ILE foreign languages represent

There ends my bilingualism.

*GROAN* Everyone's a comedian.

used to know a bit of czech

Entiendo mas Español que hablo y escribo, desafortunadamente. :(

...The v.modest "command" of German i may've once had (studied the language for two years at uni, passed exams) is now practically non-existent.
(And the studies of Latin were a nightmare - my own falt, that)

Mmm, though Finnish and Estonian are pretty similar in a few respects, my comprehension of what our overseas relatives are really talking about is patchy at best.

Likewise, dear neighbour. Me, I speak Finnish, obviously, Swedish and a bit of German, though I think since high school my German skills have lowered to the level of "Ich habe Sauerkraut in meine Lederhosen."

Try "Ich habe einen Stahlschwanz" instead. Iron rusts, you don't want that.

my uncle has the stahlschwanz, I get it whenever he gekickens der bücket.

Why did I write this like I'm referring to myself as royalty?

fairly fluent:
spanish

"hi how are you where is ____ may i have thank you excuse me":
french
german
czech
italian
japanese
cantonese

o catholic school and classics studies, almost entirely forgotten/repressed:
latin
ancient greek

I can buy beer in russian, spanish, greek, german.

In college a friend of mine said that all the Spanish she needed or cared to know was "Dos cervesas, por favor."

I speak some German and I took a year of Mandarin, but don't even ask me to remember any of it.

J'aime beaucoup parler francais--mais plusieurs fois je parle anglais et mes amis me reponds en francais. Ca marche!

Mr Don and Mr George to thread. Huevos....

Spent my junior high and HS years taking Latin, so useful for reading French, Italian etc. but not much help in speaking. Keep meaning to sign up for lessons but beens aying that for years now with no movement.

Also, asking questions is fun.

"I am not good"?

viborgu, i've been curious about pimsleur & often tempted to buy it. i studied in college for two years & studied abroad for 6 months. that was approx. 5-6 years ago. what level should i start with?!

ee-i-ee-i-oh, dammit

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2005/09/23/international/i171947D03.DTL

Half of Europe's Citizens Know 2 Languages
-
Friday, September 23, 2005

(09-23) 17:19 PDT BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) --

Half of European citizens speak a second language, according to a European Union survey released Friday.

The poll, conducted in June across Europe, found that tiny Luxembourg had the highest percentage of bilingual citizens, with 99 percent of those questioned saying they could master a conversation in a second language.

Hungary had the lowest number with 29 percent of its citizens able to speak another language. Britain was second last with 30 percent.

The survey also found that almost eight out of 10 students — ages 15-24 — can have a normal conversation in at least one foreign language.

In the United States, by contrast, 9 percent of Americans speak both their native language and another language fluently, according to a U.S. Senate resolution designating 2005 the "Year of Foreign Language Study."

In the European survey, English was identified by 34 percent of respondents as their second language, followed by German which was a second language for 12 percent, then French which was spoken as a second language by 11 percent, according to the survey....

Apparently the myth that Belgians can speak a lot of languages is not true. Ah well.

However, the subgroups and their possible similarities Finno-Ugric, Romance, Germanic obv complicates stuff (see parenthesised post).

OleM, on average, what percentage of Norwegians speak German? I can;t help but notice a striking similarity, at least in the last sentence there. And tell us more about katakana!

We shan't kiss your balls, m'lady.

I speak Dutch fluently. My passive command of German is good, but I get tongue-tied when I try to speak it because it's too similar to Dutch. I can make very very small talk in Spanish but wouldn't say I can speak it.

?

(that's supposed to be book, one of very few that I know)

I'm such a liar.

I want to start a new language study but I'm torn between the following: Hindi, Farsi, Portuguese and Welsh.

I'm learning French (8 years plus) and Spanish (nearly 3 years), I study them at university, but I am not remotely fluent and perhaps never will be. Even after seven months in Spain, my speech is littered with mistakes and I often have to ask people to repeat what they've asked me. I have met people who have spent less time than me in Spain/France and have studied the languages for a similar length of time or less who claim to be "fluent". It's possible that I am just rubbish and slow at languages, but I suspect a lot of these people are actually at the same level as me and passing themselves off as fluent. Similarly, since being in Spain a lot of Spanish people have told me that they or their friend can speak English, and when tested on it can't really at all.

