Do You Speak A Second Language?

I have been studying Cornish for a year now - I just sat my first Kowethas Kernewek exam, and was astonished to discover that, under pressure, I can actually now carry on a proper conversation, yn Kernewek, rag deg mynysenn!

I speak Irish pretty well, I'm a little rusty cos it's hard to find fellow speakers, but I was close to fluent a few years back, and I did a radio show in Irish for a few years in my earlier 20s. could easily chat with someone at length.

I speak German well enough to get by on a day to day basis while there and definitely to carry on a 10 minute conversation though it wouldn't definitely not be grammatically perfect. Basically I understand most conversational German and can speak it well enough to make myself understood. Dad from there and his family all still lives there. Despite my mom also being fluent, we did not speak it at home. What I know I learned from listening to him speak with friends and from when we've visited relatives. I'm confident that if I spent any real length of time living there I'd be fluent fairly quickly. I just wish I had some conversational partners here.

Oh sorry and for the qs... I learned in school, but my command of it was helped mostly by going to the Gaeltacht areas in Ireland for a few weeks every summer. This is sort of a rite of passage for Irish teens, you go and stay with native Irish speakers along with other kids, and (in theory) speak the language and no English.

A lot of the time it's sort of a doss of underage drinking and snogging but the school I went to was borderline IRA and made you salute the flag every morning (only remembering how weird this was.)

They used to be in the news every now and again for sending a kid home when he sneezed and said "excuse me" in English, or similar. One sentence and you were gone.

As harsh as that sounds, I learned Irish rapidly there and it totally exposed how badly it was taught in schools.

A lot of Irish people can't really speak Irish I guess, but one of my close friends in London has a good grasp and if we want to talk about English people or say something privately it's quite handy.

x-post - I really really wish my parents had raised me bilingually. :(

Lol, same here, my Portuguese lies dormant - oddly can understand but I couldn't speak the words themselves for any chunk of time.

Thinking of signing up for a class..

As an added bonus, if you do speak another language, I think it'd be great if you could say "I can speak ::your language" or something like that in the language. So we have an interesting record of the ILX polyglots.

e.g. My a wra kewsel Kernewek!

I would love to do an intensive learning session, like Local Garda describes - problem is, there are so few Cornish speakers, let alone native ones. (The language has only been revived since the 1920s.) They do Pennseythun Kernewek about once a year, where you go to a hotel in Cornwall and everyone speaks nothing but Cornish for a weekend, but I missed it this year as I was unemployed and too poor to go.

I have to say, my class has been very good at getting you up and chatting. Language teaching has changed so much since I was at school, and they'd throw months of grammar and declensions at you before you even learned to say "hello, my name is..."

It's funny, my parents both speak Afrikaans as well as English - they used to speak it to one another when they wanted to discuss stuff "not in front of the kids" - not realising that we picked it up pretty quickly. I used to be able to understand it if it was spoken - my aunt and uncle spoke it pretty exclusively in their house (my aunt is a native speaker) so I'd get a lot better every time we stayed with them - but I think it's probably gone by now, it's been so long since I heard it. Do kinda wonder if that early exposure helped me develop my weird interest in obscure languages.

I could probably converse on a message board in French or German, but couldn't speak them well enough to have an actual out-loud conversation, so will go for the monolingual Anglophone answer. Which I am not proud of. I love languages, and have quite an ear for tracing etymologies, but can't keep enough grammar in my head to make them flow. And I hate hate hate gendered linguistics.

If by gendered linguistics, you mean languages that have masculine/feminine/neuter cases, I'm completely fascinated by them. Like, how inanimate things get assigned to which case. (Why is chi (house) masculine and eglos (church) feminine? What's the thinking behind that?) Makes you think how random concepts of gender really are.

I speak Spanish well enough to have a ten minute conversation...had fun a few months ago at a dinner party in Paris where we had no languages in common collectively: some Italian, English, Spanish & Portuguese speakers; but we all spoke enough Spanish to have a three hour good time; & I felt great afterwards, to know my abilities are still intact. I'm the child of an immigrant from Latin America who didn't want his children to speak Spanish natively, so I was raised monolingually, but heard Spanish all the time since it's my father's first language & he spoke it with his family, so when I started taking Spanish in school I was fluent-ish very quickly, like within a year or two of ordinary USA Spanish courses.

this is why I was so happy to send my kids to public school in France a few years back; even if they forget it whilst in the USA due to inaction it'll have altered their minds enough so that it'll come back quickly when they're next immersed, hopefully soon.

I can carry out basic conversations in Spanish no problem, but don't feel I know it well enough to count as knowing another language. I would love to speak it fluently though.

