How many languages / What languages do you speak?

Fraggle Rocker

03-15-07, 06:09 PM

I could be a six or even a seven in German. I guess I'm a nine in English. I don't think I'm quite a six in Spanish, or quite a five in French.But I'm not sure how to estimate this. Suggestions?I meant for this to be a pretty coarse scale. Most people can make a good intuitive estimate of whether they know 1,000 or 3,000 or 10,000 words of a language. I guess I set a bad precedent by rating myself in increments of .5, but you don't have to do that.Other than English, I can answer specific questions that I learned from this CD in Gaelic.Hey hey hey! Does that mean you can answer the burning question that is perplexing us on another thread? How do they pronounce R in Gaelic??? Is it a trilled R with a tongue-flap as in most European languages, Japanese, and many others? A gargled uvular sound as in most Germanic languages and Parisian French? That strange semi-vowel of ours which, as far as I know, is unique to English? The simultaneous R and ZH that is, I guess, unique to Mandarin? Do the Scots and the Irish even pronounce Gaelic the same way, or is Scots Gaelic influenced by English phonetics?I like the scale method. Very earthquake-ySo you can tell I'm from California? :)Are you sure? You only need knowledge of 2000 words to write a PhD thesis in the field of history of science. My old professor told me that.I think he's putting you on, or else like most people he's dismally bad at numerical estimates. It's certainly true that if you get into a specialty you may be communicating primarily with a limited number of words peculiar to the specialty. I suppose if a foreigner came here, learned those 2,000 words, and wrote a successful thesis, I would have no qualms about rating him at 6.3 in English. Because once he walks out the door of the university science building, he'll find that he's not really fluent in English, not even just barely fluent. He won't be able to order food, find his way around by reading signs, or even carry on a casual conversation with a drunk in a bar. He certainly won't be able to get a job doing anything more than menial labor or writing theses on the history of science. :) In most languages, you need somewhere around 5,000 words to "get along" comfortably and be able to handle yourself in typical real-life situations, if both you and the native speaker are patient with each other.Of course he could be wrong, but he was like you one of those people who know a shitload of things.Yeah okay, I suppose he is like me. I say a lot of things that are wrong too. :)9 EnglishWell aren't you brave. You and Athel. I was a little reluctant to rate myself that high. I think I remember hearing that Churchill had a vocabulary of around 30,000 words when I was a kid (and he was still alive) and I don't think I'm in his league.

Ultimately it comes down to the definition of a "word." Obviously inflections don't count: see/sees/saw/seen. But what about syntheses from other languages that we still use as living tools: unify/unification? Or English-Latin hybrids like read/readable? As English continues to evolve from an inflected language into an analytic one, the concept of a "word" will be as difficult to define as in Chinese.

How do we count Chinese on my scale anyway? 5,000 kanji = 5,000 morphemes, and that's considered to be a very good written vocabulary. But you can put them together analytically into around 25,000 combinations that many Chinese scholars would say are their equivalent of words. Ji qi jiao ta che = gas engine foot stroke vehicle = motor bicycle = motorcycle. All made with "words" in my Fenn 5000 dictionary. If you know the Fenn 5000 are you a 7.5, which seems stingy, or a 9, which seems generous?

So my scale isn't perfect. Please don't anybody agonize over whether you're a 6.5 or a 7.0 in Swahili.

w1z4rd

03-15-07, 06:11 PM

English, Afrikaans, IsiXhosa and IsiZulu

superstring01

03-18-07, 02:55 PM

English and Spanish. Ugh. I'd really like to learn Mandrin and/or Arabic.

~String

Fraggle Rocker

03-18-07, 04:28 PM

English and Spanish. Ugh. I'd really like to learn Mandrin and/or Arabic.Mandarin is surprisingly easy. The most difficult part is the pronunciation. If you're young that shouldn't be bad. And of course the writing, but nobody bothers with that unless they want to be a scholar and read Kong Fu Zi in the original.

BelgoHead

08-09-07, 03:45 PM

Just wondering what languages everyone here can speak...

as for me, my first language was french but i forget it when i moved to canada :bawl:

orcot

08-09-07, 03:48 PM

:bugeye: you forgot you own language...
annyway dutch, english and a decend word of french

Enmos

08-09-07, 03:54 PM

Hey Orcot :D

I speak dutch (first language), english and a few words of german (very few).
I understand dutch, english and german.

mikenostic

08-09-07, 03:56 PM

English (native language)
German, semi-fluently (was fluent when I lived in Germany)
un poco Espanol

draqon

08-09-07, 03:57 PM

Russian
English
and a bit of french

BelgoHead

08-09-07, 04:20 PM

you forgot you own language...

Hey its pretty easy when your 4 year old and everyone speaks only english.

Fraggle Rocker

08-09-07, 04:43 PM

* * * NOTE FROM MODERATOR * * *

This thread has been merged with the one that already existed.

Sir. Brilliance

09-06-07, 05:05 PM

I though I saw this post a while back but I couldn't find it so...

How many languages do you know and how well?

Me:
English - Native
German - Native
Latin - Learning
Spanish - going to learn
Dutch- can guess at it
another language - going to learn

EmptyForceOfChi

09-06-07, 07:40 PM

well, i cant honestly vote for over 1 language. i speak english, (try to) obviously. but im not fluent in any other languages. i know enough of the following to survive in the culture though. i have not got advanced with any other than english though.

madarin/cantonese.
french.
korean.
japanese.

i can speak basic of the above. do you have to be very fluent in the votes?, and be able to use them as well as i can communicate in english?.

peace.

Sir. Brilliance

09-06-07, 08:05 PM

For the voting, I am assuming that you can speak well enough to converse about any general topic to decent enough levels. So not, hey what is your name. My name is John. But like Hey how are things today. Well at the office thigns are pretty good but my fiance is a fool. Or Hey, isn't that the guy we saw at wherever and be able to converse about it. Basically enough so that if you were to visti a country where the language is spoken, you wouldnt have to use a dictionary more then a few times to do everything you wanted.

EmptyForceOfChi

09-06-07, 08:17 PM

no i cant speak anything other than english at that kind of level. if i were living in another country for more than say 6 months, i will pick up anything quite fast. i am learning korean at the moment. im getting along ok, but as im not in the actual culture having to use it, im slacking ang going at a real slow pace.

i tend to try and learn too much stuff at the same time.

peace.

Fraggle Rocker

09-07-07, 06:00 AM

I can speak basic of the above. Do you have to be very fluent in the votes, and be able to use them as well as I can communicate in English?You can rate your own fluency. You're welcome to use Fraggle Rocker's Powers-of-3 Scale. (It's not copyrighted but I'd appreciate the credit if you share it.) It's based on vocabulary size, which is easy to estimate objectively. Obviouly it's assumed that you have a sufficient command of grammar at any level to make good use of that number of words, so you're not just a walking dictionary.

0 = 1 word
1 = 3 words
2 = 10 words
3 = 30 words
4 = 100 words
5 = 300 words
6 = 1,000 words
7 = 3,000 words
8 = 10,000 words
9 = 30,000 words
10 = 100,000 words

I find this to be a useful scale because the gradations are the right size to allow most people to give an integer rating. Although as you'll see in earlier posts, pedantic folks like myself get carried away and give ourselves fractional ratings. The logarithmic scale synchronizes with the way the rate of growth increases as we become more fluent: the second thousand words come far more quickly than the first thousand. And it fits neatly between a realistic maximum and minimum. Most cosmopolitan people know one word in almost any language they're interested in (sombrero, glasnost, shalom, fengshui), so that doesn't count. I don't think a human has ever lived who knew more than 100,000 words; Winston Churchill and William Shakespeare were estimated to have fallen just shy of that limit.

