Languages

[Fluory]

I can get conversational in French, and I can understand a lot of Spanish. Just can't speak it.

I'm taking Chinese and Korean in college; I plan on self-studying them out of the classroom. Whoo.

[Yin]

I should really know more Thai than I should, I've been surrounded by it my whole life. I can understand it, and speak simple phrases, but I can't read it. A shame really. D:
The only other foreign language I know is Spanish, but I never really had to use any of it, so it's weak as well.

I really like to learn French and German, but I would like to learn Chinese first.

Whenever you want to learn a language, you've gotta start when you're young. You'll learn to speak with the correct pronunciation and sound easier. That's the difference from actually speaking the language and sounding like a foreigner.

'Course, you'll live your childhood sounding like a freak and mixing up your words like I did. XD

[Fluory]

Aug 7, 2009 19:36:21 GMT -5 Yin said:

I should really know more Thai than I should, I've been surrounded by it my whole life. I can understand it, and speak simple phrases, but I can't read it. A shame really. D:
The only other foreign language I know is Spanish, but I never really had to use any of it, so it's weak as well.

I really like to learn French and German, but I would like to learn Chinese first.

Whenever you want to learn a language, you've gotta start when you're young. You'll learn to speak with the correct pronunciation and sound easier. That's the difference from actually speaking the language and sounding like a foreigner.

'Course, you'll live your childhood sounding like a freak and mixing up your words like I did. XD

You know, I think what really matters is how you approach the language and how much you expose yourself to it. I don't really think that we lose our natural ability to learn languages - the only thing is when we're older we already know how to communicate efficiently with English, so we treat foreign languages differently. We treat them foreign, and we make comparisons to English. And when progress isn't fast enough, we give up.

Just think. It takes the average baby NINE MONTHS to speak their first words. Nine months of living in the language. And even then, your pronunciation sounds terrible. I don't think it would be too farfetched to learn languages as an adult so long as you separated the language from English in your mind and constantly immersed yourself in it. I recall some dude got up to a near adult-level fluency in Japanese in the course of 18 months by living in the language essentially.

But Thai. Amazing language. Way cool. You should talk to Pilot - he's really into that language and culture.

[Arctic Yoshi]

I can speak English (no kidding) and Norwegian fluently, and at one point I tried to learn Japanese but failed miserably. I hope to pick it up again some day, though. I also aspire to one day learn Russian. Yes.