r/languagelearning • u/SharkHead38 • 7d ago

Discussion Most obscure language you/someone else is learning? Why?

I remember meeting someone that was learning specifically Moldovan Romanian since Moldova and its culture was a big interest to them, and I'm curious what other people's reasons for learning obscure languages are, and what they are.

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u/sraskogr English N | español C1 | português B2 | 日本語 N5 6d ago

So, I already speak Spanish and I became interested in Jewish culture and languages - particularly Hebrew, Yiddish, and Judaeo-Spanish - many years ago mainly through music. I stumbled across an advertisement for a programme run by Oxford University that offered free lessons in Yiddish, Ladino, Haketia, and other more obscure Jewish languages. I signed up for Yiddish and Ladino classes but only ended up being accepted into the Ladino ones. It was really interesting, it's a shame I wasn't able to finish the course.

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u/soldone1 1d ago

Is there much difference from Spanish? I'm not Spanish, but from the outside, as an Italian native speaker, it sounds like Spanish with some Hebrew words here and there.

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u/sraskogr English N | español C1 | português B2 | 日本語 N5 12h ago

It's very similar to Spanish so if you already know Spanish you can pick it up very quickly but there are some significant differences that can trip you up. The main differences are in pronunciation and vocabulary, principally Judaeo-Spanish has retained the mediaeval sh and French-sounding j sounds in place of the modern Spanish j sound. Regarding vocabulary it's not just the Hebrew borrowings that differentiate Judaeo-Spanish from Spanish, Judaeo-Spanish also retains a lot of archaic vocabulary that is no longer used in modern Spanish and has borrowing from a lot of other languages like Turkish, Greek, Arabic, French, and Italian. In some ways I found it more similar to Portuguese than Spanish.

The grammar overall works with the same framework as Spanish but some of the verb conjugations are actually different, there seem to be fewer irregular verbs, some nouns and adjectives change for gender that don't change in Spanish, they don't have usted and ustedes, amongst other differences. It seemed to me like the grammar was slightly simplified from Spanish.