"Fluency" is difficult to appraise. I've been persuaded that fluency means that you think in the language, rather than thinking in your primary language and translating in real time. This is the threshold at which you begin to pick up the culture that goes with the language, because your thought patterns are strongly influenced by the structure and limitations of the language in which you think. For me, and I suspect for most adults learning a second language, fluency begins around Level 6 or 7. Obviously the level is much lower for children and for the immersion technique. When I insisted that my Chinese girlfriend speak Chinese with me at home, I was thinking in the words I knew clear down at Level 5.

Obviously this is designed by an American around the structures of the Indo-European languages I studied first. Feel free to reinterpret the scale (or the meaning of "word" in languages like Finnish and Chinese. If you know the entire Fenn Five Thousand in Chinese (or Japanese or Korean) you're surely at Level 9.5 . :)

Oli

09-07-07, 06:06 AM

Nice Fraggle - I will use that (and credit you).
Now bookmarked.

sniffy

09-07-07, 06:14 AM

Does body language count?

Oli

09-07-07, 06:20 AM

How many words?

hypewaders

09-07-07, 09:00 AM

Giambattista: "If bi-lingual (or more), how and/or why did you learn those languages?"

Living in multiple countries has been far more effective for me than language courses, although I did learn Russian that way in the military. Recency is the primary factor for me. Although my earliest schooling was in Arabic, my fluency in that language has severely atrophied over the years I've lived away from the Mideast. My most fluent languages are simply the ones I have used most recently.

I have found it interesting how "forgotten" language skills do come back precipitously, provided re-immersion for only a matter of days. I tend to think in the language that I'm most surrounded by, and I suspect it's the attainment of such inner narrative that most enables fluency. I feel very fortunate to have been immersed in multiple languages when I was young, because there is much evidence that the brain's acceptance of new language-sets is wired up in our early mental development.

I have known highly-intelligent and motivated people who have great difficulty learning new languages, and it seems that a monolingual upbringing has been the greatest hurdle. I suspect that there exists a related human trait involving cultural outlooks as well.

The two seem intertwined for me. I find that when I think exclusively in another language, I also discover my own thoughts take on a different outlook. It's similar to the way different styles of music have very different ways of expressing a common feeling. Sounds and grammar express culture as recognizeably, and with deep nuance, like rhythm and melody.

Gaining a new language may be greatly facilitated by approaching a new language or culture in a mentality of self-discovery- making a new language and culture your own. Children may not be cultural and linguistic savants, but they certainly do approach learning differently- embracing their new worlds as a matter of course, and far outperforming adults in structured language learning. I don't advocate learning languages as an "adult". Sitting in a classroom conjugating verbs seems ineffecient to me. Starting out like a baby, babbling for your life, and up through baby-talk (don't skip that part!) adolescence, formal speech, literature, etc. makes more sense to me. The full-sensory association and context that immersion in a new language provides can greatly accelerate learning. I think anyone considering adoptinng a new language should also consider at least a short period of total immersion in order to begin the journey most efficiently.

I don't have the time or inclination to count words for the Fraggle Scale, but it's an interesting proposition to estimate one's present language skills. It's also interesting to compare where you've been with your skills, if you have lived around a quite a bit like me, and gone through changes in your brain's linguistic operating system.

On an imaginary scale of 1-10, arbitrarily assigning 1 with complete ignorance of a language, 3 being conversational in social settings, 5 being conversational in professional/technical settings, and 10 being native and well-educated fluency. Here's where I think I am linguistically right now- It's a depressing tally if I allow myself to forget that getting it back is not so hard, provided a return to the fitting environment:

English - 10
Spanish - 6
Czech - 5
Russian -4
Arabic - 3
French - 3
German -2

Fraggle Rocker

09-07-07, 04:02 PM

I have found it interesting how "forgotten" language skills do come back precipitously, provided re-immersion for only a matter of days.Indeed. I had one year of German in college. "Scientific" German at that, useful stuff like, "The scientist heated the flask of acid with his Bunsen burner." Ten years later I found myself picking up a BMW motorcycle at the factory in München, and within a couple of hours I was speaking everything I knew and picking up new words quickly.I feel very fortunate to have been immersed in multiple languages when I was young, because there is much evidence that the brain's acceptance of new language-sets is wired up in our early mental development.I think there is also evidence suggesting that simply learning one additional language during childhood--whether at home or in class--keeps the brain in tune and makes learning the third one easier even if it happens in adulthood.I have known highly-intelligent and motivated people who have great difficulty learning new languages, and it seems that a monolingual upbringing has been the greatest hurdle.My mother was raised speaking Bohemian (Czech as we call it now) in the Chicago ghetto. But in my day it was thought to be a disadvantage to be raised bilingually so she and her friends and relatives didn't even speak it around me. Fortunately they had done that when I was too small to talk back, thinking it wouldn't do any "harm," and the synapses for those foreign phonemes never atrophied. I may be the only American who can pronounce Dvorak correctly. :) I was lucky that in Arizona in the 1950s Spanish was a required class in the 7th grade, but I do regret losing the advantage of learning a second language from birth.The two seem intertwined for me. I find that when I think exclusively in another language, I also discover my own thoughts take on a different outlook.Unless you're a musician, sculptor, etc., the majority of your thinking is done in words. Our thoughts are limited by the limitations of our language. Chinese is not limited by the Stone Age paradigm of parts of speech, much less inflection. It only has nouns and verbs and relationships are expressed logically. I suspect that's why Chinese people are so adaptable.Sitting in a classroom conjugating verbs seems ineffecient to me.Then you really should study Chinese. :)I don't have the time or inclination to count words for the Fraggle Scale, but it's an interesting proposition to estimate one's present language skills.It's not hard using a logarithmic scale. If you have a high school education you know 10,000-20,000 words. A college education generally doubles that. High school classes give you 2,000 - 5,000, more if you're precocious. Again, college classes will double that. People like Winston Churchill are up around 70,000.

Admittedly my scale does not adjust for lack of practice. I don't think it matters since as we both learned you can reattain your maximum level of fluency rather quickly and easily.

Echo3Romeo

09-08-07, 12:27 AM

3.

English is my first.

Fluent in "American" Spanish, with no discernible accent (I grew up on the New Mexico side of El Paso).

Pretty good Korean thanks to some years stationed in South Korea at the UN garrison there. I can talk shit and throw out slang like I'm from the gutters of Texas Street in Pusan.

I developed conversational Arabic prior to my sojourns in Afghanistan and Iraq, although the hajis always made fun of me when I was over there, lol. (I would have too.) :)

Every time I've visited a foreign country, I've felt like a tool if I didn't know the local language. It is amazing how pleasant foreigners became when I addressed them in their native tongue before transitioning to English.

Fraggle Rocker

09-08-07, 06:01 AM

Fluent in "American" Spanish, with no discernible accentI was sitting in a Cuban restaurant in L.A. forty years ago with a Mexican-American friend, listening to the Cubans talk, all of whom at that time were first-generation immigrants. To my ears (then), Spanish was Spanish (non-Castilian anyway). I asked him whether Cubans and Mexicans can tell each other apart by accent. He said, "Well actually you picked an atypical example because there are some noticeable differences. But among many of the other Spanish-speaking nationalities they can be almost impossible to tell apart, especially well-educated people who avoid colloquialisms. But boy, no matter where they're from, they can sure pick us Americans out."Pretty good Korean thanks to some years stationed in South Korea at the UN garrison there. I can talk shit and throw out slang like I'm from the gutters of Texas Street in Pusan.Most people consider that an insult to their language. They're just too polite to tell you so until they get to know you better.

I was on the subway one night when some kid struck up a conversation with the Indian man across across the aisle. He said he had picked up some Hindi from his friends in college, and he started "talking some shit." All the Indians within earshot got really uncomfortable and were squirming and giving each other sidelong glances. Eventually he noticed. I said, "There's only one Indian word that you need to know: Namaste." They all immediately relaxed and smiled, bowed slightly, and said "Namaste" in unison. A light went on in his eyes. (Near as I can tell it has more connotative meaning than denotative, like "Shalom.")

s0meguy

09-09-07, 03:51 PM

Dutch ,English and German for me.

