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Hi guys,
languages are wonderful, each unique and unlock millions of possible contact with people. In addition, they represent strong identity and cultural marker
We all speak at least one, probably two of you are from Europe, and we'll encounter lots of them in our lifetime.
I speak French and English, obviously, but Spanish too, quite well I must say, and I'm leaning Russian (I had one semester at school and now on my own.). It a lot of fun ! Finally learning a non European / latin language.
I have always been interested by Russian, and I'll soon need it for my job so it's a double win !
If have time one day in my life I would like to learn an Asian language, probably Japanese.
There are languages I absolutely to want to learn though, or should I say one language: Dutch.
Sorry guys, but I have been in the Netherlands and it absolutely hurt my ears !
I'm confident it is, for me, the ugliest one I have ever heard (even worse than arabian).
What languages are you speaking ? Reading ? Are you interested by learning new ones ? And why ?

I have a few years of high school french, and some german from college. At this point, I’ve forgotten most of it. I should really brush up and review it before it fades completely.

If I had to pick up a new language, I’d go for Spanish. Fairly practical here.

Fluent in Dutch, English and Portuguese, and of course my mother tongue Limburgs.
Proficient in German, and can just about order from a menu or in a bar in French. Considering picking up Spanish, as it's already so close to Portuguese I can mostly read it already anyway.
Am also considering taking a course or two in translating and starting up a small business translating texts as it's something I can do while away from home for work, time I otherwise just waste (when offshift, of course).

 godardc wrote:
What languages are you speaking ? Reading ? Are you interested by learning new ones ? And why ?

Finnish(native), english and japanese. In theory I'm expected to know swedish as that's mandatory subject in Finland but let's just say I'm not even confident I can count to 10 anymore...

Enough languages for me. I'm reasonably fluent and read books in Japanese but always more you can learn from there I don't even know how many words I have ran into in that language. I stopped counting around 3400 kanji letters and 30,000 words...

 Nevelon wrote:
I have a few years of high school french, and some german from college. At this point, I’ve forgotten most of it. I should really brush up and review it before it fades completely.

If I had to pick up a new language, I’d go for Spanish. Fairly practical here.

Unfortunately, living near New York City, the amount of illegals here almost forces you to learn Spanish. It makes me refuse to do so. If I can’t order a damn coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts in America in English, I have a problem with that. And before we get started, no, I refuse to use the term “undocumented”. People who come into the country illegally are illegal. Softening the term to make them feel better is not gonna happen.

And yes, I recognize there are a lot of legal citizens who speak that language primarily. And my problem stems from the refusal to learn English fluently (again, not all, but a lot; especially in my region). This bothers me for another reason; if you move to a country, you should learn that country’s language fluently. I would not expect to move to Russia or Japan and have everyone around me learn English for me. Again, I recognize that problem doesn’t exist everywhere, but around New York City it is absolutely a thing. I know it sucks to single out a single language group, but only one group in this area does what I’m saying.

A further addendum, because I don’t want it to come across that I’m just angry and bitter. I have literally zero problem with people sharing their heritage, keeping it alive, and respecting where they came from. Perfectly OK. And I’ll be the last person to say that that’s a problem. What is the problem is forcing that culture onto me, by not allowing me to do something like order a cup of coffee in English in America from Dunkin’ Donuts. I use this example because it has happened numerous times. My wife has had it happen to her in Dutchess when ordering a meal, I’ve had it happen in Dunkin’ more times than I can count, and it is frustrating.

My main 2 are English and Japanese. I'd say my Japanese is getting pretty good at this stage, though it's a tricky one, and there are a lot of "you just have to know it" moments. But I've got quite a few friends at this stage who don't speak English, and that feels pretty good.
On the plus side, not dissimilar to how romance languages kind of unlock each other, it means that I can get the gist of written Chinese and old Korean sometimes, without having any idea how anything sounds.

I've got semi-okay French. I used to be dead good, but that was probably close to 6 years ago now... I'd have to brush up pretty hard to even come close to how I was, but being on the opposite side of the planet isn't much of a motivator. Even longer ago than that, after a student exchange thing, I got pretty decent at German, but I think almost all of that is utterly lost now.

