wallowinmaya comments on Learn a foreign language to reduce bias? - Less Wrong

10 Post author: AShepard 22 April 2012 03:37PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (37)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: wallowinmaya 22 April 2012 09:47:37PM 5 points [-]

FWIW, I'm from Germany and feel the same way.

I wonder if folks from other countries experience comparable phenomena? Or is German just an unusually annoying language?

Comment author: Gastogh 23 April 2012 05:57:05AM 4 points [-]

I'm a native Finnish speaker and I too have a stronger revulsion towards ugly songs when they're sung in Finnish.

My guess is we just don't mind it as much when it's some other language that's being used to create ugliness. Shortcomings by the (perceived) home team often feel like something that might be held against you, hence the need to signal disapproval more strongly.

Comment author: Romashka 17 January 2015 02:06:53PM 1 point [-]

I'm half-Ukrainian, half-Russian, and I find pop songs in English basically 'comfortable noise', in French 'beautiful exercises in phonetics' (since French 'r's are strikingly different to what I am used to), in Russian 'depressingly monotonous/how do they even think this is to my tastes?', and in Ukrainian... I either think of them as 'derived from Russian', or wait for my favorite lines without paying attention to the rest:)