lol.... that would be pretty cool! I would kill myself trying to learn seven languages but if you learned them all when you were a young child like that it would be so much easyer...

Lucky girl if you ask me.

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Hmm.. I should probably step in here and take part in the conversation since it seems to be seriously lacking of people who actually speaks English as a foreign language.
So yeah, English is my second language, but I've learned it in school since ... I guess around 4th grade and I've always listened to music in English, watched movies in English, foreign movies are just subtitled here but thankfully we keep the original sound!! Being from a small European country we pretty much have to speak foreign languages if we want to travel and communicate and English is a natural choice, and I don't feel I have any problems communicating.
Danish is my native language. I speak Spanish alright because I've learned the language when travelling and then I studied one semester in Spain in spring. I've had German and French in high school so I can understand most of what they say and I may be able to make myself understood in those langauges as well.

Most people in Europe speak or have a knowledge of at least two languages, most likely their native language and English because we're so close to our neighbouring countries. I have a special interest in the language so that's why I chose to have so many foreign languages in high school - and probably why I can still communicate in them!
I can understand how difficult it must be for you Americans to learn foreign languages. First of all, you don't really need them, because everyone around the world speaks English, and secondly, if you never get to travel outside of the US you're not exposed to other languages and it's really hard to learn a language if you never hear it being spoken.
Oh, and concerning kids learning languages - and all other stuff. Kids are amazing! They just do stuff! But about word order.. in many cases it comes naturally, more or less, because there's a certain rythm in the language and a structure, so when you speak another language you don't just translate word by word, but you translate meanings. So you have to find the words and meanings that come closest to what you actually want to say.

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*points to Ea* She's a lucky girl too.

lol I would love to learn another language.. but it's egsactily like you said Ea... I am never around them to hear them being spoken so i don't have that help, I don't really need them and would have no one to talk to... Pluss... complicated things like that just bogle my brain... I guess I am a verry simple minded person.

Although I do know a good deal of sign language which I think is rather easy to learn and a fascinating and wonderfull language to know.... but that's about it.



Yeah... kids are amazing. They know how to swim, they know how to fall without hurting themselves, they can learn things better... somewhere along the line as we grow up for some reason we "un-learn" those things it seems unless we keep them practiced etc...

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I live in england and i'm afraid that means i don't really speak anything else. Of course of you want to comunicate with me in Latin, Ancient Greek or Gaelic then its cool but don't try talking to me in anything. I can understand Itlaian, German and French well enough becuase i'm a classical singer and its expected that I understand them, but i don't speak them fluently unfortuantly.

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Thanks Jax... I might be blessed with a language oriented brain but I'm hopeless at natural sciences!! I don't think you are simple-minded.. people are just different and unfortunately, we can't be perfect at everything.
Sign language is cool, I really want to learn it - mostly because I've always thought it was too cool to know a way of communication that no one else didn't understand!! So.. yeah, I so really curious and I hate it when people are speaking a language I don't understand, so maybe that's where my interest in languages come from.

You learn all those languages Anduril??? But why, why, why would you learn so many 'dead' languages instead of focusing on the living ones??

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I think the US is really lacking in the making-kids-learn-a-foreign-language area. In Texas, anyway, students aren't required to take a language until high school, and even then only 2 years are required. I started taking French in middle school, and then took it my freshman year of high school, and then schedule conflicts prevented me from taking it after that. I took it again last year (spring 07), as kind of a refresher course. I was interested in continuing, but the teacher I wanted was only teaching at a campus that I don't want to go to. So... no more French, through that route anyway.

I want to become more fluent in French, and if I could pick another Romance language to learn, it'd be Italian. I'm also interested in learning (or trying to learn, anyway) the basics of Dutch, because my cousin lives in Amsterdam. Although, in the Netherlands, almost everyone speaks English. The natives will speak Dutch to each other, but when speaking to tourists, etc, they all speak almost flawless English, so it would be harder to get the immersion effect unless you went out into the more rural areas.

Also, Dutch is very similar to German- many similar sounds. I have a hard time with the sounds- I'm used to French/the Romance languages, which flow easily, and... German/Dutch doesn't. I told my mom (who had taken German in high school) how hard it was to pronounce some of the names, and I laughed, saying they're barbarian languages, that were there before the Romans came through. Ah well.

(When my mom and I went to Amsterdam in August for my cousin's wedding, we heard/saw some Dutch- mostly in the form of movies (we saw Daniel Deronda on TV in English with Dutch subtitles) and the tram schedules. Also the automated voice on the trams announcing what stop was coming up. I liked 'Stadhouderskade', 'Leidseplein'... and more )

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lol I think it would be pretty cool to know a dead language Anduril. Personaly I have always wanted to learn ancient hebrew or Egyptian...
It's pretty cool that you can learn all those for your clasical singing. My uncle does a little clasical singing and they sing in latin so I am a bit fermiliar with that kind of stuff.. but not much.

