So The C & F forums were started by English speakers and English is the primary medium for posting here…I’ve even seen Dutch speakers writing to eachother in English on here! (Which is no great surprise, but still…)
However, many of us do speak languages other than English either as our native languages or as a foreign languages. So…What do you speak? I’ll start off with moi-même:
I’m a native English speaker from California. I studied French for six years in school. When I graduated high school, I could talk in French with native speakers confidently for several hours at a time no problem. Today (i.e., nine years later), I can barely string together a single coherent sentence…I’d like to get it back someday…My primary foreign language is Japanese, which I studied in university and then afterwards whilst living in Japan for more than two years. I continue to try and study and use it as much as I can (I’ll be chaperoning 10 Japanese girls studying abroad here in Portland next week…), but it can be an incredibly frustrating and neverending struggle. A return to Japan is likely in the cards sometime in the next few years…
My other linguistic passion is Scottish Gaelic, which I was initially turned on to after a chance meeting with piper & Gaelic singer Anna Murray when I was 17. I started taking a class with a native speaker shortly afterwards and did a week-long immersion class at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on Skye while I was studying abroad at Glasgow University. I still try and keep it up as much as I can reading bits of Gaelic online and listening to BBC Radio nan Gaidheal, but I only know of one other Gaelic speaker here in Portland and I don’t see him much. I can also understand some Irish due to its close relation to ScG. An Irish speaker once told me that I spoke Irish with a Scottish accent, which I found very funny.
I, unfortunately, are one of those terrible people that only can speak American English. I took the required 2 years of foreign language in high school (French) but never was able to carry on a conversation in it. I’ve forgotten most of it.
I do wish I could speak other languages, and I am in awe of those that can speak 3 or 4 fluently. Maybe someday I’ll attempt to learn one.
I learned Mennodeutsch from a friend. I haven’t spoken it in a long time. There’s no written language (it’s a purely spoken language) so it’s difficult to study it in isolation, where there are few speakers around and you can’t buy books to read because there are no books published. Mennonites read books in High German or English, which are both separate languages from Mennodeutsch.
I can read regular German well enough, but it’s so different from Mennodeutsch that it confuses me A LOT.
I studied Biblical Greek for a while. I really love it. I believe all Christians (and non-Christians) should study Biblical Greek for at least a short while. It’s a fascinating language, from a historical standpoint. In some senses, our whole Western civilization is influenced more by Biblical Greek (it’s the language of the New Testament) than any other language, even English. Since the ecclisiastical language of the Catholic Church is Latin, Latin is given a lot of importance, but if it were not for Biblical Greek, the Catholic Church (or any body which places importance on the New Testament, for that matter) would not exist at all. I find it fascinating the role that languages play in religion.
I also can read French, although I never studied it in school. And I’m learning Arabic. I love Arabic, but it’s super difficult to learn.
I sometimes think I try too much, since I speak no languages well, especially English.
I’d LOVE to learn Scots Gaelic, and I once seriously pondered a grad degree in Koine Greek for exactly the reasons Cran described–I’d love to read the New Testament in the original language.
As it is, I do pretty well with Haitian Kreyol (there’s a language of limited usefullness), and a good but extremely rusty smattering of German…does music theory count as a language?
Besides German (including the “High” variant [which is in its spoken version just a random convention, spread by mass media to destroy diversity ^^], my own local dialect and many other ones intelligible to me) I speak English as second language after I studied it in school for 8 years. Till now, I try to invest time in self-education, predominantly to augment my vocabular. I’m a bit more familiar with the stereotype CNN-AE than with BE concerning the understanding of spoken language, but actually I seem to speak a mixture of both … although in school we were supposed to learn “Oxford English” Well, blame Hollywood.
Anyway, a lot of my study books are only available in English and furthermore, the UK is my favourite destination for a study abroad programme. Hence, English is the language I will stay focussed on. After all, what you say is probably more important (regarding content) than in how many languages you’re able to say it.
But then again, I learned some French for about 4 years, but my vocabular could contain a few more words and my grammar isn’t that fluent as I would like to have it, too … there’s just the absurdity, that I’ve no great accent and Frenchmen always tend to take me for a sort of Belgian (in some regions a synonym for a fool ) who is not able to express himself correctly … however, reading French means much more pleasure to me.
What else? Yes, not worth mentioning, but there’s of course that partial Dutch-German intelligibility … some Russian insults and the explanation, that I don’t speak Russian nor know anything (pretty important) … and a few Latin Quotes …
Do you mean Coeur d’Alene, Northern Paiute, or another native Idahoan language? If so, then the answer is yes. But if, by “Idahoan” you mean the type of American English spoken in Idaho, then the answer is probably no.
My brother speaks/reads Scottish Gaelic.
I studied French throughout HS and into college, was decent at the time, but, like Pitchfork, have rusted.
I’m currently on my 4th semester of Spanish at the Community College.
(German would be next, if I had the time)
I’ve just subscribed to audiojournals (with written supplements) in French and Spanish to try to reactivate my ear. It’s tough.