I have had long conversations in it, but full of mistakes and me asking the other person to repeat themselves.

The thing is, gendered objects are basically arbitrary - there is no sense to them, you can't learn them through any deep understanding of symbolism etc, they switch between languages (case in point: the moon is feminine in French, masculine in German), and they make up heavy parts of your testing even though they are pointless.

xpost to WCC

My dad's first language is French but I only absorbed tiny bits and pieces from him. He watches hockey games and some other TV in French but never really spoke it around the house unless relatives visited. My parents considered putting me in French immersion from kindergarten onwards but then we moved across the city and it was no longer an option.

In our school system we were made to learn French for a few years (starting around age 9/10) and after that it became optional. I stopped taking it because the pacing was slow (first three years were spent learning vocabulary and only the most basic sentence structure, like 'il porte un chapeau rouge') and I wanted to use my options for other things. In the end it made no difference: friends who took French immersion or studied French from grades 4-12 and haven't used it as adults have mostly forgotten all of it. I went back to French as an adult and I try to keep up with it so I don't lose it. I'm glad I'm at a point where I can converse in French, read in French, etc. Wish I had more people to speak it with though.

Getting the genders of things right is still a struggle. A lot of them in French are just based on what the ending of the word is, like '-ion' is often feminine, '-age' is usually masculine.

The "speaking it with other people" is so urgent and key. Apparently, even though my school only offers 4 years of Cornish, there is a meet-up in the pub afterwards where people get together and converse that some people have been doing for, like 11 years now. I really hope I can get to that level.

Yeah, it's interesting, the structure and spelling of gender in languages, and trying to work out - things in Cornish are feminine if they're -enn a lot of the time. But new words when they are invented or imported, usually they are made to be masculine because feminine words often mutate in really confusing words.

The other thing you have to remember in Cornish is if things are considered "people" or not. Yet another set of mutations are based on whether the word is a person or a thing - but the Cornish consider horses to be people, and also stones are considered to be people for the purposes of mutation. My teacher reckons that definitely speaks to the "Celtic" mind-set, in terms of standing stones etc. are considered to have spirits in them or whathaveyou. Either way, it's interesting.

Also, before anyone asks, no - Basic, COBOL, C++, SQL etc do not count as second languages.

I decided a goal of mine is to learn Spanish, it's just dumb as shit living (and teaching) in Arizona and not knowing how.
SO THEN what is the best way to learn a language? Private tutor? Community college? Other? The nice thing is I'll have plenty of people to practice with very easily.

I understand Spanish p well (can read novels and stuff),and can converse in it,tho with a fair amount of errors and hesitation.my dad is a native spanish speaker but never spoke to us in Spanish when we were kids.

i also understand some basic Portuguese,Italian,and Catalan.

i remember local garda's radio show,sounded like some free flowing irish to me.

Community College is definitely the way forward, I think. It's much easier to pick up a language in a group of people - so long as the class size isn't too large, so you can actually do group speaking. Our class started at 14, which was too big, but these days there are only ever 4 to 6 people in the group, and we sit round a table, and it's the perfect size because everyone gets a turn.

I studied Spanish for several years in high school, but not much of it ever went in, mainly because I had too much Latin in my head already.

unless these guys are your study group:

http://screencrave.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/community2.20-studygroupconfused-04-14-11.jpg

you'd learn everything except Spanish.

also, English is my second language - I speak Malay fluently, and can understand and carry out a conversation in Indonesian.

Also, before anyone asks, no - Basic, COBOL, C++, SQL etc do not count as second languages.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Saturday, June 23, 2012 3:55 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Loooool, they should, though. And symbolic logic (I might be able to tick the second box in that case).

Also, I *love* that stones are grammatically people in Cornish. The old ones really are the children of the stones.

Has everyone on this thread heard about Duolingo by now? http://duolingo.com/. It's a free language learning service that aims to translate the web at the same time...

There was an old Cornish fairy-tale, I've forgotten the details, I'll have to look it up, which was about this old giant couple, and the stones literally were their children, and the giantess used to carry them around in her apron. But when you see the rock formations on, like, the far coast of West Penwith, they really *do* look like people! Whole tribes of people just hanging out on the side of the cliff, staring out to sea. Which reminds me, I have more sketches I have to finish and upload.

I do wish people would provide examples of the languages they speak! Especially things I don't get to hear/see that often, like Irish and Malay! (I don't think Indonesian is in Latin script so maybe that's not possible?)

no. p shameful. spanish classes in HS and college, but i didn't put much into it and it never clicked. i had a hard time with the particular kind of frustration of language learning, tbh.