I can also speak French but not fluent and I never really used it.

Basically we're supposed to learn 4 languages at school: Dutch, English and 2 languages that we can choose depending on which ones the school offers. Mostly German and French. Officially schools are allowed to teach at least all European languages, Arabic , Turkish, Hebrew and Russian that I know of. At the highest possible 'level' of high school (we call it "middelbare school" or 'middle school' which is divided in several levels of difficulty or rather study intensity. It's designed so that people perceived to have higher than average learning capability/intelligence attend the higher levels) you have to learn those 4 languages plus latin. Whatever good that is.

I've had Spanish and Mandarin on my list of languages I want to learn for a while. I'm also interested in Arabic. I've quite a few of friends that speak that language plus I just like to learn languages.

whitewolf

09-09-07, 04:05 PM

Most people consider that an insult to their language. They're just too polite to tell you so until they get to know you better.

It's not really an insult on its own. When people say they picked up a bit of a language, it usually means they picked up some slang and curses, a sort of language they ought not use with strangers anyway. In addition, people are uncomfortable and at a loss for words when asked to speak their language merely for practice. Really, what would you say if someone came up to you and asked you to say something in English?

whitewolf

09-09-07, 04:17 PM

Basically we're supposed to learn 4 languages at school: Dutch, English and 2 languages that we can choose depending on which ones the school offers. Mostly German and French. Officially schools are allowed to teach at least all European languages, Arabic , Turkish, Hebrew and Russian that I know of. At the highest possible 'level' of high school (we call it "middelbare school" or 'middle school' which is divided in several levels of difficulty or rather study intensity. It's designed so that people perceived to have higher than average learning capability/intelligence attend the higher levels) you have to learn those 4 languages plus latin. Whatever good that is.

That's incredible. Is it confusing? In U.S. high schools, we're required to learn one foreign language and not all European languages are offered. In New York the language chosen for study is usually either Spanish or the language that matches the background from which the student comes.

Learning many languages is relatively easy; at least it should get easier with each language that is mastered. Grammar is similar in principle and many words migrated from language to language. If you know English, you can already comprehend some French, Latin, and even modern Russian.

s0meguy

09-09-07, 04:44 PM

That's incredible. Is it confusing?

It can be confusing when learning more than one language at the same time. But in usage no... and like I said. While all those languages are officially allowed to be taught at schools, like I said, at most schools you just get German and French. The schools in cities where there is a lot of ethnic diversity usually do allow much more languages.

Scull

09-09-07, 06:13 PM

English. Does Latin count?? I know a decent amount.

Fraggle Rocker

09-09-07, 08:57 PM

Really, what would you say if someone came up to you and asked you to say something in English?If they were totally unfamiliar with English and just wanted to know what it sounds like, I'd recite the lyrics to a familiar song like "Yesterday" or "Me and Bobby McGee." Or depending on my mood, the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. ("We, the people...") If they actually wanted to learn a tiny bit of the language I would look around and describe something we could both see. "Three women are walking toward that large building with their dogs." The last thing I'd present to them is profanity.

It always bothered me when I walked across the border into Tijuana, the little Mexican kids would start cursing at me. They were innocent, those were the words the sailors taught them when they went down from the big Navy base in San Diego to get drunk and find prostitutes. (The drinking age is 21 in California and the only state in which prostitution is legal is Nevada.)English. Does Latin count?? I know a decent amount.Of course Latin counts! I counted Esperanto. :)

Michael

09-10-07, 12:02 AM

I put 1 because I can only fluently speak one language - and to top it off I grew up in a monolinguistic environment :(

That said, I studied Spanish, I can remember to count and say a few greetings. I studied Russian and I even thought I was pretty good at it, I visited Russia and I tried a couple phrases out and people seemed to know what I was saying :) BUT I worked with a Russian women who said OMG your Russian is very very bad Michael! She could hardly understand a word I said?!?!

Presently I am studying Japanese. I can speak a little and can get along in a conversation if someone is there to help me over the hurdles. I just started memorizing the next set of Chinese characters (kanji) I am on and that puts me a little over 1000 (meaning only). I actually find learning the kanji easier than memorizing the pronunciation of new words!?!

Someday in the long far off future I have a plan to make a website to learn the Chinese characters. I know there are many out there but what the hell. It'd be fun :)

lucifers angel

09-10-07, 05:27 AM

Cool new subforum addition! I was wondering if anyone would ever add something like this.

Despite my screenname, I am not fluent in Italiano. Working on that, slowly but surely.

I have an enormous amount of interest in linguistics, but my shifting priorities and moods sometimes make it difficult for me make headway in studying, as well as other things. :(

How many languages are you fluent in?

If bi-lingual (or more), how and/or why did you learn those languages?

And I'm pleased to say that I'm the first to post in this new subforum. Excellent!:o

i can speak 2 langauges english and welsh, i learnt welsh because i am welsh and english because that is the langauge i use every day because i now live in england

Ddeisyfa pawb acha sci - forums da ddiwrnod!!

Fraggle Rocker

09-10-07, 11:25 AM

I put 1 because I can only fluently speak one languageWe all have languages that we've studied and can use, even if we don't qualify as "fluent." That's why I posted my Powers of Three scale, so you can count those.And to top it off I grew up in a monolingual environment.Many of the people who post on Linguistics grew up in bi- or multilingual homes, but that's not common among the general population. In most large countries it's extremely unusual to grow up with two languages. America is cursed with a bullying nativist movement that actually discourages it. I've met many people whose Spanish-speaking parents refused to teach the language to them, hoping it would help them assimilate faster.That said, I studied Spanish, I can remember to count and say a few greetings.That gives you somewhere between 31 and 56 words and puts you between 3.0 and 3.5 on my scale.I studied Russian and I even thought I was pretty good at it, I visited Russia and I tried a couple phrases out and people seemed to know what I was saying :) BUT I worked with a Russian women who said OMG your Russian is very very bad Michael! She could hardly understand a word I said?Well that just means you haven't quite mastered Russian grammar or pronunciation, neither of which is not for the faint of heart. You apparently know several hundred words and you can use them in sentences, and that makes you a 5.Presently I am studying Japanese. I can speak a little and can get along in a conversation if someone is there to help me over the hurdles. I just started memorizing the next set of Chinese characters (kanji) I am on and that puts me a little over 1000 (meaning only). I actually find learning the kanji easier than memorizing the pronunciation of new words!That's interesting. I am between 5 and 6 in spoken Chinese but I only recognize a couple of hundred han zi and can probably only write a few dozen of them. I would think that Japanese pronunciation would be much easier to learn than Chinese.I can speak 2 langauges, English and Welsh, I learnt Welsh because I am Welsh and English because that is the langauge I use every day because I now live in England Ddeisyfa pawb acha sci - forums da ddiwrnod!Are you saying that you grew up speaking Welsh and only learned English later in life? I didn't realize that Welsh was the language of everyday life. It seems like in Ireland English is spoken most often and a lot of Irish people can't even speak Gaelic fluently--and Ireland isn't even part of the U.K.

Echo3Romeo

09-10-07, 09:55 PM

Most people consider that an insult to their language. They're just too polite to tell you so until they get to know you better.
Well, I fit in fine with the guys I worked and drank with (SK Army officers). I suppose that sort of lets you know why I did, though. Heh.

Michael

09-11-07, 01:48 AM

That's interesting. I am between 5 and 6 in spoken Chinese but I only recognize a couple of hundred han zi and can probably only write a few dozen of them. I would think that Japanese pronunciation would be much easier to learn than Chinese.OMG spoken Chinese is sooo difficult - I almost wonder if I am tone deaf because it's very difficult for me. Could you imagine Thai or Cantonese - geesh!

