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My native tongue is Tagalog, which i can't speak any more. I also understand but cannot speak about 5 or 6 other philippine dialects. I am currently learning French, Japanese, and how to speak Tagalog again. I hope to take a Latin course next year, and to learn Italian, Mandarin, and Korean one day.
Oh, and i speak English too :D
English is my native language, but I'd love to learn French, Spanish, German, and Italian, as well as some more Eastern languages. I'm on my way to becoming fluent (as fluent as one can be) in Latin and Attic Greek, with a bit of Homeric Greek mixed in, but I'd really love to study some of the other old languages.
Chinese was my first language, but I'm more fluent in English than chinese. i've forgotten a lot of chinese since all the chinese people i know speak to me in english - including my dad who has horrible english. i'd really like to remember but its such a difficult language to learn. i can read semi fluently but i can write at only a 4th grade level. :(
i speak english, obviously, and i speak spanish well enough to get my point across most of the time. (AKA not fluently at all)
i've been trying to teach myself latin for 2 years now and havent really gotten anywhere. i found a nice textbook online last week so I'll start again.
btw, do programming languages count? lol.
i wish i can speak russian and sign language. and basque.
whoa. when did you come here? i still speak my native tongue a lot better than i do english. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by SolaceInReading
can't write so well, though, cause my spoken dialect is significantly different from the national dialect. :(
Ummm pig latin? :D
I took four years of German in highschool. I'm by no means fluent, but I know enough to get around and follow a conversation. I need to take a crash course in Chinese, as it seems that I'll be studying abroad there in two years...
Though born in the U.S., my parents are from Mexico so I learned Spanish first. When I went to Kindergarten, I only knew how to swear in English. Now, 30 years later, I can actually interject the occasional coherent thought into my swearing. I speak a bit of Portuguese, Italian and French, enough to get to the bathroom and order something to eat. I took four years of Latin in college so I could read Martial without the prudish censoring of Shackleton Bailey. I'm a very shallow multi-linguist.
I am a native speaker of English, and I am learning Spanish, even though I don't really want to. I would love to learn French, Latin, German, Celtic, or Russian. Or all of those!
German is quite an easy tongue. A person who knows latin and can decline, will learn it quickly - and the German teachers agree with that.
One begins with learning der, die, das, dem, den et cetera and everything else follows logically. Pure simplicity! To demonstrate it, we shall give an example:
One has just to buy a german book, for example, a wonderful leather-clad book that is printed in Dortmund and talks about the life of Hottentots (in german Hottentotten) and their customs. The book describes how kangaroos (Beutelratten) are captured and put in a cage (Kotter) that is covered with cloth (Lattengitter) to protect against the weather. These cages are in german calles cages called with cloth (Lattengitterkotter) and a kangaroo in the cage is called Lattengitterkotterbeutelratten.
Once the Hottentots arrested an assassin (Attentater) who was blamed in killing the mother (Hottentottenmutter) of a stupid and stuttering Hotentot (Stottertrottel). That mother is Hottentottenstottertrottelmutter in german and the assassin is Hottentottenstottertrottelmutterattentater.
The police captured the assassin and put him in the kangaroo cage (Beutelrattenlattengitterkotter) but the assassin escaped.
The recapturing started immediately and soon one of the guards came and shouted: "I captured the assassin! (Attentater)"
"Yes? Which one?" the boss asked?
"The Lattengitterkotterbeutelratterattentater"
"What? The murderer in the cloth-covered kangaroo cage?" the boss asked.
"No, the Hottentottenstottertrottelmutterattentater" (the murderer of the mother of the stupid and stuttering hotentot) the guard said.
"Oh, you should have said at once that you captured the Hottentottenstottertrottelmutterlattengitter- kotterbeutelrattenattentater!"
As one can see, German is an easy language. One just needs a bit of interest against the tongue.
Well, people should not be putting other people in cloth-covered cages that were originally designed for kangaroos. I've been saying that for years.
Rightly so. I am currently trying to learn Italian. I have a friend who is a foreign exchange student from Torino. I love Italian. I sing in Italian, but it hadn't really occured to me to learn to speak it.
Well, yes.Quote:
Originally Posted by Basil
But isn't questioning taboos and depicting ghastly things that should not be one of the purposes of literature? Like "Clockwork Orange" or something?
I hated German, I even had less troubles with Russian... but I really disliked German so that why.Quote:
Originally Posted by Taliesin
So, am I into languages, let's see... I have a degree in English and Russian (though my Russian is nowhere as good as my English and will probably never be :(), I did also French and German at school (and Latin but I don't consider that a language and I erased all of it from my mind), I can understand Spanish but speak very little, I'm occasionally digging into Hungarian and I can understand a little bit of Ukrainian... I am also attending a course of Greek but I don't have much time to study it and I find myself not too motivated...
So no, I don't give a damn about languages and I'm not into them at all :lol:
I never know how to define my level but besides English, I am able to hold a conversation (somehow) in French and Russian as well. For the others, I'm afraid I can't really have a real conversation, although I can have short/basic ones (except Greek and Ukrainian, still too basic)