it” way. I can see this obstacle very clearly in Japanese.
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This is the usual sentence structure in Latin.
There is a good old joke:
1st student: “I’ve made it twenty pages through my Cicero book.”
2nd student: “Oh, really? What’s it about?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t reached the verb yet.”
See Subject–object–verb word order - Wikipedia for other examples.
I’m reminded of this video (actually, one of three) that NativLang made about the Mongolic language family (aka Mongolian & co.), which uses SOV.
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There are six possible sentence structures, each of which has a Wikipedia article.
The two object-initial orders seem to be the rarest, then the verb-initial orders. SVO has the largest speakership, but SOV appears in the most languages.
| abrv. | full | example | example languages |
|---|---|---|---|
| VSO | verb-subject-object | stroked girl cat | Welsh, Arabic, Tagalog, Maori |
| VOS | verb-object-subject | stroked cat girl | Ojibwa, Malagasy, Yucatec Mayan |
| SVO | subject-verb-object | girl stroked cat | English, French, Greek, Std. Chinese |
| SOV | subject-object-verb | girl cat stroked | Latin, Korean, Japanese, Mongolian |
| OVS | object-verb-subject | cat stroked girl | Huarijio, Hixkaryana, Urarina |
| OSV | object-subject-verb | cat girl stroked | Xavante, Jamamadi, Kayabi |
One thing I wonder is why Latin, in its metamorphosis into the Romance languages, always shifted from SOV to SVO.
My best guess is that Western European Romance languages were influenced by the SVO order of Frankish (a Germanic language), which would make sense as we can tell they borrowed a lot of Frankish vocabulary. In Eastern Europe, meanwhile, Slavic languages with their SVO orders would have influenced Romanian.
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Instead of fighting with grammar, why not spend time reading in the target language? In German, I can either whine about all the irregularities in the language, or ignore them and enjoy fantasy books, getting better at the language without putting in much effort. After three months of reading, and knowing passively ~700 words beforehand, I can even read SCP articles in German and understand them satisfyingly, having read 2 articles. And I started with reading just one page daily!(~150 words) Same method I used with English, just read and enjoy yourself
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Yeah, that is a very effective way to learn a new language. It’s basically how I learned french.
The linguist Stephen Krashen worked his whole life on this subject - I’m sure you will like his findings. (And he is a wholesome, funny lecturer too. ^^ 
)
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Slavic languages with their SVO orders would have influenced Romanian.
Slavic languages, even if have a predominant word order, are not obliged to follow one. The language has a plenty of grammatical constructions that make, say, using “I”, in many cases, superfluous. You’re given the freedom to structure sentences however you wish.
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In my opinion, grammar is important and I always recommend people to learn in a systematic way.
Sometimes foreigners think they know, but they actually don’t, and as a native I can tell what they skipped.
By the way, in Greek we can mix the word order and still make sense, it’s not as rigid as English or Korean.
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Grammar is necessary, and it’s fine to spend some 15 minutes daily on it, but it shouldn’t be one’s primary focus, Gia.
so much editing, sigh
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I never said one should only read grammar (I don’t think anyone would say that, because it sounds obviously counter-productive) but I’m also cautious to not present what I prefer as absolute.
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Glad we’ve reached an agreement. Someone like you has got to remind us lazy punks to do the drills! 
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Is “Only a Sith deals in absolutes” an absolute?
- yes
- no
0 voters
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