For all of my Chinese friends I get their Chinese name and work really hard to memorize it. I hate the English names they sometimes pick. I'd rather go for the real deal. It's always a two or three syllable word anyway. I used to date a Chinese girl Lok-won ... aka: Lorraine

I think the characters are fun to memorize (I use a story technique associated with each primitive/element). For now I am mainly just remembering the English meaning and I have to say it's pretty fun reading things in Japanese or to read a Chinese sign.

Michael

wanneszinnig

09-12-07, 04:51 AM

Dutch 10
English 8
French 8
Serbo-Croat 5
German 4
Russian 2

Long live languages!

wanneszinnig

09-12-07, 05:00 AM

the more languages you speak, the more interesting the world becomes!

to je to!

s0meguy

09-12-07, 05:15 AM

Dutch 10
English 8
French 8
Serbo-Croat 5
German 4
Russian 2

Long live languages!

There's more people here that speak Dutch than english? Find that a bit difficult to believe lol...

Enmos

09-12-07, 05:26 AM

There's more people here that speak Dutch than english? Find that a bit difficult to believe lol...

Believe what you want, the Dutch are taking over ! :D

wanneszinnig

09-12-07, 07:04 AM

There's more people here that speak Dutch than english? Find that a bit difficult to believe lol...

There are only +- 25 milion idiots like me that actually speak the language...so don't worry:)
Speaking the language has some advantages though: in Belgium you can order the best beer in the world :)

Fraggle Rocker

09-12-07, 08:29 AM

There's more people here that speak Dutch than english? Find that a bit difficult to believe lol...This is a problem in the logging. Presumably all of the Dutch speakers also know English so they should have checked English too. It would be difficult for them to participate if they don't also know English since virtually all of the posts on SciForums are in English. I've translated one that was in Spanish, someone else took one in French, and we had trouble with a guy spamming us in Turkish. But none of those were on the Linguistics board. A person who speaks Dutch but not English would be highly visible because his posts would probably be in Dutch. :)

As for ordering beer in Belgium, don't 95% of the people in Belgium also speak French, German or English--if not all three? Probably 100% for bartenders. In fact, don't the people in Vlanderland claim that the language they speak is Flemish, and not Dutch at all? :)

From our American perspective, it seems like all Europeans are bilingual. The old European joke:

What do you call a person who speaks three languages? -- "Trilingual"

What do you call a person who speaks two languages? -- "Bilingual"

What do you call a person who speaks one language? -- "American"

wanneszinnig

09-14-07, 02:20 AM

This is a problem in the logging. Presumably all of the Dutch speakers also know English so they should have checked English too. It would be difficult for them to participate if they don't also know English since virtually all of the posts on SciForums are in English. I've translated one that was in Spanish, someone else took one in French, and we had trouble with a guy spamming us in Turkish. But none of those were on the Linguistics board. A person who speaks Dutch but not English would be highly visible because his posts would probably be in Dutch. :)

As for ordering beer in Belgium, don't 95% of the people in Belgium also speak French, German or English--if not all three? Probably 100% for bartenders. In fact, don't the people in Vlanderland claim that the language they speak is Flemish, and not Dutch at all? :)

From our American perspective, it seems like all Europeans are bilingual. The old European joke:

What do you call a person who speaks three languages? -- "Trilingual"

What do you call a person who speaks two languages? -- "Bilingual"

What do you call a person who speaks one language? -- "American"

Lol...
Most of us indeed speak different languages. We start learning French (our 2nd official language) at the age of 9. At the age of 12 we add English. Most of us don't stop there and add another 2 or 3 languages at age 14.
At the end 90% of us are bilingual, 70% are trilingual and still a lot of people speak 4 or more languages.
About the Flemish in flanders: officialy our language is Dutch. Still Dutch in Holland and Dutch in Flanders has a total different accent. Compare it with the difference between American and Brittish English.
And about our beer: it realy is the best :)

Fraggle Rocker

09-14-07, 06:32 AM

About the Flemish in Flanders: officially our language is Dutch. Still Dutch in Holland and Dutch in Flanders has a total different accent. Compare it with the difference between American and British English.America and England have been defined as "two peoples divided by a common language." The technology of the last century has served as a subversive reunification movement. We see each other's movies, listen to each other's music, watch each other's TV shows. We're not changing our pronunciation very quickly--although I do sometimes hear Brits pronounce "schedule" as SKEH-jool instead of SHEH-dyool--but we're picking up each other's slang. We understand each other much better than we did when I was a kid, a mere half century ago. If a British student tells an American colleague that he intends to "knock up" his sister, he will not be shot. ("Come to her door" in England, "Make her pregnant" lin America.)And about our beer: it really is the best.Most beer is mouse urine. I like beer that makes me notice what I'm drinking, so I order stout ale and porter, which are almost exclusively the products of the British Isles, Australia and a few progressive breweries in America. Do you guys make that good stuff too, or are your breweries giant warrens of guinea pig cages with tiny funnels, like Budweiser and Coors? :)

wanneszinnig

09-14-07, 02:04 PM

America and England have been defined as "two peoples divided by a common language." The technology of the last century has served as a subversive reunification movement. We see each other's movies, listen to each other's music, watch each other's TV shows. We're not changing our pronunciation very quickly--although I do sometimes hear Brits pronounce "schedule" as SKEH-jool instead of SHEH-dyool--but we're picking up each other's slang. We understand each other much better than we did when I was a kid, a mere half century ago. If a British student tells an American colleague that he intends to "knock up" his sister, he will not be shot. ("Come to her door" in England, "Make her pregnant" lin America.)

Most beer is mouse urine. I like beer that makes me notice what I'm drinking, so I order stout ale and porter, which are almost exclusively the products of the British Isles, Australia and a few progressive breweries in America. Do you guys make that good stuff too, or are your breweries giant warrens of guinea pig cages with tiny funnels, like Budweiser and Coors? :)

Still you can compare the differences between Brittish and American English with the differnces between Dutch in Holland and Dutch in Belgium. I guess Someguy is from Holland, so he'l probably admit.

Man, all the beers you have been drinking so far are crap..I am quiet sure.
I don't know how easy you can get imported beers...but if you can let me know and I'll tell you the difference between ordenary piss and heavens piss :cool:
..Oh and Heineken is a non-Belgian crap beer!

shichimenshyo

09-14-07, 02:05 PM

I am learning japanese

wanneszinnig

09-14-07, 02:07 PM

Arigato Osaimas!! :)

s0meguy

09-14-07, 03:07 PM

shichimenshyo

09-14-07, 03:10 PM

Japanese has the most confusing writing system( in my opinion), but i dont believe that it is that similar to mandarin. dotashite mashite

wanneszinnig

09-14-07, 04:49 PM

Is Japanese similar to Mandarin or Cantonese? I heard people say that Cantonese is more difficult to learn than Mandarin, is this true? I'd like to learn an Asian language but don't know which I should go for.

I have been in Japan and it totaly ddn't souned simillar to a Chinese language.
Knowng Japanese is cool though!

Fraggle Rocker

09-14-07, 11:31 PM

Man, all the beers you have been drinking so far are crap..I am quiet sure. I don't know how easy you can get imported beers.It's easy to get imported beer in America. I usually like "dark" beers okay. Beck's and St. Pauli Girl dark from Germany, Bohemia and Dos XX negra from Mexico, etc. And I like stout, Foster's from Australia and there are several good stouts made in America. Oddly I don't like Guinness stout from Ireland and that is world famous; it tastes kind of sissy to me. I like Porter too. I don't even mind bock beer. I just don't like regular lager, that's what most Americans like. I think if you gave them a glass of ice cold hamster weewee they wouldn't know the difference. Really good beer does not have to be served cold.Is Japanese similar to Mandarin or Cantonese?Chinese and Japanese are not related, or if they are you have to go back tens of thousands of years to find the common ancestor. Many linguists think Japanese is part of the Mongolic superfamily, with Korean, Mongolian, and the Turkic, Ural-Altaic and Finno-Ugric families. That includes a huge swath of languages from eastern Europe (including Hungarian) to the eastern edge of Asia and covers most of the southern ex-Soviet republics except Tajikistan. The Chinese languages are in a very small family with Tibetan and some minor languages to the southeast.