Knowing how to sum up language experience on my CV is really tricky, especially since I don't have any way to grade it that would make sense to UK people (GCSE's etc). Or really to US people for that matter--my skillz are all too patchy but I still feel like they count for something.

me too : (

I have realised that I have two traits that hold me back with learning spoken language, 1) I am really conscious of mistakes and want to constantly stop and correct myself rather than just carrying on and 2) I'm not really a very sociable, talkative person, so although I'm in Spain, I still spend almost the whole time that I'm not at work on my own, and don't really chat to my flatmates or colleagues.

I am usually embarrassed to tell French and Spanish people I study their language at university, because from my spoken language level it really doesn't sound like it. But at university the vast majority of my classes are in writing/comprehension/grammar, or literature and culture which is taught in English.

I've found that you can get some good free language learning podcasts, and I have them on my ipod which is good for just keeping the language in your head while you're walking around.

gbx: I don't know about Pimsleur, but for me anything that is just a recording of someone saying phrases and getting you to repeat is useless, you can't learn a language like that, it just goes out of your head the minute you've finished. Michel Thomas has a really good method (one that works well for me anyway) but the CDs are expensive. He does French, German, Spanish and Italian I think.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4818180.stm

does anyone know any basic vietnamese? could you give me some phonetic pronunciations of some basic shit? it's an emergency, and i can't find what i need on the web (no speakers).

bumped bcz i'm interested: who here speaks one or more languages besides the various versions of english, and well or badly?

(i speak a little french and still have traces of schoolboy german)

Fluent in French and Romanian; know a bit of Spanish and German.

Too bad there aren't any subforums dedicated to other languages. Aside from Dutch, of course.

Fluent in French, used to be fluent-ish in Spanish but French seems to have taken over that part of my mind. It comes back when I'm in a Spanish speaking environment, mostly.

I am near fluent in Vietnamese, having moved to Vietnam a few years ago

i speak english better than the rest (arguably "fluently") but i also studied italian, french, spanish, latin, and because of that i can read portuguese and romanian even though i never studied them (i.e., romance languages + japanese)

reasonably good in German, smatterings of Spanish, little bits of French and Italian

Yeah, knowing, say, two romance languages is the key to all the rest, especially as far as reading goes. Spoken Portuguese is barely intelligible to me, but I can understand maybe 85% of a basic newspaper article. I'm surely this is equally true for Scandinavian languages, perhaps even more so.

xp

i speak farsi

To be fair, Romanian can be nigh impenetrable to a romance language speaker if you deliberately emphasize the Slavic/Hungarian/Greek/Turkish loanwords.

xp

This is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Germanic_languages#Mutual_intelligibility

i tried a few times and i was able to identify latin declensions/conjugations, i thought i was able to read 50% (i could have judged that incorrectly though, unbeknownst to me)

when the whole catalonia thing was happening i was reading catalan pretty okay and i had never read/heard it before

xp

I speak Danish and Swedish and I understand and read Norwegian, but every time I try to speak it it comes out as pseudo Swedish ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also a bit French

i speak spanish fairly badly, but can understand it fairly well (well the accents that i am used to anyway) and am literate in the language - can read novels, broadsheet newspapers with little difficulty.

i am planning on taking language classes to learn a new language, I'm not sure which one i will choose but probably not a romance or germanic language just for variety's sake.

considering scots gaelic or arabic

re danish and swedish: the (possibly very mistaken) impression i got from the bridge (= bron/broen) is that really all that separated danish from swedish was accent -- no one ever said "what did you just say?"

(of course as someone speaking either i couldn't really distinguish this accent difference at all: except that the two pronunciatons of copenhagen sounded more like CONNHAIN versus SHIPPENHAM) (or anyway something similarly different, it's a while since i watched)

an element of the plot in LA REINA DEL SUR is that teresa mendoza la mexicana's accent is considered strong and telling in spain -- and she sometimes disguises it and at other times is proud -- but again i can't actually make the distinction myself)

never seen the show but are you saying teresa has a strong (as in thick?) mexican accent?

There's a lot of words that are different. Cucumber for instance is 'agurk' in Danish and 'gurka' in Swedish. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Lol at CONNHAIN vs SHIPPHAM, and it's 100% obvious to me which is which :)

are you saying teresa has a strong (as in thick?) mexican accent?

i'm not competent to say, my ear is not good enough! but she's from mexico rather than spain, and the lyrics to the themesong say: "Supo aprender el acento que se usa por todo Espana" (="she was able to learn the accent used throughout Spain"??)

needs more answers!!

