A knack for languages?

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I love to see old threads resurrected, read posts from people who used to post frequently but then leave.
Anyway, my mom is a an undiagnosed HFA and she can be fluent in a language after spending a week there. She's amazing.

Me - I suck at them. Took six years of French and when I went to France in high school my senior year, they tested me and my comprehension was 30%. I think part of it is CAPD.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sprachgef%C3%BChl

Took German my Junior and Senior Year in HS. I did pretty good with German I the first year, but got the Outstanding Achievement Award in German the last year.

As for English, in tenth grade, I took regular, got an 88%.
Next year went into Honors, and got an 88%.
The next year I went into AP English Lit and got a 88%.
Go figure. .-.

Know:
English
Spanish

Can do a decent job of deciphering if found in written form:
Portuguese
French
Italian
Catalan

Learning:
Japanese (slowwwwly)

Want to learn:
Russian
Korean
Swedish
Dutch
Greek

I am trying to learn Spanish and Italian. I would like to learn French but French spelling is too much of a mess.

I would also like to learn German, Norwegian, Chinese, Hindi, Classical Greek, and Sanskrit.

I've always found languages easy to learn and enjoyable. Languages have been one of my special interests. Apart from my native language I've learned 7 foreign languages and I understand a lot in many other languages and could make myself understandable in those too. I also like learning different kinds of alphabets and I already know the Latin one, cyrillic, braille and runes.

I absolutely love languages!
My native language is German (and if Upper Saxon counts, then that, too^^). In year 10 I was able to take seven languages (during all other years it was less): English, French, Latin, Russian, Arabic, Ancient Greek and Spanish. Most of it was part of the "Begabtenförderung" ("program for talented pupils", but it's just the way that when you're quite good at a subject, you can skip the lessons and instead take other courses- so I ended up not doing the general English and part of the French and Latin lessons, because they were quite boring, and just participated in the tests/exams).
At school I'll only be able (due to the bad, bad school system) to do English next year. It'll be sooooo boring...
I've also been studying Finnish and Esperanto (which is REALLY easy and therefore recommendable for everyone having a hard time learning languages AND those who love it- there are no exceptions, just 16 rules (actually less), and it's really nice talking/writing to people speaking it, because they are quite social and very nice to unsocial people and mostly also interested in other languages. I went to a small (but there are also big ones) camp with about 15 people learning it, and though I'm quite uncomfortable in social situations I felt really good there and accepted).

Of course I also understand quite much of the languages related to the ones I know, like Italian, Portugese, Netherlands, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Estonian and so on... (but that's normal!).

However, I'd only say I'm fluent in English and quite fluent in French, my Spanish and Esperanto are alright, too, for a conversation, but I wouldn't be able to conduct a real conversation in other languages.

Oh, and I want to learn every language in the world.
Since 8th grade I've known that I want to study linguistics, because the structure and etymology interest me very much, and I'll start studying it next year, hopefully!

I was told in school that I was useless at languages and should never study them. Its ironic that I'm learning Spanish at the moment and hopefully I'm going to start Russian as well.
Stupid Teachers

Logos, ich denke du solltest ganz bestimmt Linguistik studieren. Das wird Dir wohl sicher gefallen. Ich selber hab allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Köln studiert. Hat ganz viel Spaß gemacht und ich hab meine Kommunikation mit NTs dadurch verbessern können.

I think North German should be recognized as a language! You would find it easy to pick up Yiddish...I'm learning it at the moment.



C'est pas vrai, NeantHumain. Les deux langues français et espagnol sont deriveés du latin. Alors il y a beaucoup de similarités dans la grammatique et le vocabulaire entre eux. En ce qui concerne l'anglais, il y a que des similarités dans le vocabulaire.

I studied linguistics at undergrad level. I picked up very basic Inuit for a Morphology course. Apart from German and French, I can also read, write and speak Hindi and Urdu. I can read Latin, Spanish and Dutch, and can understand spoken Punjabi. I can read, write and speak very basic Italian, Russian, Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit. I find it easy and fun to learn new scripts. I learned Runic for a term paper. I started learning new Testament Greek, but then went on to my MSc course. I might take it up again!