However, Chinese Buddhist monks brought their culture to Japan around 1,500 years ago, and whenever that happens a lot of the vocabulary for new unfamiliar things and ideas comes with it. Japanese has an extensive vocabulary of words it borrowed from Chinese, just the way we have a huge stock of French words including everyday ones like very, use, beef, and question. If you know Chinese, learning Japanese can give you a weird sense of deja vu. They pronounce most of the words quite differently, due to 1,500 years of phonetic changes in both languages.I heard people say that Cantonese is more difficult to learn than Mandarin, is this true?As you surely know, the Chinese non-phonetic writing system unites all the Chinese languages in terms of vocabulary and syntax. They speak 99% of the same words in the identical sequence, they just pronounce them totally differently. So once you've learned any of the Chinese languages, all you have to do to speak another one is learn to pronounce every word totally differently. :) You've already got the grammar and vocabulary.

But yes, Kuangdong hua is much harder to speak than Beijing hua. It has (I think) eight tones instead of four. For speakers of non-tonal languages that is really difficult. The phonetics are more complicated in other ways: Mandarin syllables can only end in a vowel, N or NG. Cantonese syllables can end in a variety of consonants and they can start with NG. Shanghai hua is even harder, and every Chinese I know says Fujian hua is the hardest; it has twelve tones.

Americans refer to them all as dialects, but since they are absolutely not intercomprehensible, they are distinct languages. There are some dialects of Mandarin, such as Sichuan hua. It has six tones and there are some predictable phonetic shifts (they call it Shicuan for example), but with a little work Sichuan ren and Beijing ren can understand each other. Since we Westerners don't hear the tones the way Chinese do, I find it easier to understand Sichuan hua than Mandarin speakers do. I've surprised a few Sichuan people who thought I couldn't understand what they were saying.I'd like to learn an Asian language but don't know which I should go for.Depends on what you want to learn it for. If you have any practical purpose at all, your only choice is Mandarin. You don't need to learn Japanese or Korean to work with Japanese or Korean people. Bit if you want to be a scholar, then you have to decide which culture you're most interested in.

If you just want to enrich yourself, I would strongly recommend Chinese. It is a very powerful language that will break you free of the Stone Age paradigms of English: inflections, tense, number, gender, prepositions, etc. You'll learn to think in a more modern and more adaptable way in Chinese and you'll understand why their country is advancing so quickly despite the handicap of a repressive government with a schizophrenic economic system.Japanese has the most confusing writing system( in my opinion), but i dont believe that it is that similar to Mandarin. dotashite mashiteThe standard newspaper character set uses 2,000 han zi, or kanji as it's pronounced in Japanese. These are used for the important words in the sentence, the nouns and verbs. But Japanese has a phonetic alphabet of syllables that are used for connecting words, modifiers and inflections. It also has a second phonetic alphabet that is used for transcribing words borrowed from foreign languages, trademarks, etc. So you have to learn three parallel writing systems to read and write Japanese, two of which are phonetic and the third is borrowed from a totally unrelated language and is not phonetic at all.

A Chinese person can puzzle his way through much of the meaning of written Japanese since most of the main words are Chinese borrowings. A Japanese can read written Chinese at an elementary level. Chinese are expected to know 1,200 characters at the end of the fourth grade, so they probably know the 2,000 that the Japanese know after the fifth or sixth grade. A really well educated Chinese knows 5,000. A scholar might know ten thousand or even twenty thousand, but that gets into ancient writings which used characters that are not present in normal writing any more, not even sophisticated modern scholarly writing.

Koreans have a better phonetic alphabet, with each symbol representing one phoneme as in our Western alphabets. They use Chinese characters also, but not to the same extent as the Japanese. Mostly for names.

A well-educated scholar in Japan or Korea who specialized in classic studies will have learned as many Chinese characters as the equivalent level of education in China, and they can read ancient Chinese philosophy as well as their Chinese peers. This is similar to Western scholars being able to read Latin and/or ancient Greek, Indian scholars reading Sanskrit, pious Jews outside of Israel reading Hebrew, and pious Muslims in any country reading Arabic.

Enmos

09-15-07, 04:48 AM

What do you call a person who speaks one language? -- "American"

What about German ? ;)

wanneszinnig

09-15-07, 06:11 AM

Well all the beers you just named are piss...we are used to strong, tastefull beers.
I ll give you a list...I would be surprised if you could find them...but if so...let heaven piss on yr tongue:

Duvel (Blond, strong beer...8,5%)
Westmalle (Blond...8,5%)
Leffe
Stella (regular pint, 5%)
Rochefort (6, 8 and 10%..dark beer)

Well we have + 2000 sorts of beer..
Go to yr supermarket and check out what they have. Post it and I ll tell you what is good.One rule...never drink it ice-cold!! Beer being drunk ice-cold is no beer...it should be shilled.
Guiness is ok, but it has a very bitter taste. I am not a big fan either.

s0meguy

09-15-07, 06:40 AM

What about German ? ;)

Or French

I-Am-Invisible

09-19-07, 11:04 AM

What about German ? ;)

today many germans/swiss speak english aswell... the french and british are worse...

Oli

09-19-07, 11:28 AM

today many germans/swiss speak english aswell... the french and british are worse...

Nope, to the best of my knowledge the French are taught (certainly were when I was kid) English from 11 years old onwards.
Any monolinguistic tendencies in the French tend to be *cough* snobbery rather than inability. :D

We Brits though... pah, I'm ashamed when I go abroad of the "they're not really foreigners, just stupid, and they can understand me if I'm loud and slow enough when talking" attitude.

Fraggle Rocker

09-26-07, 03:20 PM

We Brits though... pah, I'm ashamed when I go abroad of the "they're not really foreigners, just stupid, and they can understand me if I'm loud and slow enough when talking" attitude.Americans do that too, to other Americans. Especially women, but men do it too.

"Why did you leave this like this?"

"Like what?"

"Like this!"

"I don't understand what you mean."

"L I K E - - T H I S - - ! ! !"

keyfur

09-29-07, 01:00 PM

Pedantically, Cantonese has ten tones. To switch from Cantonese to Putunghua is much more difficult than simply pronouncing words differently. Cantonese has many 'words' of its own, (incl. the characters) which do not appear in 'Mandarin'.

Fraggle Rocker

09-29-07, 05:06 PM

Pedantically, Cantonese has ten tones. To switch from Cantonese to Putunghua is much more difficult than simply pronouncing words differently.But it's even harder to go the other way. The four tones in Mandarin are real no-brainers: high, low, rising and falling. Americans can master them, even if we can never hope to sound like a native. For a Mandarin speaker to learn to differentiate among tones that are high, low and medium, rising low to medium and medium to high, etc., is a challenge. Not to mention, some of the tones in Guandong hua are differentiated by their length, which is not phonemic in Mandarin. I think the short ones end in glottal stops--another sound absent from Mandarin--which is variously transcribed as gwok, yip, etc. On the other hand, Mandarin uses Z and ZH as vowels, which are difficult for Cantonese, although they use M and NG as vowels.Cantonese has many 'words' of its own, (incl. the characters) which do not appear in 'Mandarin'.I think the Fenn Five Thousand, the standard set of pre-Communist hanzi, will service any of the languages of China. The written language has held the Chinese people together for a couple of thousand years. There are only a handful of important words in any of them that are incomprehensibly different to a scholar of another. Shanghai hua uses ala for the pronoun I instead of wo, ngo, nguai,etc. If you look up the characters they use to write a and la, they were just chosen for the phonetics. But that's remarkable and rare, and when they're not trying to stress the fact that a person is speaking Shanghai, they generally write it with the standard wo character. If you're talking about slang, then of course there are differences because slang is dialectal even within a single language.