I can read Korean, and I know a few phrases etc., and if I'm trying hard, I can kind of get by with listening, but I never got good. I like to blame everyone there for speaking English to me, which made me lazy, and the South Gyeongnam accent, where I lived, which is really really rough and broad. It'd be like sending a kid from Shanghai to live in Belfast. My vocal cords could never properly get a foothold on it, which is usually something I don't struggle with when it comes to languages and accents.

I also have a really bad habit of just automatically tagging in other languages without thinking if I'm having a conversation and can't recall a word. Used to happen in school a lot between German and French. But a few months back I met a French guy downtown, and we spoke a bit of French together... but to my shame, I kept saying "の" because I was too drunk to remember "de", which is a fething rookie level mistake of profound proportions.

Tried my hand at Chinese and just couldn't do it. Tonality totally kills me.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

tneva82 wrote:
[I stopped counting around 3400 kanji letters and 30,000 words...

...先生...

I'm jealous! I really want to get that good. Reading/writing are easily my weakest points.

English (native tongue), Spanish and French. I tried my hand at starting German via the Duolingo iPad app but didn't get very far. Would love to learn something 'exotic' like Japanese but I fear that I am getting too old to start something complicated that requires attention. As Homer Simpson says, "whenever I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain!".

German, french (well yeah of course i understand it but my accents terrible oh wonder and it is a bit rusty allbeit i still understand most of what people are talking about) English and swiss german which basically allows me to somewhat pick up what dutch people want from me funnily enough.

Most usefull, i guess english to a degree (as a philosophy student it's quite usefull for looking over the border of your own plate but to a degree since the academic discussion over here in what you could call german sphere is quite a bit diffrent in many degrees and prevalent theories).

I also have a really bad habit of just automatically tagging in other languages without thinking if I'm having a conversation and can't recall a word. Used to happen in school a lot between German and French. But a few months back I met a French guy downtown, and we spoke a bit of French together... but to my shame, I kept saying "の" because I was too drunk to remember "de", which is a fething rookie level mistake of profound proportions.

If you mix it up enough you get swiss standard german or french, yes these are distinct from french french and german german, because of what is called helvetisms aka loanwords that got integrated, mostly french and german but also with the ocasional italian and funnily enough quite a bit off "jidisch(?)"

I used to be OK at German, but once I got to a level I just couldn't get it. I like it as a language and can understand a good portion of rammstein songs. I'd like to know finnish so I can understand korpiklaani songs, but not enough to actually learn it.

Danish (native), English, German and French....in descending order of practical usability.

I would really like to learn Chinese (Mandarin).

 posermcbogus wrote:

...先生...

I'm jealous! I really want to get that good. Reading/writing are easily my weakest points.

Mind you I can't all that well by hand and I can't USE all those words fluently and there's plenty of "what was that word again" on plenty of the rarer cases. Many of those are I run into one book and that's it.

Sometimes feel like author of book wants to use some word or two nobody else in Japan has used before

Fluent in English and Serbo-Croatian, basic Spanish, and am learning Russian.

Hey, Dakka is a pretty multi lingual forum it appears ! Glad to see many people speak some french. When I was in Ohio, lots of people knew at least some French, but I have to agree it's kinda difficult if it's not your mother tongue.
I'm surper afraid of learning Italian or Portuguese because I'm scared of mixing everything with my Spanish and that, I don't want to.
Italian sounds very pretty too me though, more than Spanish.
Never tried to read a real book in Spanish although I'm currently reading Pet Cemetery in English and read The Horus Heresy book one: Betrayal lol

Learning Norwegian at the moment. Reading is pretty straight forward, speaking it as a bark however.

BTW on the subject of language learning what has been the hardest thing for you?

For me in english it was irregular verbs. The words cannot describe the sheer hate I felt toward THOSE buggers. One of my biggest sense of reliefs I got when I started japanese studies was there is just handful of verbs that conjugate irregularly that you need to worry about. I let out huge sigh of relief over that

Same subject haunted me during swedish lessons at school. Irregular verbs should be banned by law!

