What languages would you like to learn?

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blitzkrieg
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05 Aug 2011, 2:12 pm

OSB wrote:
'fun'
what reason would i have?


Espionage?



OneStepBeyond
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05 Aug 2011, 2:17 pm

blitzkrieg wrote:
OSB wrote:
'fun'
what reason would i have?


Espionage?


'fun' is my story and i'm sticking to it



Tequila
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05 Aug 2011, 2:18 pm

Tom_NUFC wrote:
Well, I learnt Spanish at school, but haven't used it a great deal, and its a bit rusty. Every now and then I buy a copy of 'Marca', a Spanish daily sports paper and have a read of it. I'm not fluent, but I can understand the basics, although I'm better at understanding the printed word than speech. I got myself a teach yourself Spanish CD pack to brush up, and went overboard a bit and got a French one too... and an Italian one, German one, Portuguese one and Japanese one. :lol:


With Spanish it can actually be not too difficult to understand the written word side of it. Enough to read a menu anyway. But speech? Forget it.

My Spanish roughly extends to...

Image



MXH
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05 Aug 2011, 2:20 pm

OneStepBeyond wrote:
MXH wrote:
OneStepBeyond wrote:
im learning german too!

for fun or for a reason?


'fun'
what reason would i have?

idk, maybe youd like to be able to make fun of people in a different language to their faces and them not notice. Its pretty awesome.



blitzkrieg
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05 Aug 2011, 2:22 pm

Tequila wrote:
My Spanish roughly extends to... [snip]


:lol:

OSB wrote:
'fun' is my story and i'm sticking to it


:thumright:

Right you are.



Last edited by blitzkrieg on 05 Aug 2011, 2:36 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Jory
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05 Aug 2011, 2:27 pm

I spent over a year studying German, but I gave up on it when I realized:

A. I had no practical use for it.

B. I had a hard enough time expressing myself in English.



SammichEater
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05 Aug 2011, 2:30 pm

Jory wrote:
I spent over a year studying German, but I gave up on it when I realized:

A. I had no practical use for it.

B. I had a hard enough time expressing myself in English.


Yup. I got my foreign language credits, and that's good enough for me. :)


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Tequila
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05 Aug 2011, 2:47 pm

Jory wrote:
I spent over a year studying German, but I gave up on it when I realized:

A. I had no practical use for it.

B. I had a hard enough time expressing myself in English.


And that's the thing - unless you're going to live in countries or areas of countries where the language you're learning is used on a regular basis, why bother? There's no 'reward' for doing it at the end of it and a lot of hard work.

Consider even that most people don't even bother learning their own national languages these days - like Irish - or are starting to ascribe less and less importance to them, like Maltese, say - and you can understand the reluctance to want to bother.

Plus most fluent English speakers on the Continent will want you to speak English and will not want to deal with an English speaker mutilating their language. :wink:



Tayribeiro
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05 Aug 2011, 3:00 pm

Mais alguem fala Portugues Acho que nao, mesmo porque nao e uma lingua muito conhecida, o teclado americano nem possui a acentuacao nescessaria. =/



Noop
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05 Aug 2011, 3:26 pm

French, German, Russian & possibly Latin. I've tried learning a little bit of Japanese but I don't know when I'll pick it up again.



pratchettfan
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05 Aug 2011, 3:39 pm

German and, like someone else here, using Deutsche Welle to do it.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/0,,2547,00.html

It is the only other place in Europe I would like to live. The fact that I could get there by train, one day, is a major bonus.



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05 Aug 2011, 3:43 pm

I already speak semi-fluent German. I can have a basic conversation in German... if the German speaker knows a few English words as well because when I forget words I put the English in! I speak a bit of Russian and would like to learn more. I love the Cyrillic alphabet. Most of all though I would love to speak Hungarian because it is my Grandpa's native language. Unfortunately he was too 'busy' being a person with undiagnosed AS sitting hunched in a chair listening to alphabetized opera to bother teaching my Mum and her FIVE brothers any Hungarian! My Mum still wishes she had been brought up bi-lingual and she says she would have taught me Hungarian if she had known it herself.

I am also interested in Hebrew and Yiddish. Yiddish is technically not a dead language (someone mentioned this earlier) but it is not as widely spoken as other languages and it is hard to find teaching resources about Yiddish. My library which has a vast foreign language section only has two Yiddish dictionaries, no language books.


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pratchettfan
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05 Aug 2011, 3:49 pm

Jellybean wrote:
My library which has a vast foreign language section only has two Yiddish dictionaries, no language books.


You're 23 and you have your own library? God, my life has been such a major failure! :lol:



Henbane
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05 Aug 2011, 4:49 pm

Laz wrote:
Yiddish (although I think this is pretty much a dead language now)


I think there are quite a lot of Yiddish speakers in the US, round Queens way... Lubavitch and other Hasidim. Plus in Israel?
I have a great book called Outwitting History, about a man in America who managed to save over 1.5 million old Yiddish books. Awesomeness.



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05 Aug 2011, 4:56 pm

Laz wrote:
Yiddish (although I think this is pretty much a dead language now)

There's over 1.5 million Yiddish speakers, so it's anything but dead. Although, its speakers are spread far apart, and it has no official use anywhere, nor any media presence.

Here's a short list of the languages I want to learn. A few I'm not so serious about as the others.

Ancient Greek
Breton
Catalan
Cornish
Faeroese
Georgian
German
Greek
Hungarian
Irish Gaelic
Korean
Lakota
Latin
Latvian
Manchu
Mongolian
Nahuatl
Old English
Old Norse
Portuguese, Brazilian
Scots, Doric
Scottish Gaelic
Sumerian



Last edited by dunbots on 05 Aug 2011, 5:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

puddingmouse
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05 Aug 2011, 5:22 pm

dunbots wrote:
Nahuatl


This would be awesome.


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