I've been told--by a Chinese who regarded it as a possible urban legend--that during the war years when some American G.I.'s were stationed in China, the incidence of rape by soldiers was quite a bit higher in Shanghai than in other cities. The supposed reason is that "I don't want to," which is wo bu yao in Mandarin, is ala fu you in Shanghai hua. Spoken in normal candence and interpreted by a drunken foreigner, it sounds a little bit like "Ah luff you."

keyfur

09-30-07, 08:23 AM

Agreed on the 5000. I was thinking of the Cantonese "mow" (low rising) for 'negative have' and keoi (LR) for third person singular pronoun, as well as the pluralising suffix "dei" (low level).
Loved the Shanghai story.

keyfur

09-30-07, 08:29 AM

Incidentally, a propos one of your earlier posts, it is rare in English to use the compound verb "knock up" except in the very precise circumstances of "wake someone up by knocking on their door".

Fraggle Rocker

09-30-07, 10:53 AM

I was thinking of the Cantonese "mow" (low rising) for 'negative have.'My Chinese friends always assumed that mow is just the Kuangdong pronunciation of the mei in mei you, "not have." The word stands on its own in compounds with the meaning "don't have," as in mei chian de, "lack money (-ing)," i.e., "poor."

I remember the poem our Chinese teacher (who was from Fujian and an outsider to the rivalry) taught us:

Tian bu pa,
Di bu pa.
Zuei pa Tong ren
Shuo guan hua.

"I fear nothing in heaven or on earth
so much as the sound of a Cantonese speaking Mandarin."Incidentally, a propos one of your earlier posts, it is rare in English to use the compound verb "knock up" except in the very precise circumstances of "wake someone up by knocking on their door".On this side the compound also has only one meaning: "to impregnate," but it's considered vulgar.

From one round of the Washington Post's weekly word contest a few years back. Rules: to rewrite a well-known set of instructions in the style of a famous poet.

The warning on a liquor bottle, by Eminem:

"If you a knocked-up ho,
Don't drink no mo."

(I can't resist reposting my absolute favorite from that week.)

How to Do the Hokey Pokey
by William Shakespeare

O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe,
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.
Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke,
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from Heaven's yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst thou go, girl.
The Hoke, the Poke—banish thou now thy doubt:
Verily, be this what 'tis all about.

keyfur

10-01-07, 05:06 AM

Yes, orally I'm sure your Chinese friends are right. However, it has its own ideogram (the 2 parallel bars removed from 'to have'). Further, looking at the verb "to be", Cantonese pronunciation and ideogram are far from the national language 'shr'.
I love the Shakespearian Hokey Cokey: thank you for that.
How many meanings can you think of for the syllable MAN, disregarding tone, in Mandarin and Cantonese??

Fraggle Rocker

10-01-07, 09:50 AM

Yes, orally I'm sure your Chinese friends are right. However, it has its own ideogram (the 2 parallel bars removed from 'to have').Are you saying that Mandarin mei and Cantonese mou have two different symbols?Further, looking at the verb "to be", Cantonese pronunciation and ideogram are far from the national language 'shr'.Yes, that stands out. I don't know if they write hai with the symbol for shi or if it's just a different word with a similar meaning. There's no way they could be the same word with phonetic shifts. Cantonese also don't use the Mandarin word chi for "eat," but they say set, which is Mandarin shi, one of many words for "food."

You must have learned the Yale transliteration system like I did. I thought it was superior for actually studying the pronunciation. In Pinyin, "be" is shi and it's shih in Wade-Giles.How many meanings can you think of for the syllable MAN, disregarding tone, in Mandarin and Cantonese??I don't really know any Cantonese. My Mandarin vocabulary is so small that I don't have two readings for every syllable. (And maybe not even one for all of them.) The only one I can think of is man fourth tone (I think), "slow down."

keyfur

10-01-07, 02:59 PM

1. Yes, your Mandarin mei is a negative prefix: Cantonese simply alters the positive verb form.
2. The Cantonese hai (to be) is indeed a totally different word and ideogram. You are right, too, about the verb 'to eat'.
3. I never learned Mandarin formally. I was an interpreter in Cantonese many years ago and learned the written and spoken languages using the Barnett-Chao romanisation system.
4. Sorry about the apparent trick question "man". It was one of my favourites for illustrating tonality.

Wherein lies your interest in the Middle Country?

Fraggle Rocker

10-01-07, 05:36 PM

Sorry about the apparent trick question "man". It was one of my favourites for illustrating tonality.Long before I studied Chinese, I was told a story that I haven't verified. A regional administrator rose to power during wartime and was not well educated. He surrounded himself with scholars to help him finish his education. One made a reference to the tonality of Chinese and the ruler said, "What? I have never heard of such a thing. Give me an example demonstrating this tonality if you expect me to believe you." The scholar crafted a four-word sentence using the same syllable in all four tones, meaning something like, "Whatever Your Grace requires of me."

I think the example betrays its apocryphal nature. If I'm not mistaken, ancient Han had six tones, as are preserved in some regional dialects of Mandarin like Sichuan hua.Wherein lies your interest in the Middle Country?I always wanted to study a non-Indo-European language. Books on Hebrew were easy enough to find in the 1950s, but in a cowboy town I couldn't find any live speakers. Eventually I moved to L.A. and after finishing college and getting a job that had nothing to do with any language except Cobol, I discovered that the nearby community college offered classes in Mandarin. A year later I found myself with a Chinese girlfriend and I prevailed upon her to speak Mandarin at home even though for her it was like living with a three-year-old. (Turns out it was a good match emotionally but that's another story.)

I think I made it to about four and a half eventually, which is not bad. What little I know, I am completely fluent in. I think in kiddie-Chinese and my pronunciation is pretty good. Although she was from Sichuan and I still have traces of a Sichuan accent. They get the tones right, but they reverse S C Z with SH CH ZH. Final NG after certain vowels becomes N and final N becomes a nazalised vowel like French or Portuguese.

temur

10-01-07, 10:24 PM

If you just want to enrich yourself, I would strongly recommend Chinese. It is a very powerful language that will break you free of the Stone Age paradigms of English: inflections, tense, number, gender, prepositions, etc. You'll learn to think in a more modern and more adaptable way in Chinese and you'll understand why their country is advancing so quickly despite the handicap of a repressive government with a schizophrenic economic system.

Can you create an artificial language that is based on the word roots that modern English uses and with Chinese grammar? That would be easy to learn, adaptable and modern.

Sangamon

10-02-07, 02:28 AM

New kid on the block here

I'm fluent in English & Dutch, I can have a not-too-technical conversation in French and if I'm lost in Germany or Spain I will be able to talk to the locals and get home.

Then there's bits and pieces of Thai, Swedish, Portugese and Mandarin floating around in my head, but none of those are of much use outside of a bar :)

Fraggle Rocker

10-02-07, 06:08 PM

Can you create an artificial language that is based on the word roots that modern English uses and with Chinese grammar? That would be easy to learn, adaptable and modern.I think, easy. Brit speech word short, China speech word short. I speak China speech use Brit word, you understand.

I can't always come up with a one-syllable English word to match a one-morpheme Chinese "word," but the opposite is also true so it balances out. The simplified grammar would need to be adapted carefully. There are only nouns and verbs. "Short" is a verb: "to be short." When I say "short man" it is really "being-short man," with no participial suffix since Chinese has no inflections. The meaning is obvious from the word order, which is very rigid in Chinese. Sometimes a sentence gets so complicated that the relationships between the words are not obvious. In that case the particle de is inserted strictly as a parsing aid, indicating that the previous phrase or clause is complete and is a modifier of the following word, phrase or clause.

This is not so necessary in writing, where the 1,600 phonetically possible syllables of spoken Chinese explode into several thousand distinct homonymic morphemes and the possibility of misunderstaning is greatly reduced.