Ditto pour moi.
I do notice that when I am with French speakers I start picking it up very quickly again (simple coversational level) and French people lways remark how good my pronunciation is. (And my Hindi improves within a week of landing in India or during an extended period with non English speaking oldies).
I actually grew up in a tri lingual home environment of colloquial Hindi, Fijian and colonial accent English which was supplemented by my total education in English as taugt by Irish and NZ Marist Brothers and subsequently by secular teachers in Oz. If I include my maternal grandmother. who looked after me a lot when she visited my home from the village, I would have to say quad lingual because she spoke Nepali (or Gurkhali as she called it).
I have the ability to take on any number of accents at will. Mostly, my spontaneous accent tends to be , what is called, “educated Australian accent”.
( I have conversed with the following members of this forum and I would be interested on their independent comments on my accent:- Terry McGee, Mitch, Doug Tipple and Erle Bartlett. Without prejudice.)
Did you really live in Oz? Is there another Oz I don’t know about? I’m baffled. And envious.
I speak Spanish and French every day with my high school students, and French at home with my children (though they’ll rarely answer me in French).
My French is much better than my Spanish because I have all those odd words you find when you’re trying to tell your kids what to do. I sure have a good time with Spanish, though. Sometimes it’s hard to shift between languages when I meet students in the hall. Usually it’s my English that suffers.
I really need to learn some Irish, though, so I can read tune names. It drives me crazy to see something I can’t pronounce. Reminds me of Russian. I took a short immersion course, and had the hardest time throwing away my old alphabet and learning a new one.
Ulster-English and French. I don’t mean that strange not-exactly Lallans that seems to be enjoying some sort of vogue in Norn Iron at present. Just English with gaelic syntax. How I learned it, at my Mother’s knee.
(“Get away from there, child! And quit girning!”)
I tried to learn a lot of languages in my teens and twenties so I have a teensy bit of Japanese and Arabic. I did have an intensive Japanese course from a Japanese speaker, but never got the chance to practice. My son’s Japanese is better than mine, now, as he has completed computer games in Japanese because he was too impatient to wait for the English language version.
I am currently working through a “Teach Yourself Irish” book. The irregular verbs threw me, but I’m just hanging on. I know just enough Irish to have translated “Taimse I’m mo Chodlaidh”, and know that the second verse is replete with double-entendres. The translation on Mudcats gives one, very po-faced, translation. That ain’t how I read it!
I like to read French. Marcel Aymé is my favourite writer. But I like Baudelaire and Francois Villon too. And I’ve just been reading Simenon.
Some interesting stuff coming out here! High German, Cherokee, Hatian Kreyol…
Wanna learn Scottish Gaelic? Do it! Do it! Do it! There are only about 60,000 speakers left, so the more the merrier! Go to http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaidhlig/clasaichean and see if there are any classes near you. You just might be surprised!
I too had a strong interest in learning Koine after taking a class on the New Testament with Dr. Richard Rohrbaugh, a friend and colleague of Dr. Bart Ehrman…Fascinatin’ stuff…Learned the alphabet and got through chapter one of the Greek book & then got sidetracked…Another language I’d love to learn… Just not enough hours in the day…
I have enough French and Japanese to get into trouble and not enough to get out. Rust and disuse have done the rest.
Languages I’d like to have: Ukrainian (or Russian if I must), Irish and Scots Gaelic, Lakota/Dakota, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, and Turkish, to name a few.
My trouble with learning languages is that I live in Wyoming,where the only common languages are English, a bit of Spanish in the bighorn basin, and a smattering of Shoshone and Arapahoe among the elders on the rez. Languages are like musical ability–they languish if they aren’t used often. So I doubt I’ll be taking up Scots Gaelic, unless our ship comes in and we can afford monthly trips to Caithness and Sutherland.
The second time I went to Haiti, the orphanage was having some trouble with getting tags for their truck. So we went to have a chat with an influential businessman. I’m telling you, this guy was right out of a Bogart movie–all legit on the surface, but with way more ifluence than a construction contractor/import-export guy had any reason to have…
Anyway, during our meeting (conducted in English), the phone rang. He answered in Kreyol, listened for a moment, then had a long conversation in Spanish. A bit later it wrang again, and he effortlessly switched to fluent French, hung up, and continued our conversation in English. Toward the end of our talk, he had yet another phone conversation in German. I was in awe.
Then there’s the story of Hernby, the little boy at the orphanage who was fluently trilingual at age 11. It’s fairly common down there. Necessity is the mother of learning.
That’s exactly the problem. I grew up with an Italian dialect and Swiss German (there is not one real Swiss German, say one of them therefore). In school I was teached German (so called High German) then Italian, French and English. I teached myself a bit of Russian and also Scottish Gaelic with books, but stopped with both because there was no real use for it and the knowledge of both is just vanishing.
Spanish (in high school, from non native speaker, never really learned it)
Dari (form of Persian Farsi)
ASL (needed to take a foreign language in college)
Well, blame Hollywood.
) who is not able to express himself correctly … however, reading French means much more pleasure to me.