I do like to troll the Rosetta Stone booth ppl at the airport by telling them I will buy one of their packages when they release one for papiamento.

<3

WCC, actually Indonesian and Malay are pretty similar - same structure, just different words, pronounciation and speech rhythms.

I can speak Malay = Saya boleh bercakap Bahasa Melayu
I can speak Indonesian = Saya bisa berbicara Bahasa Indonesia

Oh yeah, I can read Arabic too (thanks to four years of Quranic classes) but I don't remember what most of it means.

Thank you! That's really cool, I can see how closely they seem to be related. This kind of thing is fascinating to me, how you can sometimes see similarities between languages which must have diverged a long time ago.

(I really like comparing Cornish with Welsh speakers - which is very similar - and with Irish speakers - which is not that similar, but still shares similar things if you know which letters commonly changed.)

ABBS - I am a language teacher (TESOL) and agree that structured classes (comm coll or other, just make sure you have a good teacher) are best for getting grammatical foundation and sea legs in listening, speaking, writing (reading is usually easiest if you already highly literate, which most of ILX is). After a good while of that, immerse yourself in situations that will enable you to use your newfound skills.

The best language learners have a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for learning. (That is to say they are both able and willing to use their new language). A willingness to be uncomfortable helps, as does a low "language ego" (high language ego usually translates to a fear of making errors/looking stupid and strong clam-up)

I speak Spanish but should definitely practice more.

I didn't know that term before, but I think I have the acme of all language ego.

Ha ha ha @ language ego.

I think that I am one of the worst students in my class because I just blurt random Cornish things out in class all the time, regardless of whether it's the right answer or even appropriate sometimes. My teacher, OTOH, thinks I am one of the best students because I produce loads of actual Cornish, all the time, regardless of whether I'm saying "cabbage soup!" or "Gary has the key." Language is one of those things you have to be just not afraid of getting it wrong.

Ha, I don't think that's a problem for me – I have this awful Peggy Hill pronunciation style (just on account of picking up vocabs from signs, from conversation, etc, and never learning anything formally) but I still try to use Spanish words all the time. Universal reaction from my students (about a third of whom have Spanish as their primary language) or from my brother (who went on a mission to Chihuahua and is fluent) is "what are you saying? why are you saying that? godddddd" and it just makes me lol. But when I understand a Spanish word here or there that a student says they think I am a total badass. I think it would really help make me a better advocate for those kids, and able to talk to their parents, which would be super helpful. Plus it's just a cool language. I've never been able to figure out how to roll my Rs but everyone says if you speak it long enough it just happens eventually.

If by gendered linguistics, you mean languages that have masculine/feminine/neuter cases, I'm completely fascinated by them. Like, how inanimate things get assigned to which case. (Why is chi (house) masculine and eglos (church) feminine? What's the thinking behind that?) Makes you think how random concepts of gender really are.

Well, not that random, assuming you're talking about grammatical gender:

sci.lang FAQ - How did genders and cases develop in IE?

I took a few German classes in high school and college, as did my roommate, and we'd hang out at home and go shopping and speak the most garbled, fucked up, silly blend of German and English. But any excuse to try on all the fun different words! Why not! Languages are cool.

Yeah, it's just a physical thing your tongue has to learn, there's nothing mysterious about it. I started a Spanish speaking thread on the sandbox to practice once...maybe la hora ya llegó.

One of my personal complications is that I work with Spanish speakers from all over the Spanish speaking world, and there are very different vocabulary and pronunciation conventions from one person to another. I decided a long time ago that I would not attempt to ape my conversational partner's style (la española, la puertorriqueña, etc) and would just speak the dialect I learned the most from -- español bogotano.

also i knew f hazel would show up before too long!!

Well, what I mean by random is... what Emil.y pointed out - why is moon masculine in Germanic languages and feminine in Romance languages (and also Celtic languages, apparently)? Why is ship feminine in some language groups and masculine in others? It doesn't seem nearly as neat a division as that link suggests.

i have high language ego! that's my biggest obstacle to speaking spanish on the reg because i am v conscious of saying things correctly in my native language and like to think i can express myself v well in english. i get super bummed when i realize how limited i am in spanish and then i start thinking "how can i express this really great idea in english using the 5 words i know in spanish?" then i'm like, "wait i know more than 5 words!" and by then i've been sitting there for 10 seconds hemming and hawing and i pull up google translate while i'm on the phone with a parent and hoping that it works. this was very difficult when trying to tell some mom that her son smelled like weed but didn't have anything on him.

My parents are bilingual Cubans and brought us up the same. I speak as much Spanish as English these days.