This exercise would be much easier for speakers of English than many other languages. We are not used to heavy use of inflections, our syntax is fairly similiar, and we build new words by shoving old ones together just like they do. We'd have to drop the notions of tense and number, and discover that they're really not as useful or necessary as we think. It would be great to dump our useless articles, and to replace our pathetic stock of Stone-Age prepositions with verbs that describe relationships far more precisely.

Myles

11-03-07, 04:34 PM

I spoke Irish at school until the age of twelve. It is now very rusty as I have not used it since moving to the UK some fifty years ago. I taught myself German using a book , listening to German radio stations and reading German magazines. I finally became fluent by dating German girls in an International club. Later, I taught computer programming in Germany for six months. Most of my students knew very little English so I inproved my knowledge of their language quickly, socialising after classes.

I taught myself French in much the same way. I can also manage enough Spanish to get by.
If you wish to get past the "can you tell me the way to the station" stage and communicate using everyday expressions and idioms, I suggest reading novels and paying close attention to the dialogue. Try not to use a dictionary. You will find that you will learn expressions in their proper context unlike those poor souls who rely wholly on a dictionary, thereby producing quaint expressions. Remember, translations are seldom exact; you must learn to convey meaning rather that a word-for-word version of what you would say in your own language,
I hope this helps.

Myles

cosmictraveler

11-03-07, 07:35 PM

I speak english, American english that is. I still am trying to learn it and keep

trying everyday.

pjdude1219

11-04-07, 01:46 PM

i speak english but i would like to learn german, polish, romanian, and hungarian.

kaneda

11-08-07, 11:21 AM

I speak some French. Well, I should since I live in France but apart from bills almost all my French is bonjour, merci, au revoir, used in shops. Only once in a blue moon do I need more.

I have travelled around the world mainly on my own and managed in dozens of countries where English is not the first language, or in places where it is hardly spoken at all. You point, hold fingers up, use common-sense, etc. It isn't hard. Ideally I'd speak 20 or more languages but I find what little I learn, I lose by not using them.

I remembered reading of a man who was fluent in 66 languages and could get by in quite a few more. He couldn't understand why everyone else wasn't the same since he found languages easy. But that was a quirk in his brain. He never found a cure for cancer or anything. He was just ordinary outside his language skills.

s0meguy

11-09-07, 10:54 AM

I was thinking of doing an EF (ef.com) course and go to different countries and learn Spanish and Chinese. Theres other options or additions that I'm looking at: French for instance. It's an official language in 41 countries but I'm not really sure what I'd use it for, since almost everyone these days speaks either English, Chinese or Spanish. Not really sure about the last one, but its just a language I'm interested in. Thoughts?

Fraggle Rocker

11-09-07, 05:50 PM

Hindi and Bengali also have huge numbers of speakers. Arabic, Japanese and Portuguese are also in the top ten. I'm not sure which languages are #9 and 10 these days. German was hanging in there for a while.

I would recommend learning languages that are as unrelated as possible, because this will introduce you to vastly new ways of thinking. Assuming you're a native speaker of English, why not pass up the other Indo-European languages? That excludes everything mentioned so far except Chinese, Japanese and Arabic. You could choose Hebrew instead of its cousin Arabic because it's easy to find a teacher in any country with a large Jewish community. Vietnamese, Thai, Tagalog and Korean come to mind. Also the family that includes the major non-Indo-European languages of Europe: Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian. Or something offbeat that's in the news like Georgian, or one of the myriad African languages.

If your goal is to be able to travel and talk to people everywhere you go, then that's different. But if you're interested in expanding your mind, I recommend that you consider not selecting languages more-or-less closely related to English like Spanish, French, Gaelic, Greek, Russian, Farsi, Hindi, Armenian, etc.

If you chose Arabic, Japanese and Xhosa, you'd have your life's work cut out for you. ^_^

USS Exeter

11-09-07, 05:53 PM

For me Spainish and English (my strongest) and German.

Sock Puppy

11-09-07, 05:58 PM

There's no vote option for "zero".

s0meguy

11-10-07, 05:15 AM

If your goal is to be able to travel and talk to people everywhere you go, then that's different. But if you're interested in expanding your mind, I recommend that you consider not selecting languages more-or-less closely related to English like Spanish, French, Gaelic, Greek, Russian, Farsi, Hindi, Armenian, etc.

If you chose Arabic, Japanese and Xhosa, you'd have your life's work cut out for you. ^_^

Well thats kind of my goal (being able to talk where ever I travel, at least, at the places I like to travel to, which is also why I'm mostly interested in the big languages. I'm 20 years old, and I think that learning more languages could be a good investment in the future, for getting a good job, with all the globalism and all. Plus I just like learning to understand languages). And my native language is Dutch.

But expanding my mind is also a good thing. I understand how languages like Japanese and Arabic are vastly different from the languages that I understand currently (Dutch, English, German and French somewhat) but besides understanding a language that has different rules, could you elaborate more on the "expanding your mind" thing?

Fraggle Rocker

11-10-07, 07:16 PM

I understand how languages like Japanese and Arabic are vastly different from the languages that I understand currently (Dutch, English, German and French somewhat) but besides understanding a language that has different rules, could you elaborate more on the "expanding your mind" thing?Sure. I'll give you three examples from one language: Chinese.

1. Tone is phonemic. You can't use tone of voice to indicate how you feel. You have to express it in words.

2. There are no inflections. No gender, number, case, tense, mode, etc. "Dog eat fish." If it's really necessary to make it clear that there was one dog, three fish, and this took place yesterday, you say, "Yesterday one dog eat three fish." If it's clear from context you don't need the extra words: a general statement that dogs like to eat fish if it's available, or my dog eats fish every chance he gets, or if you leave your fishbowl on my coffee table when we come back from the movies your fish will be gone.

3. There are no prepositions. No vague words like "in," "at" and "for," with so many meanings that they are now essentially meaningless. Chinese has only nouns and verbs, so you have thousands of verbs to choose from to help you express relationships very precisely. Instead of "the apple is in the box," you say, "apple occupy box interior." In the last century we began struggling to free ourselves from our Stone Age paradigm of prepositions by inventing a new kind of grammatical construction, as seen in a steady stream of unorthodox compounds like user-friendly, carbon-neutral and labor-intensive. The Chinese have had that facility for thousands of years.

(Okay, in addition to nouns and verbs Chinese also has a couple of particles, which are nothing more than placeholders to help you parse a complicated sentence.)

oreodont

11-10-07, 07:30 PM

I did most of my schooling in French Catholic schools...but university in English (and a few university courses in German with English permitted for exams and papers).

French and English are interchangeable for me. I can also get by in German and get by 'well' in German after a few days emerged in the language. I studied Russian for two years and can read it if a dictionary is handy but can no longer follow a movie or program in Russian. I also studied Latin for 4 years and ancient Greek for 1 year in school. Latin was my favorite subject in school.

The sum total of my knowledge of non Western languages is zero.

Orleander

11-10-07, 07:40 PM

I'm only fluent in English. But I can speak enough Spanish, Portugese, Japanese, German, and Chinese to get a free drink from a man who likes to hear how handsome he is .;)

Zyxoas

11-10-07, 08:11 PM

So languages with prepositions are primitive? Good thing the Bantu languages (like the isiXhosa you mentioned in an earlier post) don't have prepositions...

In my native Sesotho, which is closely related to isiXhosa (Bantu S branch), there are (by Doke & Mofokeng's analysis) 12 parts of speech, none of which include any "small words" (such as prepositions and particles). Generally, words are constructed from roots, and their meanings and relationships are indicated by prefixes and suffixes. Word order tends to be quite free, and this is further facilitated by the fact that verbs, qualificatives (adjectives, relatives, enumeratives, and possessive nouns and adjectives), copulatives, and pronouns describing a noun agree with it using a "concord" prefix.

