Go在俄语中的意思居然是这样？我再也不抱怨英语难学了......
通篇看下来，文章列举了很多语言中的“怪癖”以及独特语言系统，看完我长舒一口气——英语听起来真的是好学太多了。别的不说，至少我们的26个字母都是从罗马文里面借过来的，首先在字母表这一关上，我们就已经赢在起跑线上了。
跟着大白一起来读读这篇文章吧。
When considering which foreign languages to study, some people shy away from those that use a different alphabet. Those random-looking squiggles seem to symbolise the impenetrability of the language, the difficulty of the task ahead.
当考虑学习哪种外语时，有些人会回避那些使用不同字母的语言。那些看似随意的歪歪斜斜的符号似乎象征着语言的不可穿透性，以及任务的艰难性。
So it can be surprising to hear devotees of Russian say the alphabet is the easiest part of the job. The Cyrillic script, like the Roman one, has its origins in the Greek alphabet. As a result, some letters look the same and are used near identically. Others look the same but have different pronunciations, like the Pin Cyrillic, which stands for an r-sound. For Russian, that cuts the task down to only about 20 entirely new characters. These can comfortably be learned in a week, and soon mastered to the point that they present little trouble. An alphabet, in other words, is just an alphabet. A few tricks aside (such as the occasional omission of vowels), other versions do what the Roman one does: represent sounds.
因此，当听到俄语爱好者说字母表是学习中最容易的部分时，你可能会感到惊讶。西里尔字母和罗马字母一样，起源于希腊字母。因此，一些字母看起来相同，使用也几乎相同。其他的看起来一样，但是发音不同，比如代表r音的Pin Cyrillic。对于俄罗斯人来说，这就把学习任务减少到只有大约20个全新的字母。这些技巧可以在一周内轻松地学会，而且很快就能掌握，不会造成什么麻烦。换句话说，字母表只是一个字母表。除了一些技巧(比如偶尔省略元音)，其他版本的字母也都和罗马字母一样:代表声音。
Foreign languages really become hard when they have features that do not appear in your own—things you never imagined you would have to learn. Which is another way of saying that languages slice up the messy reality of experience in strikingly different ways.
当外语具有你自己的语言所不具备的特点时，它们才真正变得困难起来——你从未想象过有一天你必须学习这些东西。这是另一种说法，即语言以惊人的不同方式将混乱的现实经验分割开来。
This is easily illustrated with concrete vocabulary. Sometimes the meanings of foreign words and their English equivalents overlap but don’t match exactly. Danish, for instance, does not have a word for “wood”; it just uses “tree” (trae). Or consider colours, which lie on a spectrum that different languages segment differently. In Japanese, ao traditionally refers to both green and blue. Some green items are covered by a different word, midori, but aoapplies to some vegetables and green traffic lights (which, to make matters more confusing, are slightly blueish in Japan). As a result, ao is rather tricky to wield.
用具体的词汇来说明会更加容易。有时外来词和它们的英语对等词的意思重叠，但不完全匹配。例如，丹麦语中没有表示“木头”的单词;它只使用了“tree”(trae)。或者想想颜色吧，它们位于一个光谱上，但不同的语言以不同的方式划分。在日本，“ao”通常指的是绿色和蓝色。有些绿色物品被另一个词“midori”涵盖，而“aoi”则适用于一些蔬菜和绿色交通灯(更让人困惑的是，在日本，绿色交通灯是略带蓝色的)。因此，“ao”在使用上相当棘手。
Life becomes tougher still when other languages make distinctions that yours ignores. Russian splits blue into light (goluboi) and dark (sinii); foreigners can be baffled by what to call, say, a mid-blue pair of jeans. Plenty of other “basic” English words are similarly broken down in their foreign corollaries. “Wall” and “corner” seem like simple concepts, until you learn languages that sensibly distinguish between a city’s walls and a bedroom’s (German Mauerversus Wand), interior corners and street corners (Spanish rincónand esquina), and so on.