Agreed.

B1ldts, Frisian, Dutch, English, French, German. Decent but rusty Spanish. Novice Sorani Kurdish (learning it currently, it's hard)

are you saying teresa has a strong (as in thick?) mexican accent?

Mexican telenovelas are a pretty big deal globally, so Spaniards have likely heard Mexican Spanish accents on TV. Also, it's a fun hook for writing a TV show, so they'll make a bigger deal out of it than people would in real life. But you wouldn't need a "thick" accent to stand out in Spain as a Mexican Spanish speaker. Like, if there are Australians around here in Texas talking one or two sentences is enough to peg them as Australian. Maybe they'd turn out to be from New Zealand, or someone would assume they're British, but everyone will know they're not from the US.

A "thick" vs "weak" dialect is pretty ill-defined linguistically anyway... maybe better to think of a dialect recognition threshold, some point in conversation with someone where it becomes clear they're speaking a non-local dialect of your language. Better reflects that what you are sensing is a kind of distance from your own dialect, a relationship, not some measurable intensity of somebody's individual speech. It's also usually the case that there are non-linguistic markers of difference or otherness that will cause you to ascribe more "thickness" to their dialect.

i'm not competent to say, my ear is not good enough! but she's from mexico rather than spain, and the lyrics to the themesong say: "Supo aprender el acento que se usa por todo Espana" (="she was able to learn the accent used throughout Spain"??)

― mark s, Wednesday, November 15, 2017 10:38 AM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haven't watched it but i may just do so for a few minutes now

intonation is definitely something that is harder to learn than distincion and using the vosotros form, though

novelas usu work with cliches right? so i wouldn't be surprised if this is a colonizer vs colonized thing, which has been used in latin american literature and art for over a hundred years ("subversiveness")

it's very much from teresa mendoza's POV. she's someone put-upon and endangered at the start who turns the tables on everyone -- other gangsters (mexican, north african, spanish, french, italian and russian), plus also cops from half a dozen countries, and men everywhere -- to become top dog, BUT AT COST TO HER SOUL PERHAPS AND HER HEART FOR SURE (she loses boyfriends a LOT). so yes, that's the dialectic -- who's good and who's bad here (and who's exciting and who's tragic)? it's often insanely pulpy -- but i've also never watched something so cheerfully populist that deals at such length with e.g. migrancy and border politics in the (more well-worn) context of drugs and sex-workers, glamour and tourism and corruption etc, in mexico and america a little, but mostly in spain and gib and mellila

if we take the discussion here i won't be the only person in the thread: can i really be the only person watching LA REINA DEL SUR?

noted

yeah I need to watch this it sounds pretty interesting!

i'm watching on netflix uk (ep 48 of 63 in s1, s2 due next year): there's also a US englang version that i haven't watched any of

hopefully can find one in Spanish with English subtitles

the version i'm watching has subtitles in different typefaces to cope with all the languages on-screen!

Recusing myself from this thread for the time being

My Italian is still pretty fluent despite not having lived their for 17 years and not visited for nearly 10, I can still get through a film without subtitles although my vocabulary is getting poor.

French, still pretty reasonable but I was never that great.

German I can still order a meal, but a train ticket.

French and Italian means I can generally get the gist of what’s going on in Spanish and. Catalan but can’t respond.

Mandarin, Cantonese and japanese incoherent mumbling that sometimes results in noodles, beer or taxi rides.

As I’ve grown older I have started to really enjoy the process of learning languages and I think I am gettinrg better at it. I really want to spend 6 months in China or Japan so I can reallly lock down an Asian language. Japanese looks the better bet, although there grammar is hard, tones are harder.

