So for those of you that speak more than language, what language do you speak?
And if you don’t speak a second langauge, or you would like to learn another additional language, what would you want to learn?
I took french in high school, then again in college. Can’t speak a word of it. I can read some of it though and can sometimes understand bits and pieces in movies and stuff. Went to Costa Rica without knowing any spanish. I found that I could figure out what signs meant though because words are similar between french and spanish.

What are some of the challenges you find in different languages?
French has too many tenses. What’s wrong with just past and present tense? Sheesh. Plus I can’t pronounce words worth a crap and did horrible on my oral exam in college.

I only speak English, but I would LOVE to learn Scots-gaelic. It’s a dying language, but its what my ancestors spoke, and its a beautiful language. I WILL learn it someday!

I became practically fluent in Italian when my husband and I spent our junior year of college abroad, he from Georgetown University and I from Vanderbilt. He lived in a villa in Fiesole (omg lucky….) and I lived in a weensy little apartment in Florence with four Italians, a fellow American, and one bathroom for the six of us.

BUT! Since the Italians didn’t speak English, and they were really fun people to hang out with, I learned the language!

I’ve forgotten some of it, but it seems that whenever I make the effort it always comes back pretty quickly.

I would love to learn Japanese!

Ohhh, fun topic! Short story: I am completely fluent in English and Mandarin, can understand Taiwanese quite well but feel super silly speaking it, am somewhere between advanced and fluent in Spanish, and intermediate-ish in Latin.

Long story: I was born in Taiwan, and even after moving to the States as a young child my parents spoke Mandarin Chinese (and to a lesser extent Taiwanese) to us at home. I only learned English in kindergarten (boy was that confusing), so my home life soon became a strange amalgation of Mandarin, Taiwanese, and English. 

I picked up Spanish in 7th grade, and have kept up to it all the way to getting a Spanish minor in college. Practice is really the most important part in maintaining a language, and I’m hoping to keep it up and put my Spanish to good use as a physician in the near future; Spanish-speaking physicians are in high demand in Texas. I also took four semesters of Latin for fun in college…the declensions drove me crazy haha. 

Overall I absolutely love learning languages, and have played around with either learning Hindi or Japanese. Japanese since all my grandparents are fluent in it (Taiwan was a Japanese territory during their childhood) and Hindi because it’s the fourth most widely spoken language in the world, and I am reasonably proficient in the first three!

Posted By BB on 05/05/2011 10:13 PM
But I found I have to be much more aware of my tones in Mandarin and follow the basic fluctuation rules.  I can easily say….”Your mom needs more hay” when I meant so say “Your horse needs more hay.”   

Haha, I know exactly what you are talking about in your examples.  My mom teaches private Chinese lessons as a hobby, and during high school I woke up many a weekend morning to hear people in the living room working on mastering their tones.  Have you ever been to Taiwan before?  I’ll be there for a few weeks this summer, and while I’m excited I can’t exactly say I’m looking forward to the weather!

I went to an all French school until High School but I’ve since lost some of my French as I don’t use it much. My family and bf are more french than English. My grandmother refuses to speak English to me so I use it when I see her. My Mom’s side of the family is French Acadien.

I would love to learn German and how to read in Latin. I have a friend who was born in Germany and I thought it was so awesome listening to her talk.

Rabbit in German – kaninchen

I’m sort of a language nut.  I can’t claim total fluency in anything other than english as I didn’t start studying anything until high school and college, but I can definitely hold a conversation in a few.  I’ve formally studied (in order of most to least skill) Turkish, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, and Persian.  And as it’s really close to Turkish I’ve taught myself to read Azerbaijani.

What”s the most difficult?  Well in Turkish, it’s the word order.  It’s hard to follow a sentence, especially spoken, when the verb comes last!  My silly Turkish learning stories: The word izlememeler roughly means they should watch, but if you break it up, izle memeler, which I did my accident when speaking, it is a command meaning, “Watch the breasts/the ones with breasts”. Another time I accidently told my instructor that my dad like to eat the chinese, instead of my dad likes to eat chinese food.

Arabic… umm everything, lol. It’s like a crazy puzzle, it’s fun, but everytime you think you understand there’s a new crazy grammar point that seems like it was made up by some sadistic linguist.  Spanish, comparitively not a lot, I remember thinking things were difficult when I started learning it in high school, but it seems like a happy dream in comparison to others now, lol.  Russian, verbs of motion! And Persian, well the lousy text book I had that was written in the seventies and completely illegible was probably the biggest obstacle.  I have yet to find an instructor and a text book that wasn’t rather bad so my Persian is pretty rudimentary and I’m not sure that I learned enough grammar to actually complain about.  Azerbaijani, having to go between cyrillic and latin script all the time and it being ridiculously close to Turkish but those little differences always throw me off.

So for those of you that speak more than language, what language do you speak?  

And if you don’t speak a second langauge, or you would like to learn another additional language, what would you want to learn? 

I took Spanish for all four years of high school, but I really don’t remember much.

In college I took Old English (more for reading than speaking – Beowulf and other texts are in OE) and Welsh. What can I say? I like dead (or dying) languages.