I always found the subjunctive tense in Spanish difficult to fathom as there isn't really an equivalent in English I don't believe, or rather if there is, it isn't used much. Either way, I remember it being puzzling 20 years ago when I did my Spanish A level.

With Russian the immediate hurdle was learning the cyrillic alphabet. Now that I'm ok with that, my biggest issue is false friends; words seemingly identical to, in my case Serbo-Croatian, but with significantly different meanings.

I briefly investigated learning Hindi with Duolingo (I work in IT for an Indian company), but found the new alphabet intimidating... I may try again while we're locked down.

I move a lot for work and seem to be working my way down the list of world's largest languages.

So native English speaker (or whatever it is we talk in NY public schools)
Some kitchen and HS Spanish.
Decent enough Japanese (being married Mrs Kyoto doesn't hurt)
Some Chinese (mostly forgotten)
Some Hindi (obliterated by Arabic)
Arabic WIP

I have concluded that of them, they all have interesting ideas, but not a one is well designed.

Nouns should not have genders (fie on thee Hindi and Arabic, at least Spanish used them somewhat consistantly)

I am not convinced that plurals are needed either (that's Japanese and Chinese there)

Totally not convinced that tenses are needed when modifying nouns can do the work (Chinese)

Arabic has some neat ideas for building from 3 letter words to make more complex ideas (JMAe, to gather, builds to make worlds like society, university, group, and mosque depending on what vowels and consonants you add), but needs more distinct vowels and consonants to make it work (how many As does a language need?).

Characters are a neat idea, especially how basic radicals build to more complex ideas (this is Chinese and Japanese of course) but divorcing writing from speaking entirely just is not practical. EVERYONE who used Chinese characters (Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Mongolia) ended up replacing them partially or entirely with an alphabet (Japan replaced them with 3, and then kept 2000 characters anyway because that's just how they roll). There is a theory that divorcing writing and speaking is what held the Chinese empire together, Cantonese and Mandarin (for example) are completely different spoken languages that happen to share a writing system that is completely understandable regardless of what you speak.

I can't think of one nice thing to say about English. It needs like 5 more vowels and a few more consonants for writing to even start to make sense. And #$%^ the grammar and vocabulary. I mean Christ. I have nothing but admiration for those who use it but didn't grow up with it.

Instant written translation is pretty decent and already baked into many programs and would guess instant verbal translation will be common in 10 years.

English and..

Sadly I basically just cant do it, lots of struggle with French & German at school (and a lot less with Spanish) and almost nothing to show for it

so hats off to those that can, while I can wrap my brain around sciences pretty easily, and stuff like history with a bit more work languages just don't stick

I know English and Spanish. Although the only reason I learned Spanish was because of a previous job. It was very useful since I lived in San Diego.

I really want to learn German, took a class for school once, but it was boring but i liked the language. I hope i can one day do it again.

I have made attempts to learn Japanese over the years. While I've found it time consuming I have always enjoyed it, and hope I get to visit there one day.

English, and any words or phrases that English looted from other places. The problem there is knowing where the term is taken from, and how it is used in English.
There is a lot of Latin used, bits of Nordic languages, French, and anywhere else that invaded us over the millenia.

English is a mongrel mess, which can be useful.

Answer 1: I speak English, and don't need any other language. This is most useful as learning foreign languages is a mental block of mine. I speak one language, end of. They tried to teach me French in twelve years of formal education, yet I walked out with a U grade fail. I.e so shockingly bad I didn't even rate an F.

Answer 2: I know Pascal and C++, and the former is outdated.

Native English, decent French, basic German, conversational Japanese but it's a bit rusty.

I used to read Latin pretty well, though it's faded a lot in the past 45 years.

I find that with the mixture of Romance and Germanic languages I have, plus the Latin, I can sort of navigate stuff like menus which has a well defined context in most western European languages (except the Celtic ones.)