Ed otm

i'm pretty good in french but still find it difficult to watch a tv show w/o at least french subtitles. i would really like to get to the point where i could see some theatre in france, or a new movie, without feeling like i was wasting my money.

xxp

out of those three korean is the easiest/quickest to master with the only difficulty being a few pronunciation issues (that even some koreans have trouble with)

japanese is the second easiest/hardest and mandarin would be definitely hard with canto being like the hardest (because as you say, tones)

also i never understood why people think japanese grammar is hard? especially spoken japanese

spoken french sounds very different than written so it makes things harder, i studied it for 6 years and still can't understand a lot of it (too many dialects too)

my friend is from switzerland and he learnt swiss french (but swiss german is his native language). he was driving around in rural quebec and the lady at a gas station sees his first and last name are french so starts talking to him in french. he understood none of it. he tried talking to her in swiss french and the lady didn't understand any of it either. so they ended up talking in english with the quebecer giving him the stink eye

Québécois French, especially joual, is as impenetrable to European French speakers as a thick Scottish accent is to North American anglophones. That said, many francophone Montrealers will unconsciously 'tone down' their accent in order to make themselves more easily understood by foreigners. There's also an insufferably prescriptivist bias – particularly in France – that makes some people unwilling to even entertain the possibility that other varieties of French are equally valid, which partly explains why these stories are so common.

yeah, the idea that the only correct way to speak French is to speak the way they speak in France annoys a lot of people in Quebec. Particularly because French French tends to borrow a lot more words from English ("weekend", "parking", etc.) than Québécois French

That's a common Québécois misconception, though. Just because the anglicisms used in France are different, doesn't mean there's more of them.

I don't know, there definitely seems to be a conscious effort to avoid anglicisms in Quebec (which is why we get words like "courriel" (a great word!) for email). I don't get the impression that this is as much of concern in France.

Québécois French is rife with anglicisms for obvious historical reasons, so we need to actively combat them. France doesn't really have that problem – we're projecting it onto them.

An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-Cw9ywW-TU

People use courriel here only for official stuff, normally you just say mél

Once I went to a talk (academic) by a Quebecer in Paris; after a couple minutes they asked her to switch to English

I have a student from Ottawa right now, his French accent sounds like a Spanish accent to me

On the metro last week a lady I was talking to asked me if I was Canadian. Previously I was asked if I was Belgian. Everyone can tell I have an accent but evidently it’s not readily place able. I’m just glad they don’t think I’m American! No one switches to English with me anymore.

i was taught courriel in english speaking canada

every so often you'd get someone who went to france or was told that "mail" was okay (before the world wide web was the defacto knowledge base) and the instructor would i guess begrudgingly accept it

Courriel is too long, spoken French approches the minimum number sounds possible.

YES

yeah, most Québécois will just say "mail" or "email" (English pronounciation rather than "mél") but will write "courriel".

ya in spanish people say mail as well and i recall some italians doing this

pretty universal i guess? as with most tech/internet things

I mean, if there is some linguistic shortcut you can take that allows you to say what you want to say in a comprehensible manner with fewer syllables, people will do that. I'm pretty sure that's universal across all languages.

Except for Germany

Ha!

My parents are Swiss so I speak Swiss German. Once I tried to explain to someone what the difference between Swiss German and regular German was and mostly what I came up with was that Swiss German is regular German spoken faster without a lot of unnecessary extra words and syllables.

sounds gut to me

it's so weird (swiss) german is one language i never really studied (four month reading knowledge course doesn't count) even though half of my family speaks it

The dialect of Spanish I speak, Bolivian, is regarded as the slowest spoken Spanish, which makes it hard for me amongst Spanish speakers from elsewhere.

Once I went to a talk (academic) by a Quebecer in Paris; after a couple minutes they asked her to switch to English

― droit au butt (Euler), Friday, November 17

That just makes my blood boil (I say this as someone who speaks French with a standard French accent). And it's hardly an isolated incident.

I felt terrible for her, she's a friend and French is her first language: her English has a pretty strong accent too.

My friends from the provinces get picked on too, for having e.g. Auvergnate accents.

This is mostly a Paris thing, though, and even here it's getting better, I think, as the city becomes more and more diverse. And maybe this reflects an increasing sense that the French are not going to bother getting very good English.

Languages that I have studied reasonably seriously and have visited countries in which they are spoken and can communicate in on a good day: German, French, Spanish
Language that I have studied somewhat and have been to the country where it is spoken and feel I could improve in quickly with proper study and conditions: Italian
Language that bedevils me because it is similar to languages I know, which I understand pretty well based on listening to songs and cultural connection with a lot of native speakers. For which I have never visited a country where it is spoken and can't seem to get the ball rolling: Portuguese
Languages I have studied at some basic level, either taking an intro course or using Teach Yourself,Routledge Colloquial, Pimsleur, Duolingo or some other self study method and can exchange greetings in: Not going to list them all here right now

I hadn’t thought about people in Montreal toning down their accent and kind of previously unconsciously chalked it up to an urban/rural divide.