I also have mad German menu reading skills from going there a couple times with work. I can’t say anything in the language, but I can order pork and potatoes from a menu like a pro.

What are some of the challenges you find with different languages?

I have a lot of challenges with vocab, which is strange since I think I have a pretty good English vocab from doing a lot of reading. I tend to remember grammar easily, but for the life of me I can’t remember the words I’m thinking of. I’ve always had issues with listening to someone speaking the language especially – I just can’t process the words they’re saying fast enough, though I know that I *should* know what they mean. I guess that’s why I like languages with few speakers – not much chance of running into one and having to speak to them (though I have run into a native Welsh speaker, in Pennsylvania of all places, and I felt bad I couldn’t say much other than “How are you?” and “I’m very good”)

BB, your mother called. She needs more hay.

RabbitPam, I’m glad I wasn’t drinking something right then as I would have spit it all over the screen.

MB, we can learn Scots-Gaelic together! There’s also the Scots that’s an offshoot of English/Germanic languages and both would be fun (reading Scots is actually fairly easy, since it has a lot of words on common with English). I love the languages of the British isles and I’d love to learn more about Gaelic since, from what I understand, it’s fairly different from Welsh, though they’re all part of the Celtic language family.

Elrohwen – Old English? That’s freaking awesome!! Linguistics is my random side interest/hobby, and I love reading about evolution of languages over time and how languages influence on another.   Like you said, I have a fascination with the languages of the British Isles too and I think it would be super interesting to learn some of it.

We can form a Scot-Gaelic study group! My ancestors are from Wigtown in Scotland (a very long time ago) and I have a friend in Gasgow that I visit via the webcam. I don’t know who laughs harder, him at my Texas twang or me at his Scottish accent.

4 years of high school Spanish, very little retained, 5 years of Latin that I remember better for some reason. A smattering of Czech from living in West.

Becoming fluent in Lagomorphese.

Rabbit Pam, I just spit hot tea on my keyboard!

Peppy and Kral, I’m a big linguistics nerd too! If i had time to minor in something in college (darn that engineering class schedule) it would’ve been linguistics – specifically related to the British isles. I also took a class called “History of English to 1300” (didn’t get to take the follow up class though).

There’s a great book out there about the history of the English language, that apparently goes with a documentary on PBS. I can’t find the documentary on DVD 🙁 but I did get to read the book when my co-worker lent it to me. (it’s called The Story of English – very good if you can find the book)

Old English was fun – it was basically a grad level class that also allowed undergrads, and undergrads got an A just by showing up. We sat in a circle and took turns reading. We never read much of Beowulf because there was a separate class for that, but I do remember the opening lines. That was fun because it wasn’t so grammar focused (because we weren’t carrying on conversations) – just kind of translation and reading. I remember the final was translating something – open book and on your own time out of class. It took me four hours! Haha.

Welsh was also super fun. I’ve wanted to go to Wales forever, but I’ll have to find my text book and work on some things before I go. I do have Harry Potter in Welsh! Some day I’d like to become proficient enough to read a bit of that.

I can speak a few languages English with a heavy ‘hillbilly’ accent lol. I learned to speak Russian on my own and it is by far my favorite. I took Spanish in high school but dropped it after the first semester I cannot learn Spanish no matter how hard I try. I learned German from my cousin who grew up in Germany when I was young. I know a little Irish Gaelic not Scots-Gaelic I am more Irish than anything and it always fascinated me. And I can speak a small amount of Portuguese due to one of my friends not knowing much Englsih.

Challenges were as I said I speak with a heavy hillbilly accent and that tends to carry over when I try to speak another language so I had to learn how to control that. The accent is slower than most people so when I am learning a language that a string of words are said quickly my tongue gets tied lol. And sentence structure was difficult for me at first.

I only speak English. I do know some Spanish since I took it in high school and my college roommate was a Spanish major and the last 2 years of college she pretty much only ever spoke Spanish. All of her classes were in spanish and she said she even started dreaming in spanish! Could you imagine?!?!

I would really love to learn Hawaiian, since that is my heritage. I actually found a hula halau (school) that teaches hula and the Hawaiian language. I’m hoping to sign up for some classes later this year after the “busy” season at work. The Hawaiian alphabet only has 12 letters which actually really makes things more complicated because a lot of the letters have to repeat so many times and makes the words seem much more intimidating, IMO.

Lani, you should definitely learn hula! I had some Hawaiian friends in college who put on shows as a group and it was so cool.

I speak Spanish in addition to English. I always thought Russian would be cool to learn though.

Posted By Lani on 05/06/2011 08:56 AM

I only speak English. I do know some Spanish since I took it in high school and my college roommate was a Spanish major and the last 2 years of college she pretty much only ever spoke Spanish. All of her classes were in spanish and she said she even started dreaming in spanish! Could you imagine?!?!

I would really love to learn Hawaiian, since that is my heritage. I actually found a hula halau (school) that teaches hula and the Hawaiian language. I’m hoping to sign up for some classes later this year after the “busy” season at work. The Hawaiian alphabet only has 12 letters which actually really makes things more complicated because a lot of the letters have to repeat so many times and makes the words seem much more intimidating, IMO.

…. Oh yes, fellow native, i know what you mean