Languages You Speak/Would Like To Speak/Are Learning
Original post
Posted by Unknown user, 18.08.2007 - 17:35
Personally...
- (As you *might* have noticed) I speak English. Not really well, but I think I can say I know the basis. But it is not my first language: French is. I don't want to sound pretentious or anything, but I speak French really well. Yet, it is the third language I learnt.
- My mother language is Arabic, it was the first one I learnt as I am Moroccan and was born in Morocco. But my parents speak French more than Arabic, and I started going to a French school when I was 5, thus, I started forgetting Arabic. I was still as able to understand it as before, but I couldn't speak it anymore, past my 8th birthday. (Some other important factors were involded, but it is not necessary to mention them.)
- The second language I learnt was Spanish, because of/thanks to Spanish TV channels and my grandmother, who only spoke Spanish and Arabic. But when we left the city where we were living (Tanger, just in front of Spain), I stopped watching Spanish channels, and left my grandmother as well, and then, forgot Spanish too
.- That's when French comes. It became my first language around 8. As the French school system wants it, I started learning English at 11. And I unexpectedly didn't have any difficulty with it. I have always had the best mark in that subject, without making any effort for that. Unfortunately it is still not enough. I realised my level was not as good as I thought it was.
- The next year, (I was 12) I chose Latin, but I had to stop after a few months, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to start Spanish the following year. I started re-learning Spanish at 13.
- But since I took Spanish at 13, I couldn't take German at 15. I had too many subjects and the teachers wouldn't let me add German. Yet it is the language I really want to learn. I like the sonority of it, and I watch German TV channels just to hear it, even if I don't get a word of it
.- As a consequence, the two languages I can speak the best are French, and English.
As you see the topic is vast, there is a lot to say...
| Overlord_PT Posts: 140  |
I speak portuguese and english wouldnt minde to learn french or something it would help me when travelling
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| Ragana Rawrcat Posts: 4919  |
Last Thursday I realized I understand some German as well. Students who learned German in our school were going to Goethe institute in Riga. I didn't want to go to school that day (;D) so I just asked if my friend's German teacher could take me to this excursion as well... I mean... with other students who, unlike me, ALL were learning German language for more than 4 years. She agreed. So, we went to this institute. It's all about German culture, language, history and so. There were A LOT of books about German stuff and all were in German. Even our guides talked with us in German. We had to search for answers to different questions... in German. Wow. That was fun. Well, and in the end I realized that I didn't need any translation for the stuff our guides said - I understood it on my own. German is pretty similar to English and (a bit) Latvian, ya' know. 
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| KouyateLindup Posts: 3  |
I'm pretty handy with languages and I am learning or can speak: Modern Greek (although I'm rusty) Ancient Greek (well, I can translate and compose it) French (did it for 8 years, I should be) Italian (easy) Latin (see above) Serbian (still learning) Russian (some words in Russian also appear in Serbian) Koine Greek (Bible Greek, different to Classical Greek) Basic British sign language (I know about 150 signs) Ameslan (about 100 signs) Japanese (learning it so I can read anime) Qur'anic Arabic (for some reason) 
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| Khaldi Posts: 188  |
I know only Armenian , Russian and English (little) .i Would like to learn German and French .
---- Urartu is a NeoHittite and ProtoArmenian kingdom !!
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| Bad English Tage Westerlund Posts: 61303  |
Written by KouyateLindup on 27.10.2009 at 09:36 Are you greek ? because first langauge what you mentioned is greek paok+partizan poutuna vulgaria
---- I stand whit Ukraine and Israel. They have right to defend own citizens. Stormtroopers of Death - "Speak English or Die"  I better die, because I never will learn speek english, so I choose dieing
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| Ernis 狼獾 Posts: 6807  |
Written by Bad English on 27.10.2009 at 19:38 She also said she's rusty at Greek which lets you make the guess.....
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| Bad English Tage Westerlund Posts: 61303 |
Written by Ernis on 27.10.2009 at 19:58 I have no clue what means rusty 
---- I stand whit Ukraine and Israel. They have right to defend own citizens. Stormtroopers of Death - "Speak English or Die" I better die, because I never will learn speek english, so I choose dieing
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| Valentin B Iconoclast Posts: 10086  |
Written by Overlord_PT on 18.10.2009 at 19:30 why do portuguese/brazilians always learn french and not german/spanish/whatever?(some even before english i remember Cesaria Evora knows little english but fluent french)
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| Ernis 狼獾 Posts: 6807 |
Written by Valentin B on 10.11.2009 at 18:21 Mayb because French is obviously closer to Portuguese than English, thus also easier....and well...as you may know there's quite a lot of differences in the pronunciations of Spanish and Portuguese...I'd say French is easier in pronunciation for Portuguese speakers than Spanish...
