Parrot Time Magazine

Why These Questions?

So why do people ask these kinds of questions? Most of the time, I think they ask them because they are trying to make themselves known in the new group. Some people like to introduce themselves while others want to post something they feel will get a lot of responses and thus attention to them. This way, they can instantly show they are "into" languages.

This may not be the best strategy though, because most people will have already asked or seen these questions asked before and are tired of them. Personally, whenever I see them now, my eyes just glaze over. Some people will do that, simply ignore them. Some will join in and contribute to the discussion, usually resulting in endless disagreements like I mentioned before. Some may even become hostile towards this, expressing their frustration at seeing such a question yet again being asked when there is no answer and perhaps guessing that the person is just looking for attention.

You Really Want to Know?

Now, it is possible that the new person really wants to know the answer to one of these questions, but I doubt that is the case. Most people that make a practice of dealing with many languages will already understand that these questions are completely subjective and are relative to the person asking, not to anyone else's opinion. It is like a chef asking a group of other chefs "What is the best way to boil an egg?" Each chef will give their personal thoughts and none of them will agree, but it is such a basic question that they do not even consider it one worth answering. They would rather be discussing entire dishes or concepts of cooking.

I am not saying that such questions are entirely without merit. Rather, such a question should be posted in a fixed place with a short answer about how it depends on things like I outlined, then anyone asking should be redirected there. Having these questions replayed over and over has never provided any new insight that I have seen and only end up, at best, taking up time and space and, at worst, starting arguments.

There are other questions that can cause similar problems and are done for similar reasons. One thing that language learners love to do is ask how to translate a word or phrase into as many languages as possible. Forums and chats are flooded with these requests all the time. There are also many web pages that already contain such lists. Perhaps the most popular one is "How do you say 'I love you' in as many languages as possible?". Do a search on that and you will find numerous web pages with lists for it.

Wasting Time

In some ways, these can be even more aggravating then the "Which language is...?" questions, because they are done only to waste time. No one ever needs to know how to say "chicken" in twenty languages. If they are translating something, they will only need it in one other language, and they will need more than just that one word. The only time I have found such a question to have any merit is if someone is doing an etymological research on a word. That is, they are looking at the origins of the word and want to present how it connects across many languages. I wrote a series of articles once doing just that, examining the origins and relationship of words for certain foods like bread, milk and egg. But that was a specific case. When people ask for multiple translations for a word, they are normally doing it just as a fun time waster.

Now some people love these lists and will be appalled that I consider them wastes of time. "Language is not all serious," they would tell me, "sometimes, it is fun to just see different words!" I would agree with that, but being fun does not mean it is not a time waster. Just ask someone caught up in playing Candy Crush about how much time they have wasted on it. Few would even try to justify it as something useful.

If you are in a language learning community with some kind of board or forum for posting things, you will inevitably also get the completely non-language related topics. That is mainly because the people feel like they are in a community of their peers and can then talk about anything. It is good that they feel that way, but that can also cause them to post things that completely irrelevant. Not only does that frustrate people who do not want to talk about lemon pie on a language board (and I certainly would not... pumpkin pie, yes, or even banana cream pie, but not lemon), it can make it harder to find the posts that are on topic. On a large forum, this also contributes to the decline of the forum in speed, since every message has to be gone through whenever a post is shown. I have seen where this became so bad that forum was becoming unusable, but the moderators refused to delete any of the non-language related postings because "someone might like them".

I am sure you can think of particular questions from people that have frustrated you or made you smile and contribute. You have probably also asked some of your own. I know I have asked some simple question and posted some rather pointless topics merely to get people talking. The one thing that is more of a problem for a group than an abundance of trivial posts is the lack of posts of any kind. Many people are afraid to be the first to say something, but will happily respond to what another person writes.

With that perspective, then the "trivial and meaningless" question and requests can play a vital role in the growth and continual health of a group. It is always a matter of finding the proper balance. You want enough to keep things going but not enough that it drives people away. It is not even a single phenomenon: a group will not become active then suddenly die. It will happen in waves, as new people come in and others leave, the group becomes reborn over and over again. People that were there many years before will visit and tell you that it is not "their" group any more because they see so many people they do not know while the ones they knew have largely moved on. That is the nature of groups.

And The Answer Is?

Inevitably, these questions create discussions and debates, but rarely come up with an actual answer. That is always left to the question asking to determine from the various opinions and arguments given. Such answers can never really come from external sources because language learning, or at least the drive behind it, is always personal. Even if someone were to come up with a definitive answer to your question, it may not suit you. For example, if you ask which is the best ice-cream flavor, and everyone tells you “chocolate”, you may find you don't like the taste and really prefer vanilla.

Before you ask one of these questions, I hope you think about why you are asking it and what you really think an answer could be. There really isn't anything wrong with asking, but you might not get the response you thought you would.