weird differences

[ratcreature]

I've been making Anki flashcards to learn vocabulary and grammar and such, and because visual cues help with memorization I do google image searches in the language I'm learning for stuff to put on the cards.

This mostly works fine with Spanish. You enter the Spanish word and you get pictures that work decently as cues, not just for plain objects but also verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and get a kind of visualization of actual word usage. However with Russian words image search results are more often than not completely overrun by internet memes.

That is not useful. (Also you frequently get gross image results for totally harmless words.) Though I guess it might say something about Russian internet culture.

Like if you image search e.g. "a little" in English you get a bunch of images with thumb and index finger a bit apart, which is the kind of thing you might put on a vocabulary flashcard. But if you google "немного" the first page is all internet memes, and you probably don't want to look at these at work or if you are easily disturbed (from nudity to animal harm to racism to execution pictures all kinds of stuff is featured). From what I can tell that is mostly because these come from sites that collect internet meme pictures or something, and the word just appears somewhere on the page.

It's like that with every other word. I mean, concrete nouns are frequently okay, like if you google "дверь" it results in images of doors, but even simple verbs get you a bunch of weird memes, when with other languages they get you pictures of people doing something. Whether you google to work, travailler, trabajar or arbeiten you get fairly similar images. Image searching "работать" meanwhile does not, but lands you in weird internet meme land again.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/__marcelo/]

Wow, that's definitely weird. I wonder if it reflects a (much larger than I assumed) role of "meme mills" (i.e., para-official versions of 4chan) in Russia. Being statistically speaking a single-country language, local political usage of the Internet should have a larger impact than, say, any particular Spanish-speaking country's.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, such meme mills sound definitely like they could cause this. It's a lot of gross stuff (as far as I can tell from the pictures). I certainly did not expect to run into this kind of stuff for googling basic 101 verbs. And it does seem like a reasonable assumption that it is more of a uniform internet culture than with Spanish, because Russian as colonial language spread more in a single, if large, block with the post-Soviet states. Though it is a fairly useful language in Germany too. There are an estimated three million Russian speakers living here.

[http://users.livejournal.com/__marcelo/]

Though it is a fairly useful language in Germany too. There are an estimated three million Russian speakers living here.

This surprised me for about half a second, and then I facepalmed. How quickly do things recede from immediate memory... (for us foreigners; I assume in Germany it's still a pivotal fact).

[ratcreature]

The biggest group of the native Russian speakers are ethnic Germans from Russia who have the right to German citizenship based on ancestry (though they tightened the eligibility rules eventually, because it turned out quite a lot of people suddenly found some German grandparent somewhere...) and settled in largish numbers in Germany when the economy in Russia tanked in the 1990s. I think in total about 2.8 million came after 1989. Many didn't speak German well anymore -- for obvious reasons on top of atrophy over time from ancestors who moved to Russia over a century ago, emphasizing German ancestry and nurturing German language skills in the Soviet Union was not very advisable after two world wars. And plenty were mixed families of ethnic Germans and Russians. (Incidentally the usual "integration" panic ensued about violent, unemployed young men etc. and took over a decade to subside, though of course by now we have the next one...)

The rest is made up from some number of Russian Jews who decided to immigrate to Germany rather than Israel after the Soviet collapse (about 200 000) and finally regular Russian immigrants who come either for education or work, and some with refugee status for their politics or sexual orientation, since the anti-queer sentiment increased so much in Russia recently.

[http://users.livejournal.com/__marcelo/]

Interesting! I love how people's movements, families, and cultures are (usually) much more fluid than national myths would have them be. Ultimately it's all constructed, and re-constructed every day.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, for Germany that kind of thing work even less than usual. I mean, they had to make a really concerted effort to cobble something together.

One obvious language related indicator for that is that the construct is called something different by all its neighbors as is seen in the many names for Germany derived from completely different roots. Hilariously in several Slavic languages the term for Germans is (most likely) derived from "mute" presumably because the language border between Slavic and Germanic languages, like the Polish Niemcy (with the Russians splitting the difference and calling the country "Германия" but Germans "неметцы"). So there you have the classic case that the people just call themselves collectively "people" (as is the root of "Deutsch" derived from), while their neighbors call them "the mutes"...

[http://users.livejournal.com/__marcelo/]

the people just call themselves collectively "people"

That's always funny, if somewhat implicitly racist.