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| Overlord_PT Posts: 140 |
Written by Valentin B on 10.11.2009 at 18:21 spanish is easy but german is way to hard for us
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| Overlord_PT Posts: 140 |
Quote:Quote: Indeed
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| Overlord_PT Posts: 140 |
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| nana.MD Star-Queen Posts: 2052  |
I've always wanted to learn portuguese but lately I realized I want to learn japanese! Anybody willing to teach me?? hehe lol
---- Live how you want just don't feed on me, if you doubt what I say I will make you believe...
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| Elio Red Nightmare Posts: 4920  |
Written by nana.MD on 12.11.2009 at 04:20 Learn watching anime 
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| Overlord_PT Posts: 140 |
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| nana.MD Star-Queen Posts: 2052 |
Written by Elio on 17.11.2009 at 13:37 LoL...well it's quite surprising how u can learn several things just watching anime
---- Live how you want just don't feed on me, if you doubt what I say I will make you believe...
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| Ernis 狼獾 Posts: 6807 |
Written by nana.MD on 17.11.2009 at 20:53 Can you also learn to WRITE Japanese just by watching anime on television? I doubt....
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| nana.MD Star-Queen Posts: 2052 |
Written by Ernis on 17.11.2009 at 23:51 noup i don't think it'll be that easy...a friend learned and he said it's pretty difficult
---- Live how you want just don't feed on me, if you doubt what I say I will make you believe...
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| Ernis 狼獾 Posts: 6807 |
Written by nana.MD on 23.11.2009 at 21:50 I think it should be less of a problem if you've already learnt Chinese characters....they're basically the same that Japanese uses, just some minor differences in writing technique and appearance (similar to difference between Gothic blackletter font and modern font)...also...Japanese uses only a small portion of Chinese characters....the rest is phonetic alphabet (syllabary)....
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| nana.MD Star-Queen Posts: 2052 |
Written by Ernis on 23.11.2009 at 21:58 thanx!! uhm the thing is i dont know chinese either he....but im actually searching for some classes, hope i learn them in my spare time, it's something i wanted to do for a long long time
---- Live how you want just don't feed on me, if you doubt what I say I will make you believe...
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| SerratedSyringe Posts: 510  |
Having lived in the states all my life, I'm fluent in English. I've taken about five years of German, but I'm nowhere close to fluent. Listening to German music with fairly clean vocals, I can maybe decipher 50% of what they are saying, and maybe 90% if I read the lyrics. I could probably hold a decent conversation in German, but my grammar is awful.
---- Just another cog in this infernal machine....
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| Ernis 狼獾 Posts: 6807 |
Now since a professor spoke at university not so long ago... Why is everyone speaking English? Why must English be the number one language in international communication... Latin had this position for a long time and this was a fine case since Latin was not a first language for anyone... everyone everywhere had to learn Latin to some extent to be able to communicate with everyone... What we have now is that English-speakers don't study languages at all because... "Everyone's speaking English anyway so learning foreign languages is a waste of time..." It's unfair... I think what world needs is the return of Latin as it's the basis of most modern European languages plus it's the most well-studied and the most typical Indo-European language ever recorded with a history of thousands of years... learn Latin and you'll find English, French, Italian, German, Russian and Persian suddenly a lot easier to master and comprehend... Therefore... why must a completely insignificant and marginal IE language such as English suddenly replace a clear and well-formulated language with a thousands of years of history such as Latin...
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| Ragana Rawrcat Posts: 4919 |
Written by Ernis on 28.03.2010 at 23:48 Heh, that's true and in my opinion it's more sad than unfair. It's their (people's who don't know any other language but English) loss after all.
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| Ernis 狼獾 Posts: 6807 |
Written by Ragana on 29.03.2010 at 21:34 That professor said that nowadays being multilingual means that one can speak several languages... being bilingual means speaking two languages... being monolingual means speaking English... The thing is that Europe's richness is the diversity of languages and cultures... that's why the plan of making English the main language of the EU and using it like this sucks bad enough... An average European should be able to speak his native language, one or two foreign languages more or less well and understand 3 or 4 other languages... One should be able to go to Spain, take El Pais and dig it... go to France, read the papers/internet/ads and dig it... go to Germany, take a paper and dig what's written... not that "HEY, DOES ANYONE HERE SPEAK ENGLISH?! I don't speak these weird languages of yours!" You do not have to know all the languages well... what counts is that you understand them more or less...
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| Ragana Rawrcat Posts: 4919 |
All in all I agree with you but I believe that, for example, in all Baltic states to get a job you must know three languages (the national one, Russian and English) since they're all needed when working with different people when in (for example) Australia I doubt people are asked to know more than just English (knowing other languages certainly should be considered as a great plus). In Europe... yeah, there are enough of small countries in this region so it's great if you know other languages besides English but do you think that an Australian kid should learn French or Spanish considering that there's a probability he/she won't use it? And what language would you propose to be the official EU language? I personally think English is easy to learn and that's one of the reasons why it is the main language, not only because there's Great Britain and the USA which are important English-speaking countries. P.S. An average European is a lazy person who spends 50% of the day by watching TV, not a study-hard smartass who can learn that many languages.  Besides, there are also some illiterates and people who simply aren't good at anything because of various reasons.