当其他语言的区别被你的语言所忽视时，生活会变得更加艰难。俄语将蓝色分为浅色（goluboi）和深色（sinii）；外国人可能会对称呼它们例如“一条中蓝色的牛仔裤”而感到困惑。很多其他的 '基本 '英语单词也同样被分解成了外国语的对应词。在你学会某些语言之前，'墙 '和 '角 '似乎是很简单的概念。这些语言能够合理区分城市的墙和卧室的墙（德语Mauerversus Wand），室内角落和街角（西班牙语rincón和esquina），等等。
These problems are tractable on their own; you don’t often have to refer to a corner in casual conversation. But when other languages make structural distinctions missing from your native tongue—often in the operation of verbs—the mental effort seems never-ending. English has verbs-of-all-work that seem straightforward enough until you try to translate them. In languages like German, “put” is divided into verbs that signify hanging, laying something flat and placing something tall and thin. “Go” in Russian is a nightmare, with a suite of verbs distinguishing walking and travelling by vehicle, one-way and round trips, single and repeated journeys, and other niceties. You can specify all these things in English if you want to; the difference is that in Russian, you must.
这些问题本身是可以解决的;在日常谈话中，你不需要在闲谈中经常提到某个角落。但是，当其他语言的结构区别在你的母语中缺失时——通常是在动词的操作方面——你在脑力上的努力似乎是永无止境的。英语里的“万能动词”似乎很简单，除非你试着去翻译它们。在德语等语言中，“put”被分为表示悬挂、平放东西和放置高瘦东西的动词。“Go”在俄语中是一个噩梦，一套动词来区分步行和乘车、单程和往返、单次和多次旅行，以及其他一些细节。如果你愿意，你可以用英语分别指定所有这些东西;不同的是，在俄语中，你必须这么做。
Sometimes verb systems force choices on speakers not only for individual verbs, but for all of them. Many English-speakers are familiar with languages, such as French and Italian, which have two different past tenses, for completed actions and for habitual or continued ones. But verb systems get much more exotic than that.
有时，动词系统不仅迫使说话者对个别动词作出选择，而且必须对所有动词作出选择。许多说英语的人都熟悉法语和意大利语等语言，它们有两种不同的过去时，一种用于完成动作，另一种用于习惯或继续动作。但动词系统比这要奇特得多。
“Evidential” languages require a verb ending that shows how the speaker knows that the statement made is true. Turkish is one of them; others, such as a cluster in the Amazon, have particularly complex—and obligatory—evidentiality rules. Many languages mark subjects and direct objects of sentences in distinct ways. But in Basque, subjects of intransitive verbs (those that take no direct object) look like direct objects themselves, while subjects of transitive verbs get a special form. If Martin catches sight of Diego, Basques say the equivalent of “Martineksees Diego.”
“证据性”语言要求有一个动词结尾，表明说话者如何知道所做的陈述是真的。土耳其语就是其中之一;其他的，比如亚马逊河流域的一个部落，有特别复杂和强制性的证据规则。许多语言用不同的方式标记句子的主语和直接宾语。但在巴斯克语中，不及物动词(不带直接宾语的动词)的主语看起来就像直接宾语本身，而及物动词的主语则有一种特殊的形式。如果马丁看到了迭戈，巴斯克人就会说相当于 'Martineksees Diego'的话。
In the end, the “hard” languages to learn are not those that do what your own language does in a new way. They are the ones that make you constantly pay attention to distinctions in the world that yours blithely passes over. It is a bit like a personal trainer putting you through entirely new exercises. You might have thought yourself fit before, but the next day you will wake up sore in muscles you never knew you had.
最后，那些难学的语言并不是像你的母语那样是以一种新的方式来学习的语言。它们会让你不断地注意到这个世界上的不同之处，而你却轻松地忽略了它们。这有点像私人教练让你进行全新的锻炼。以前你可能觉得自己很健康，但第二天醒来时，你会浑身酸痛，这是你从未意识到的。