I get your point about focusing more on used languages Ea.. it would be a good thing to do but I have just always loved Ancient Egyptan for some reason. lol
Yeah... sign language is pretty cool. Me and my sister always joke and say we can talk while we chew our food now and no one complains. And if someone tells us to "Be quite" we can still talk. haha

Ah... Honestly I am pretty simple minded. Science, mechanics, math... it all confuses me to no end. The things I am good at are things I can just do and don't have to think about, like music. I am even better and "memorizing" subjects like history than complicated like science etc...
But hey... I've lived a vrey simple life. If someone says Show up at work at 10 get off at 6 and then go to the grociery store at 6:30... I'll be sitting there thingking...

"Why don't you just say 'go to the grociery store after work.'" lol


Yeah, Eäryendë, I agree. As Ea said we don't really need foreign languages in the US... so I think that's a big part of it. It's cool that yo ustarted so early on French, I am sure that helped you learn it better.

Yup... German is a very "hard" language. i have a lot of german decent and my grandpa used to speak German. (though i don't remember him much) So I've been around that a bit. Didn't know Dutch was so simular though... that's interesting.

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Yeah, my mom was able to kinda/sorta pick her way through some Dutch words because of her German background.

It might be interesting to learn Latin, and even though it's a dead language, it's still used and still taught in many schools/colleges.

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You took my body and soul
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Aww, I want to speak Italian too!!! The epitome of romance... lol.

Well Jax, again I agree... I prefer simple over complicated in most cases, and definitely in the situation you just described!

What I meant by asking about why learning dead languages was more like.. you know, it might be easier to learn a living language than a dead, because you get to hear it spoken. I had a year of Latin in high school because it's the mother of the Latin-based languages like French, Spanish, Italian and also English, so learning the Latin grammar would give us a better understanding of the grammar in those other languages.

I wanted to elaborate more on what I was saying about kids learning new languages and word order. I meant when you just learn something by watching and doing, like kids do, it comes a lot more naturally. Like when they learn a language only by listening they will know that 'water' refers to the liquid that comes out of the tap and 'cold water' is something and warm water is something else. The problem with different word order occurs when you start looking at the grammar and discover that it's different from what you already know, then the brain has to work in totally different ways, and that's why it gets harder to learn new stuff when we get older.

Oh and one last thing... to me Dutch sounds like a mix of German, French and English...

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I learnt Latin becuase....well I live in Oxford, and everyone takes Latin. Of course most people give it up but i loved it so much i kept it on. And then Greek i learn becuase i and a freind were so far ahead of the rest of our class in Classical Civilisations that the teacher offered to teach us Greek. Gaelic i speak becuase my mum is half irish and so its just around the house and i also compete internationaly in irish folk music and gaelic is as widely used in that as english, for instance the entry form is in gaelic and stuff.

I think German is a beutiful and really expressive language. It reflects the climate and the life of the people. I love speaking and singing in German.

That really depends if you mean Flemish or Dutch. Flemish is m.ainly based on French.

Ahh well you see the grammer for Latin is quite diffrent from the grammer for english. English is very unique and is the hardest to learn becuse of dipthongs and our relly weird grammer stsyem. English derives from Latin its true but its also very germanic, based on galic and gaelic, has arabic influences and a lot of french. (Intrestingly the arabic came through the french is many cases) English is the most 'melting pot' of all the european languages.

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True, but since I chose a language-oriented line in high school we had to have Latin, first of all to have the basic understanding of the Latin-based languages but probably also to get a overall understanding of grammar structures which we can use for all languages.

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True, personally i'l let you in on a little secret. I failed grammer. I mean when i say i failed, i mean failed. However my entire Latin class but one came up with a cunning plan, first of all we wrote jokes and lovely messages to our examiners (or scrutator's) at the top of our papers in an atmept to bring them over to our side, in perfect grammer of course and pre-memorised, and secondly we memorised off by heart in both Latin and English all of the Aneied Book 4 (the Dido and Aeneus bit) and all of our other set texts. This meant that whatever came up in the translation set text exams we would get perfect results, however bad our grammer exam had been.

And it worked, we all got A's or A*'s apart from my freind who got a D overall becuase she refused to memories the set texts. So just a heads up to anyone with siblings learning Latin; TELL THEM TO MEMORISE EVERYTHING.

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O_o crikey....


Yeah, that's about it. *nods*


I'm going to go out on a limb and say you are probably a very driven individual Anduril.

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Meh
Not really, I just know who I want to be and what i need to do to be that person. If thats driven then i suppose so.

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lol Well, i would call that driven... who knows maybe I am using the wrong words to describe it but... *shrugs*

That's very good though, i think. To know what you want to be and know what you are goign to have to do to be that is something many people just dont' have... none the less the self control to actually do what it takes.

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So... Happy early New Year!
What are you all doing for New Year's this year? And what are the tradions in your countries?

I'm leaving for Spain tomorow. I'm going back to the city where I studied abroad and I'm really excited. We'll have dinner at a friend's house and then .. I don't know what will happen. I don't know how many we will be or who the other guests will be!

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