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| Valentin B Iconoclast Posts: 10086 |
Written by Ernis on 29.03.2010 at 21:47 while i do agree that knowing a few other languages helps, i don't think we should go to that length. 2, MAYBE 3 foreign tongues apart from english should be more than enough i think. i mean come on, unless you're a professional translator/interpreter or have to travel around europe a lot and talk to people of different nationalities i don't see what would be so useful about (for example a guy from hungary) knowing hungarian, english, german, greek, romanian, french and swedish. you can't really expect most people to learn so much stuff even in order to get a vague clue about these languages. i can understand people who actually have a liking to this(like you and me) but let's face it, different people have different priorities and learning paces. i know spanish and english at least at semi-fluent level, and german, french and italian at least at basic understanding level. you know english, russian, chinese(fluently), and french and spanish more or less if i understand correctly. i know it doesn't seem like much to you or me because we enjoy learning different tongues, but other people have difficulties learning even english as their second language(the finest example being right on this forum ), i guess it boils down to the individual's will/ability, but mostly to necessity to learn these foreign tongues. for example, i know this cousin of mine who lives in Alicante. when it comes to Spanish, i'm absolutely zero compared to her, because she's been living and working there for a few years, so she was pretty much forced to learn it if she wanted to get a (decent) job, which she did.i know it sounds extremely cheesy and childish to make a list of languages i want to learn but here goes: -first off i definitely want to repair my french and german and improve my italian. i can understand any but the most complicated french texts, but with speaking i'm pretty much at K7-level even after 7 years of studying it. german and italian are kinda the same only on a shittier scale haha. -russian is something i've been interested in for a while. the fact is, here everyone learns english and wants to go to england(which is some kind of "promised land") to study or make some absurdly expensive shopping trips saying "omg i went to (enter pretentious and obviously fake accent) London Oxford Street!!" or go to the US to live the "american dream" or something, but no-one ever visits russia and everyone disregards them here as the "commies" or something. plus learning the cyrillic alphabet should be fairly useful if i go to bulgaria or ukraine sometime(even though there aren't that many common words). Moldavia, our little sister-country to the east has a huge russian-speaking population. plus, russians know how to party.. vodka, drunk fistfights and singing, sign me up (before you say, yeah i know it's just a stereotype)-portuguese i guess would be a logical step from spanish, given that they're fairly similar apart from the weird/occasionally funny pronunciation of the portuguese. -mandarin would be the language i would right now deem to be (apart from english) by far the most practically useful, and so in the near future i want to start learning it. for example i think there's nothing better that could tilt the scales in your favor like negotiating with a chinese salesman/businessman in his own tongue, diametrically on the other side of the earth away from his homeland. the same case goes with romanni, only with romanni there's no "homeland" lol.
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| Ernis 狼獾 Posts: 6807 |
Written by Ragana on 29.03.2010 at 22:18 English easy to learn? Not that much... it's not much easier than Mandarin Chinese... English has most illogical and irregular writing/pronunciation rules that no other language has (except Chinese...) where a word's pronunciation has to be memorised and where one letter (let's say E can have 10 different ways of pronunciation... and with a possibility that none of them corresponds to what E originally stands for...) This makes Spanish, Russian, French, Irish, German etc etc etc a lot easier ones to learn... What saves English is media... but that's the only thing... That's why I say, bring back Latin... Nobody expects people to use the complex sentences of ancient Rome which are as difficult as the cheesy tone of them... In fact, Latin was used in a rather free and easy manner during the whole period from Renaissance to 19th century and up to 20th century where it suddenly has retreated to the fields of medicine and law... Plus... Latin is LOGIC... it's so logic and systematic it hurts... plus it's neutral... Example... I saw "Passion of Christ" which was shot in Latin and Aramaic and since it was probably a French release it had French subtitles for the Aramaic lines... the Latin lines, as one might guess, did not need any subtitles at all... Written by Valentin B on 29.03.2010 at 22:34 As I said... it's not important that you speak all of them perfectly... you should speak bout three languages well... and others... well... just understand them in the basic field...
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| Ragana Rawrcat Posts: 4919 |
Quote:Written by Ernis on 29.03.2010 at 22:47 Ah, I see but I still don't think it's difficult in other ways. The sentences have to be built up from the other side and that's usually the hardest part but people get used to it and those different pronunciations... well, Latvian also has two different pronunciations of the letter 'e'. In English you don't have to know many different declinations of nouns, grammar genders nor any other forms of verbs, proverbs, nouns and pronouns that you have to conjugate just to make some sense... and there also aren't some mystical crooks (macrons, carons, etc.) on/under the letters - just Latin letters. Latin is neutral, yes, but I still don't find it logical just because there's some strict order in what you have to place words. Plus is that the words more or less are understandable but minus is that Latin doesn't seem good as a language of literature... in my eyes it seems sharp and it'd surely take time to learn it.
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| Valentin B Iconoclast Posts: 10086 |
Yup, latin is fairly dry, harsh-sounding and boring to study extensively.
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