Well, what I mean by random is... what Emil.y pointed out - why is moon masculine in Germanic languages and feminine in Romance languages (and also Celtic languages, apparently)? Why is ship feminine in some language groups and masculine in others? It doesn't seem nearly as neat a division as that link suggests.

Oh, it isn't neat, but it isn't random either. There's definitely an arbitrariness in the way languages change over time, but if you had the entire history of the Indo-European language laid out before you, you'd see that differences like E.mily pointed out that seem bizarre and random in the present are in fact the result of a set of systemic and to some degree predictable historical processes of language change. Noun classes in Indo-European languages seem random now because they are semantically empty, pretty much. You can bet that in their original form they were not, and made useful, non-random distinctions.

Yes, and those non-random distinctions reveal much about the cultural narratives of what constitutes "masculine" or "feminine." They have meaning and context within that culture - like a lot of narratives about gender and what it means - but compared one to another, it reveals the arbitrary nature of deciding what it means to be "masculine" or "feminine."

I realise I'm not explaining myself very well.

Something like... the gender of nouns within a language is something which reveals something about that specific culture, and how they conceive of masculine as opposed feminine. But it reveals nothing about either the actual Moon - or indeed about actual, individual men or women. *Why* they draw the distinction is not arbitrary at all. But the actual distinction is arbitrary when compared to the distinctions that other cultures make.

Seriously, let's not make this about gender, though.

I really just want to see how people say "Yo hablo Espanol" or "parlez-vous Francais?" in as many languages as people on ILX speak.

(Sentence 1 being v v v out of character, sentence 2 being v v v in character)

Anyway, native English speaker, but I can get by in Spanish. Although if I don't get my ass back to South America in the next couple of years, I'm going to lose it. Only immersion will do it, and I'm too lazy to do it here in Texas.

I have great regard for polyglots. I am purely an Anglophone with mere fragments and smatterings of about three other languages. None come even close to fluency. To slave my pride, I tell myself that at least I have total mastery of english. Total mastery, d'y'hear me?

oops that was supposed to say itt
in this thread
haha!

Totally agree with LL, loved reading that Hazel

the folk beliefs
accurate AND charitable choice of words

Somewhat hesitant to reveal to LBI that on a recent vacation I dipped into the DL course of what I presume is his majority language.

Ha, echt? Leuk! How far did you come? Was it difficult for you?

So far just past the first checkpoint. How would you feel if I told I am enjoying it and not finding it especially difficult?

I'd feel great :) That's very good to hear. Are you planning on using it in any other context than racking up DL points? Do you have friends you could speak it with?

I wish

Well, did meet some Brazilians in the neighborhood recently, one of whom is half-Dutch and works for the Consulate, I think. Don't know if I will run into anytime soon, but always good to be prepared, I guess.

Actually already have a question for you. So "een tweeling" is a *pair* of twins? And also one single twin? And you can just tell by context which one you mean, with the first case being the default, or...

Also seems to me that "children" can be translated as "kinderen" but also "kids," but singular is only "kinder," no "kid" afaik.

Sorry singular just "kind" like, um, some other language.

"Een tweeling" is a pair of two people who are twins. It can never be one person of a two people who form twins. You do say 'mijn tweelingbroer' (my twin-brother), but you can't say "ik ben een tweeling" (I'm a tweeling), because that would literally mean you are two persons. Rather, you are part of a "tweeling". If that makes sense.

Children is 'kinderen', not 'kids' (though loads of Dutch ppl do say kids, taking it from English). Singular is 'kind'.

Perfect sense. Thanks!

Digging the Dutch word for clogs.

Other words besides "kids" that look like English: sorry, water.

Looks like we got the word "water" from you, and "sorry" came from us.

Alstublieft

Dankjewel

The two words of Dutch I remember from broadcasting hey Arnold and spongebob to the Netherlands and flanders 15 years ago. (I used to be able to sing the spongebob theme in Dutch)

wat heb jij lekker kontje!

(the expression I learned in Holland some years ago)

Flattery will get you nowhere Euler :)

nu in de bioscoop

My Dutch tree seems to have changed behind the scenes so I only have partial credit for various leaves and have to redo many lessons. Guess it is not a big deal except when I lose health have to switch to another tree to regain.

De schildpadden eten boterhammen

Finished Stressed Pronouns although I can't keep them straight yet

Ja! We hebben geen bananen.

lol: https://thegeekygaeilgeoir.wordpress.com/2017/09/06/even-racists-got-the-blues/

... and DL just added Korean.

A week and a half into Duolingo Spanish and i can say "la mayoria de la gente cree que estoy loco" and "estoy en el programa de proteccion a testigos" but couldn't honestly ask what time it is.

