by Flemming Funch
Languages and accents can be fun to study. This site has 297 different people from a great variety of different places read the same English sentence.
When I did improv acting some years ago, I was studying accents a bit. In an interesting roundabout way, as one would try to sound like an English speaker who comes from India or Spain or France or something, without making any attempt of learning the actual language. Native speakers of different languages will do a bunch of very specific things when they speak. A Spanish speaker will speak very forward in the mouth for example. So there are courses and tapes for learning just the accent, by mimicking the mechanical aspects of how one speaks.
On the subject of languages, for a moment I got the idea that it would be fun to try to learn the numbers in a great many languages, or make a site that catalogued them. No useful purpose, really, but it could be some kind of hobby. Not that I need one. Well, I'm glad I didn't, because somebody already did it really thoroughly. Here are the numbers from 1 to 10 in over 4000 languages. Sheesh, I can only count in about nine different languages.
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