As far as machine translation goes, it's getting better but it makes astonishing mistakes because it doesn't understand the cultural context of the material.

One of my colleagues speaks English and six Indian languages. Another one speaks English and 8 European languages to a reasonable level.

SamusDrake wrote:
I have made attempts to learn Japanese over the years. While I've found it time consuming I have always enjoyed it, and hope I get to visit there one day.

I would like to learn Japanese as well. I spent two years in Japan in my early twenties (Camp Schwab and Mt Fuji) and got to the poiny that I could communicate basic needs or wants (I was slow though). Only problem is no one in my area speaks it or teaches it.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
Unfortunately, living near New York City, the amount of illegals here almost forces you to learn Spanish. It makes me refuse to do so. If I can’t order a damn coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts in America in English, I have a problem with that. And before we get started, no, I refuse to use the term “undocumented”. People who come into the country illegally are illegal. Softening the term to make them feel better is not gonna happen.

And yes, I recognize there are a lot of legal citizens who speak that language primarily. And my problem stems from the refusal to learn English fluently (again, not all, but a lot; especially in my region). This bothers me for another reason; if you move to a country, you should learn that country’s language fluently. I would not expect to move to Russia or Japan and have everyone around me learn English for me. Again, I recognize that problem doesn’t exist everywhere, but around New York City it is absolutely a thing. I know it sucks to single out a single language group, but only one group in this area does what I’m saying.

A further addendum, because I don’t want it to come across that I’m just angry and bitter. I have literally zero problem with people sharing their heritage, keeping it alive, and respecting where they came from. Perfectly OK. And I’ll be the last person to say that that’s a problem. What is the problem is forcing that culture onto me, by not allowing me to do something like order a cup of coffee in English in America from Dunkin’ Donuts. I use this example because it has happened numerous times. My wife has had it happen to her in Dutchess when ordering a meal, I’ve had it happen in Dunkin’ more times than I can count, and it is frustrating.

As a Puerto Rican who was born and grew up in NYC, I'd like to remind you that the US has no official language, and that Puerto Ricans are American citizens.

If you lived in the areas of Texas or California, where the majority of the population speaks spanish rather than english, would you be making the argument that yeah, while it's important to keep the culture alive for english speakers, really you should try to assimilate and speak spanish? Somehow I doubt it, and you should ask why.

 Orlanth wrote:
Answer 1: I speak English, and don't need any other language. This is most useful as learning foreign languages is a mental block of mine. I speak one language, end of. They tried to teach me French in twelve years of formal education, yet I walked out with a U grade fail. I.e so shockingly bad I didn't even rate an F.

Answer 2: I know Pascal and C++, and the former is outdated.

I didn’t list computer languages. Which is a long list, but as rusty as my spoken languages, as I’ve not touched them since college.

(but is primarily Pascal and C++. We touched on a LOT of others though, which was nice to pad my resume)

yellowfever wrote:

SamusDrake wrote:
I have made attempts to learn Japanese over the years. While I've found it time consuming I have always enjoyed it, and hope I get to visit there one day.

I would like to learn Japanese as well. I spent two years in Japan in my early twenties (Camp Schwab and Mt Fuji) and got to the poiny that I could communicate basic needs or wants (I was slow though). Only problem is no one in my area speaks it or teaches it.

In japan one way i found effective on improving language was walking shikoku pilgrimage(in spring). The moment you don pilgrim gear it seems you signal to locals you are open to talk. The moment they realize you talk japanese to some degree floodgates open. First time i walked it i used japanese in 2.5 weeks more than my previous 4 trips combined(including first 2 month trip...). I have had cases where i'm sitting on my break and from bus tour first one and then after he/she leaves all other come alone or in small groups. Guess first one told i speak japanese so rest came to chat as well and lodgings generally chatty events.

Though if you do this please keep in mind it's still pilgrimage and treat it with respect as it matters to locals. They are welcoming of foreigners and don't require you to be buddhist or go through complex ceremonies but some respect especially toward Kukai himself(who is bit of national hero in japan) can't be too hard. There's been some less than stellar foreigners soiling reputation for others.