It's difficult because so much Spanish is mutually intelligible with English and French i can get most of the answers right without really learning anything. It seems to have a much weaker focus on genuine productive skills (like being able to translate sentences from scratch, rather than selecting word order) than some of the other courses.

haha! telling time/what time is it was a core feature of every Spanish class I took in grade school. ¿que hora es? son las dos y media. it always seemed like we learned the same things every year to the point where i wondered why we weren't allowed to learn more each year instead of learning the same thing. then we got a new teacher who introduced us to verbs and i started to understand.

so since my brother-in-law is German and my niece and nephew are growing up in Germany, I thought it might be time to learn some German. going to try it solely via Duolingo and see how far I can get. I have zero previous schooling or knowledge of German outside of watching Wim Wenders movies.

trying to avoid using any linguist shortcuts like looking up a phoneme inventory of German and just rolling with Duolingo. although I am doing Spanish too, just to make myself feel better.

Was ist der deal mit Flugzeugessen? That's a phrase that's gotten me by in Germany.

My big issue with Duolingo is that it often feels like I am beating the game rather than learning a language. Especially during he pick the boxes translation to English there is often only one way to arrange the boxes.

Nearly done with all the Japanese it has and i’ll be looking for what to follow in from it. I need something with a bit more (any) grammar explanation. Looking things up in a Japanese grammar dictionary whilst doing DL is not reallly cutting it n

Tend to agree with latest two criticisms. For a language that is similar to one you already know, another Romance language if you know French or Spanish, a Scandinavian language if you know German, say, it is relatively easy to guess the answer and not really feel like you actually learned what you were doing. I haven't gone too far in the Japanese course but I can well believe Ed that you could fake it without quite making it and learning that mysterious thing know as Japanese grammar.

Otoh have found it very useful to practice agglutinative languages, which have rules that are logical but abstract and maybe hard to internalize.

for me the fun of doing Japanese in Duolingo is figuring out the grammatical patterns, like, how to negate, how to turn an assertion into a question, how to change a verb's tense. all of those elements have been there. supplementing that with an explicit explanation of the rules seems useful, but in becoming able to use the rules, I like Duolingo's approach.

not sure what a good Japanese grammar book is, though

There are tons of books on Japanese grammar, not sure which are the good ones, if any.

How for along are you in Japanese, Euler?

For a language that is similar to one you already know, another Romance language if you know French or Spanish, a Scandinavian language if you know German, say, it is relatively easy to guess the answer and not really feel like you actually learned what you were doing.

Sort of agree with this, but on the upside, I feel like you can sort of conceptualize the language if you can connect it to English. With Swedish, there are a fair amount of words that are close to English words, and a few idiomatic phrases actually have equivalents in English. For example, the phrase for "agree" is "håll med," which literally translates to "hold with," and then I remembered reading the phrase "I don't hold with that" in 19th century English.

My practice regimen, outside of Duolingo, has been a) attempting to read crime novels in Swedish and b) trying to make up sentences in my head when I'm in the shower or riding on the train or whatever.

But did you study German before, Phil?

not sure what a good Japanese grammar book is, though

― droit au butt (Euler), Monday, 2 October 2017 4:52 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It’s not the Japan Times Japanese grammar dictionary. I’m sure it’s a useful resource if you actually have some grounding but as a learning tool it’s obtuse.

But did you study German before, Phil?

No - I've only ever studied French (in school), Spanish and Japanese. None of the Japanese stuck - I can still maybe count to five, but that's about it.

So your Swedish studies are safe from Germanic interference then.

Yeah, but my wife - who studied German for several years - definitely noticed the similarities, and it has made things easier on her.

Well in that case...

I haven't been working on Japanese lately, since I returned from Japan. I'm still roughly where I was a couple of months ago. I'm going to Tokyo again in January so I'll pick up again in the next month or so.

I looked at the Japanese for dummies book but it's just romani apparently! That is not what I want.

romaji, duh.

I've got a couple Vlax Romani books you can borrow if you decide to take a radically different tack!

I've spent the last week on Italian in Duolingo and I think I want to commit to it as my third language. I only know the basics right now, but I'm trying to plunge in and puzzle through Italian news articles and opera libretti (also watching a Zelda Let's Play). There's enough lexical similarity with French that I can often pick up the gist of what's being said.

This is a fun reference page if you have one Romance language under your belt and are considering another one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity

If you trust these numbers (data comes from Ethnologue/SLI International, who are problematic but probably OK with Romance languages info) JMM chose Italian wisely... it and French have the highest lexical similarity of all Romance language pairs! Well, tied with Spanish/Portuguese actually.