Tone is phonemic, and emphasis is achieved by usually changing word order, putting the most important element first. Some verb tenses are constructed by changing some of the tones of the inflected verb. There are up to 5 basic tenses, instead of English's 2. The verb conjugation system is so ridiculously complicated it would make you cry...

There are 17 noun classes (the Bantu group as a whole has 25, if one includes classes 1a and 2a, though no modern language has retained all the classes) and most classes have their own unique sets of concords. Colours and a few other descriptive words are adjectives while most others are relatives (the difference essentially lies in the use of concords). There are 3 demonstrative pronoun positions (the Bantu norm is 4). Ideophones are an integral part of the language (not simply isolated utterances) and have their own syntax. Conjunctives (basically like English conjunctions when used between sentenses or clauses) may be formed from special verbs.

Learning about strange languages certainly does expand one's mind. I tried learning 'Arabic a while ago but it didn't work since I was basically trying to do it from the Qur'an (like leaning English from Shakespear). I may still continue trying to learn it, as well as (written) Chinese. I would also like to learn more about the major Khoisan language Khoekhoegowab (aka Nama or Hottentot) but there seems to be very few resources available for it (which makes me wonder how the Namibian education department manages to teach the language in school as a first language).

Fraggle Rocker

11-11-07, 02:15 AM

So languages with prepositions are primitive?No, sorry if that's the impression I gave. I think any "part of speech" that gives you a small number of words to express a small number of concepts, without any way of creating new ones, is going to seem primitive after the next Paradigm Shift. Prepositions in the Indo-European languages have gone through the Neolithic Revolution, the Dawn of Civilization, the Industrial Revolution, and are now entering the Post-Industrial Era or Information Age. There are only a couple of dozen of them in any of our languages, and unlike nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, there is no convenient mechanism for creating or borrowing new ones. (We have doggedly managed to create a small handful of new ones over the centuries, such as "beyond," "during" and "without.") In, on, with, at, by, to, for, over, under... Most of them obviously originally denoted physical relationships like relative location, but as life became more complicated they were pressed into service for a host of new meanings. In time, in love, in English, in disagreement, in the lead... these are all different relationships, poorly expressed by the same word. It would be difficult for me to explain to a foreign student the difference between arriving at a meeting "in time" and "on time," despite the fact that I sense and understand that difference.

Prepositions in English are a handicap. So are verb tenses and noun cases (in languages that decline nouns like German, Russian, Greek and Romanian) because there are so few of them. Inflections generally stifle the development of a language by not being easily adaptable to a new structure of the external world. That was the problem with Esperanto. It has what seemed 140 years ago like a generous assortment of suffixes and prefixes that "allow you to create any word you need," but it's rather awkward in a post-industrial society. The fact is downright embarrassing today that it has a suffix denoting female, but not male. Titles of occupations and such are assumed to be male.I tried learning Arabic a while ago but it didn't work since I was basically trying to do it from the Qur'an (like leaning English from Shakespeare).That seems to be a very common way to teach Arabic.I would also like to learn more about the major Khoisan language Khoekhoegowab (aka Nama or Hottentot) but there seems to be very few resources available for it (which makes me wonder how the Namibian education department manages to teach the language in school as a first language).Do they emphasize writing in the early school grades? Perhaps not!

Zyxoas

11-11-07, 03:04 AM

What do you mean "do they emphasis writing in the early school grades?" I've seen on the internet final Khoekhoegowab papers, meaning that the children learn it all through their school careers.

Are you saying that closed word classes are outdated? But I believe that every language has those. The only difference in Sesotho between the closed adjective and enumerative classes and the open relative classes is that the three sets use different concords (they are all qualificatives, distinguished only by morphology). I honestly can't think of any Sesotho words with similar problems as you cited for "in," as the language is aglutinative (while English is analytic) thus there are no "little words" since their functions are provided by affixes with definite meanings.

I don't think you can get rid of "little words" in an analytic language, since they provide the same function as affixes in a more synthetic language.

I didn't mean I was being taught Arabic from the Qur'an, I meant that I was teaching it to myself...

Please elaborate on your concerns about inflection (in general, not just crazy IE declension). Does Finnish have the same limitation? What do you think of re-anima-t-ion and thousands of other words constructed from Greek, Latin, and Germanic affixes, similar to inflection (or do you strictly mean I pray/he prayS/I prayED/etc)?

Fraggle Rocker

11-11-07, 11:16 AM

What do you mean "do they emphasis writing in the early school grades?" I've seen on the internet final Khoekhoegowab papers, meaning that the children learn it all through their school careers.You wondered how they teach the written language in school, since you didn't find a lot of written instructional materials. How exactly do they teach it then? There must be some textbooks available somewhere.Are you saying that closed word classes are outdated?Some extremely small closed classes reflect logical abstraction and are, therefore, probably as timeless as arithmetic. E.g., personal pronouns: One would suppose that I, you and he will be the only people we can talk about for all eternity, no matter where society's structure and technology take us. (Chinese dispensed with the he/she/it variants of the third person pronoun in ancient times.) But larger closed classes, such as prepositions, which attempt to catalog all possible types of relationships, are doomed to obsolescence. A farming society living in permanent villages is going to have a lot more types of relationships between nouns and activities to describe than nomadic hunter-gatherers. People whose lives are full of engineered technology will have even more, and 21st century humans who live a large part of our lives in a virtual universe will have still more. I honestly can't think of any Sesotho words with similar problems as you cited for "in," as the language is agglutinative (while English is analytic) thus there are no "little words" since their functions are provided by affixes with definite meanings.I agree that the class of prepositions would be useful instead of limiting if it were not closed. The Indo-European languages have a taboo against coining new prepositions.

However, after studying Chinese I have the same criticism of a language structure with a limited set of classes. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, numbers... this is starting to look very much like the structure of computer programming languages. They become obsolete very quickly as the hardware engineers hand new domains over to the software engineers and the limitations of their languages prevent them from developing high-quality software efficiently. Programming languages reflect the structure of the universe they were built for, and human languages do the same thing.

China, the world's oldest continuous civilization and possibly the world's oldest continuous society going back to the Neolithic Era, has had to adapt to Paradigm Shifts in the structure of its universe. Its solution has been to simplify its language structure, making it more adaptable. It only has two parts of speech, each of which are expandable without limit, no inflections, and it has lost paradigms that once seemed like sensible representations of reality such as singular/plural and past/present/future.I don't think you can get rid of "little words" in an analytic language, since they provide the same function as affixes in a more synthetic language.Chinese has done an admirable job. The Wikipedia article on analytic languages goes to great lengths to define Chinese particles. But in practiceThere are only three or four of them; di for possessive and dei for participial are merged into de in standard Mandarin Their practical purpose is to parse spoken sentences They can be omitted when the meaning is clear without them, and often are in writing where homonyms have distinct charactersPlease elaborate on your concerns about inflection (in general, not just crazy IE declension). Does Finnish have the same limitation? What do you think of re-anima-t-ion and thousands of other words constructed from Greek, Latin, and Germanic affixes, similar to inflection (or do you strictly mean I pray/he prayS/I prayED/etc)?I don't know anything about Finnish. My knowledge of inflection in non-Indo-European languages is limited to a cursory view of Japanese and Hebrew. The Japanese language is full of ritual and formality, and a Zen master would surely insist that struggling to express oneself in Japanese builds character. :) Inflection builds a type of complexity into a language that is recursive: it's about the language itself rather than about its use as a technology for communication. If it's difficult to create new prepositions to describe an increasingly rich and complex world, how difficult is it to create new inflections?

I am not as critical of English's word-building engine, which includes tools borrowed from other languages, because it is not a closed paradigm. We find Germanic, Greek and Latin elements like "un-," "ize" and "-able" useful, so we use them. (Sometimes all at the same time as in "unrealizable," a word that would frustrate a traditional etymologist.) As we need more, we invent them or find them. In America we already use Russian "-nik" and Spanish "-ito." "E-", our own prefix meaning "online," is well established.