I overheard some tourists from Quebec speaking when I was in northern Vermont a few years back and it took me a minute to untangle what was going on

People in France preferring English to differently-accented French might be the most stereotypical French thing I have ever heard

Used to be fluent in "official Irish", i.e. the version that has nothing to do with what native speakers speak. Have gone from fluent to passable in German through lack of use. Also passable in French - I can watch a movie without subtitles but at best I catch 80% of what's happening. I have a degree in Sanskrit but at this point could not read or produce a single sentence.

I've got a question: What, linguistically, could be deemed the most efficient world language? The one that's pronounced how it's spelled. The one that has the fewest exceptions to the rule. Is there such a thing?

I’m going to guess that it’s not one using the Latin Alphabet or a least if it does they’ll be a lot of diacritics.

But then what about regional variation? If spelling will reflect some form of standardised pronunciation then regional differences will break the relationship.

Standard Italian is follows the spelling very closely if you are Milanese but not if you are Sicilian.

Spanish is pretty good on the whole "pronounced like it's spelled" front

i've got a new strat for my French. Les Pieds Sur Terre from France Culture. a new 30-minute podcast episode every day. if i can get to the point where I'm enjoying it and not having to pause and go back etc then I'll be v happy.

Ed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographia_bohemica ?

That was interesting and led to this

Languages with a high grapheme-to-phoneme and phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence (excluding exceptions due to loan words and assimilation) include Maltese, Finnish, Albanian, Georgian, Turkish (apart from ğ and various palatal and vowel allophones), Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian), Bulgarian, Macedonian (if the apostrophe denoting schwa is counted, though slight inconsistencies may be found), Eastern Armenian (apart from o, v), Basque (apart from palatalized l, n), Haitian Creole, Castilian Spanish (apart from h, x, b/v, and sometimes k, c, g, j, z), Czech (apart from ě, ů, y, ý), Polish (apart from ó, h, rz), Romanian (apart from distinguishing semivowels from vowels), Ukrainian (mainly phonemic with some other historical/morphological rules, as well as palatalization), Belarusian (phonemic for vowels but morphophonemic for consonants except ў written phonetically), Swahili (missing aspirated consonants, which do not occur in all varieties and anyway are sparsely used), Mongolian (apart from letters representing multiple sounds depending on front or back vowels, the soft and hard sign, silent letters to indicate /ŋ/ from /n/ and voiced versus voiceless consonants) Azerbaijani (apart from k), and Kazakh (apart from и, у, х, щ, ю).

"apart from"

(apart from h, x, b/v, and sometimes k, c, g, j, z)

not what you're looking for but making use of the fewest sounds is kind of efficient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotokas_language

Russian is pretty much pronounced as spelled - Polish probably as far in the other direction as any language I can think of.

I need create own polish alphabet, it will be gut pic.twitter.com/XYqcRZbtXZ

— ⭐Jag. Thornproof♠ (@SanJaguar) October 10, 2017

presumably thanks to this?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthography#The_post-revolution_reform

my dad's parents* were reds in the 30s: my dad told to me once that he could remember his mum teaching herself russian in the bath, adding that she was learning from a tsarist-era guidebook so it probably would have done more harm than good come the worldwide bolshevik revolution

*one of them ended up very reactionary, the other stayed secretly red till the end in her 90s, i don't really know how they negotiated this personally

adding: my dad was naturally good at languages, picking up the useable basics very quickly -- he taught himself serbo-croat in order to read an untranslated paper abt karst landscapes* and once (in lapland) held a halting conversation with the woman running a post office in esperanto lol

might learn Volapuk one day so I can curse the Esperanto-speaking masses

starting scottish gaelic classes on saturday, something I've been meaning to do for about a decade. procrastination is bad news.

Ashamed to say as a Scot that pretty much the only words I know in Gaelic are a song about porridge

i know next to nothing apart from the words that are similar/the same to the bit of Irish I learned on Duolingo.

I don't think it's incumbent of Scots to know any gaelic - as long as they don't have that tiresome anti-gaelic road sign attitude - I just have always been interested in threatened languages in general and it seems like it makes sense to learn the one that's closest to your home. I was inspired by walking past a classroom at the university I work at here in Vancouver and hearing young indigenous people learning the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh) language

kinda neat

https://localingual.com/