Thread: What languages do you speak?

WOW! I'm impressed. Does "splanguish and pig-latin" count?

LIMIT

Originally Posted by LIMIT

WOW! I'm impressed. Does "splanguish and pig-latin" count?

LIMIT

Splangish?? good grief.... just washed my fingers and can't do a
thing with'em.

LIMIT

Native - American English (and yes, it is its own language according to linguists)

Native Fluency - Russian, German

Survival - French, Italian, Spanish

Barely Survival - Thai, Mandarin

Interesting, but useless - Latin, some Egyptian hieroglyphics

"I'll have another beer and bring the mummy one too..."

Originally Posted by nickyspaghetti

I am definately going to bring my children up speaking both English and Polish. I think it gives them a good start with languages(especially as polish is such a complicated one) and makes it easier to learn a third at school. Maybe German, French or Russian. I would love to speak more but I just didn't have the opportunity when I was young to learn in a good environment(damn English education system)

Trivia question: Why is Polish written using the Latin alphabet, but it is a Slavic country?

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Answer: Poland was converted to Christianity by the Roman church and so all the monasteries were Catholic....the same reason Russia uses Cyrillic - converted by the Greeks!

In order for me to pronounce anything in Polish, I have to transliterate it into Cyrillic to get the sounds....bizarre!

I'm fluent in Cantonese -- a very sing-song sounding Chinese dialect, spoken in Hong Kong where I grew up. What gets me is that in written form it is exactly the same as Mandarin, but I can barely understand a word of the latter in spoken form. My father spent more than 30 years as a police officer in Hong Kong (he was born in England from Irish stock and moved to HK to join Her Majesty's police when he turned 18) so his vocabulary in Cantonese is unrivalled for a Gweilo, but his accent is hilariously bad. That tells you something about how hard it is for the Western tongue to learn the totally new and alien sounds of some SouthEast Asian languages!

The only 'white' guy I met who spoke with a 100% local accent was born in HK himself. And it is incredibly difficult for Chinese kids born abroad to get the Cantonese accent right too as they're learning the language almost in a vacuum.

I can get by with French, and my schoolboy German is almost useless until I spend a few days in Germany and it starts flooding back.

Anecdote: when camping in France along the Loire some years ago, a friend and I were queuing up in line to register our pitch and to get some tokens for the showers. There was a Dutch couple, a German couple, and an Italian couple in front of us (sounds like ths start of a corny joke!). Anyway, these couples from different countries were fully able not only to pay and buy tokens by speaking in French, but were also able to hold a sociable conversation with the Frenchman behind the counter. So we step up and in terrible broken French and awful British accents we barely make ourselves understood, running off with some tokens clutched in our hands and shamed by our lack of language skills in comparison to almost every other European people. We are so lazy in the UK with foreign languages!

You have to start learning a foreign language when you are a toddler - just like your native tongue. I had friends who were raising their kids speaking English, Russian, German, and French...each language used for a different topic (ask Mom about dinner in French, ask Dad about the game in German, etc.)...after they were in first grade, they switched topics to expand vocabulary and reading. Apparently, by the time the kids were in middle school, they could switch on the fly. The parents also added after school tutoring in proper grammar (and other topics the US schools omitted, such as world history, penmanship, actual music training) and foreign films, US films with subtitles, foreign news. The kids still had time for playing with friends, doing normal kid stuff. When it came time to take language electives (problem number one in the US...you get a choice as to whether or not you learn a foreign language), I think the kids opted for Spanish, since their German and French was better than the teachers.

You can successfully learn to speak and listen, but not write a language...but it will leave you missing out. To assimilate the language, you must listen, speak, read, and write. Hear someone say the word, you say the word, read the word on a flash card, then write the word. This is especially helpful for new alphabets (Russian, Chinese, etc.). Another trick is to have pictures when learning. Try this:

Say/think of a word. What appears in your mind? Not the word spelled out in letters, but a picture. Say "ball"...and the image of a ball appears in your mind, be it a red rubber toy ball or a football...whatever. Now, say the foreign language word for the same item, let's say Russian: myach (ch like in "match")...as you say or read the new word, think of the picture. Draw the picture on flash cards. This will place the word in your short-term memory. Then, using the word in conversation will move it to the long term memory. That's why phrase books are helpful, only if you chat with people.

I learned Russian while in the Army. The language school in Monterey has a 70% attrition rate for Level 4 languages (Russian, Chinese, Korean, etc.). You learned or spent the remainder of your enlistment as a cook. The school was run by Russians, not native-born Americans, so the standards demanded European performance levels, no pushing people through so their self-esteem would remain in tact. We were given the equivalent of 4 years of college Russian in 47 weeks - 8 hours a day in class, 6 hours of study after class (some required, other voluntary). I went to Basic and then later to Intermediate Russian, with 2 4 week refreshers in Munich where the training moved from language to linguistics. After I left the Army, I didn't use my Russian daily for nearly 10 years. Then I went to Moscow to work. For a week, I felt like I was brain dead....then, the flood gates opened. Most of the Russians thought I was a Russian, just born in the US of Russian parents.

There is also some belief that language and mathematics are at odds with each other in the brain, using opposite sides. 2+2 will always be 4, but language changes and you have to use context, emotions, and nuance to understand. I suck at math, but I'm not sure if this rule holds true for everyone.

Всего Хорошего! Good luck!

I speak
American English - native (originally from Ohio but half my life in Oklahoma and Texas - so I speak Yankee and Reb).

French - a minor degree in college and several visits to France starting as an 11 year old exchange student to Montmorency a suburb of Paris. (Helped my accent tremendously!)

A fair amount of Spanish, a smattering of German and a phrase or two in Pakistani (urdu -spelling?), Norweigian, Chinese, and Dutch.

Want to learn a ton about your native language, study a foreign language. Comparing and contrasting differences is amazingly illuminating

Originally Posted by WireBeard

Native - American English (and yes, it is its own language according to linguists)

Tis not, according to John Cleese "Letter to America"

"2. There is no such thing as "US English". We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take account of the reinstated letter 'u' and the elimination of -ize."




Nenad

Native language: Swedish (can understand Danish and Norwegian as well).

Possibly fluent in: English (either British or US, both, or none).

Beer-ordering fluency in: French, Spanish, and possibly German (ein bier, bitte).

Odd words known in: Russian, Finnish, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Arabic, and possibly other languages as well.

Originally Posted by superfly

Tis not, according to John Cleese "Letter to America"

"2. There is no such thing as "US English". We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take account of the reinstated letter 'u' and the elimination of -ize."




Nenad

Really? Say "give me a fag" in New York and in London and compare the results.....