Topic: Other Languages

[ThePerm]

What other languages does everyone speak? I've taken German and Spanish.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

I've taken Hardcore and Casual.

[Ian Sane]

I took French in grade school because you pretty much have to here in Canada.  The fact that virtually no one in Western Canada speaks French exclusively makes no difference.  Around the Vancouver area I think learning Cantonese or Hindi would prove more useful.

I have never been anywhere where French is spoken so I haven't practiced speaking it in about ten years.  I was never even close to fluent though.  It never came easy to me.  I had to work to get decent grades in French class and all of it was memorization with no real learning.  I was always good at math and never could relate to people that just couldn't wrap their head around it.  Well I'm that way with learning other languages.  It just doesn't click.  My brother briefly (ie: brief enough to withdraw from the class without it affecting his grades) took Spanish and while looking over his stuff I was just as clueless.  It's not a natural skill to me.  I hear about people going to another country and learning the language by being immersed in it.  The idea of that blows my mind.  I've gone to the Azores twice and I can barely even pick out individual words when people were speaking Portuguese to me.  It just sounds like "djsaflenaofndla" to me.

Oddly enough I seem to date multilingual women suprisingly frequently.  You figure as a guy who only speaks English it would be ideal to end up with a woman who also only speaks English.  No pressure on either side to learn any other languages.  Yet probably 50% of the woman I've gone on a date with not only spoke at least one other language but had an actual interest in learning new languages.

[vudu]

1 5p34k |337

[Caliban]

I speak both English and Portuguese with ease, and I speak somewhat of an intelligible g-code. I've learned some German in high school for 3 years, but it's hard (at least for me) to actually learn a language as if it was native to me unless I socialize with a Germanic community.

[nickmitch]

I speak French. Also, I understand Creole.

[Stogi]

Arabic.

[EasyCure]

se habla espanol

[Flames_of_chaos]

Polish, I also took Spanish in HS and I don't remember a thing!

[S-U-P-E-R]

日本語  ^_________________^

[Bill Aurion]

私も！ ^________________^

[wandering]

I'm pretty much monolingual, although I've taken Spanish.

I'd like to learn to Chinese. I figure it's going to be a useful thing to know, when China takes over the world.

[DAaaMan64]

NOT ON MY WATCH

It's a seiko

[matt oz]

I took French through middle school and high school, then minored in it at college.  I'd say I have a pretty good command of the language, but I'm not fluent.  I've only been to France for one week, so I wasn't really immersed in the language long enough to improve my skills very much.

I'd like to learn Italian and Japanese, but I don't know when I'll get around to that.

[Guitar Smasher]

I speak English and French.  Unlike Ian, depending on which side of town you are (where I am), people will approach you in either one or the other language.  For any civil type job you need to be fluent in both or very lucky.  I do use French at my place of work fairly often so it's useful that I learned it.

[NWR_insanolord]

I only know enough Binary to ask where the bathroom is. Also, I'd like to learn Japanese and Klingon.

[ThePerm]

insanolord who the **** answers back to that?

[UltimatePartyBear]

I've forgotten nearly everything I learned in three years of Spanish in high school, but I think by the end of that I was doing pretty well.  If I had had occasion to practice, I'd probably be fluent by now.

Learning a new language is one of those things where I'd rather just have the knowledge downloaded into my brain Matrix style.  There's fun in learning some stuff, like flying or playing an instrument, but not in learning a language.  Not for me, anyway.

Has anyone here tried Rosetta Stone?

[EasyCure]

Napoleon did

[matt oz]

Napoleon did

I chuckled.

[ThePerm]

i got rosetta stone not as a way to teach me, but as a way to practice. its kinda weird in german though because its a little iffy about movement, and thats in the first parts of the software. It has go, run, walk all confused. Apparently walking is visually now running, going is equal to walking, only animals really run...everything else seems right. However, like the hardest thing to learn i would say is endings. It is INCREDIBLY important to learn the genders in german. If you didn't try as hard in the beginning it will be double hard later on. Some of the things i learned in my German High school class that were taught wrong(but are right in say Spanish) by my teacher(who taught german and spanish), were haunting me in my college classes. Once things are set in your head their hard to unlearn. I have spent alot of time learning the language, and i  don't want to forget anything. Its hard though, there isn't a big German population here.

[Ian Sane]

It is INCREDIBLY important to learn the genders in german.

This is a big part of what tripped me up in French class and with German it's got to be way worse.  It makes me think that having English as your first language gives you a disadvantage in learning other languages.  In English the gender thing is logical to a Vulcan level.  Then I take French and now I have to assign genders to inanimate genderless objects?  And there's no rule, I just have to know by magic what's what?  HUH?

And sometimes a noun will be masculine in one language and feminine in another.  Here's a English loanword for everyone - "it".  Though Chinese apparently has no gender which is a little too much the other way.

[Shecky]

C, Perl, Python...

[Hostile Creation]

nickmitch, are you from Louisiana or do you just happen to know Creole for some inexplicable other reason?

I am from Louisiana, and decided rather arbitrarily to take French in high school.  Minored in college, have a pretty firm grasp of the language, though I don't get near enough practice.  May go teach in France for a while, to hone up.  My understanding of Cajun/Creole French is limited, but I can generally read it and make sense of it.  Hearing it is another matter.

That's the only language aside from English that I know really well, but I can pick up on Spanish and Italian thanks to my knowledge of French and linguistics in general (my friend is studying as a linguist, so one picks things up).  That friend and I may actually be learning Finnish for the hell of it soon, but I don't know how serious that will get.

If I had to choose another language to learn, it would probably be Russian, Japanese, or one of the Chinese dialects.  I've also seriously considered learning Greek, since my family (mother's side) is from Greece.

[nickmitch]

I was born and raised in New Orleans.