Languages? How many can you speak?

[Carbomb]

I did try learning German once, and I was surprised at the similarities in vocab, and in some of the phonetics. Same with Dutch - it's amazing how the odd snippet or phrase can sound like an English one. The German "was ist das?" we know instinctually from its sound to be "what is that?"; same how we can hear "das ist gut", etc. In Dutch, when you know that the phrase to ask someone how they are is to ask "how goes it with you?" you can hear the similarity of "hoe gaat het met jou?"

 I do wish I'd made more of an effort with the Germanic languages.

[King Coconut]

8 hours ago, Carbomb said:

It's likely to provide a more universal base.

It may well be more universal, but I'd still argue that a living language would be the more useful base. But let's not steer the language thread off-course with semantics...

I agree wholeheartedly with Dutch analysis. Once I'd learned German, coupled with my English, I found I could understand huge swathes of Dutch. Quite the mad feeling to understand someone who's speaking a foreign language. 

[SpiritOfTheForest]

Re the Latin discussion: I saw this today and this is pretty much why I think Latin is worth learning (although I haven't). While speaking Spanish can give you an advantage in understanding some elements of French or Italian, a solid base of Latin gives you a much more solid foundation to learn any of the Romance languages. Knowing Latin will allow you to learn Portuguese or Romanian with far more ease than if you only spoke French. I found it an interesting image worth sharing to this discussion anyway. 

[King Coconut]

Yes, but learning a whole, extremely challenging, dead language to make learning another language easier is like chopping your whole cock off because it's 3 inches too long.

[Fog Dude]

I did a year of Latin at FE college, but can hardly remember anything about it precisely because it's not a 'living' language. Did some beginners' Italian back then and an intermediate class some years later, but I'm convinced most of the vocab I retain I must've learnt from watching AC Jimbo and co on Channel 4 back in the day. I agree with what others are saying about Dutch: I find that having German and English means I can understand a fair bit of it, and written Frisian too.

I'm trying to become a translator of French, German and Spanish into English at the moment, but it's all very daunting because the industry is almost totally unregulated. It's now possible to be a Chartered Linguist and even (since last month) a Chartered Proofreader, but notably not yet a Chartered Translator specifically. 

Portuguese I can usually understand written down, but when spoken it sounds to me like bad Spanish with a Russian accent. Turns out I'm not the only one. Two holidays to the Algarve as a kid – plus the Brazilians being good at football, probably helped develop an interest in it – although the closest I've come to formal learning was a one-month course in Galician nearly a decade ago now. I can essentially read Catalan despite no lessons in that ever, but can't begin to make head nor tail of Basque. 

My only instruction in Welsh came a good ten years back as well but I'd already been accustomed to hearing it thanks to Sgorio (plus the fact that 888 English subtitles were patchy if the TV aerial wasn't pointing just the right way towards Wenvoe). I've forgotten all but a few very basic sentences, mind. I managed three words of Slovak on a day trip to Bratislava 19 months ago, and while we're on the Slavic front, lately I've found myself with a lot more russophone acquaintances all of a sudden, so over the past few months I've been teaching myself to decipher and transliterate the Cyrillic alphabet... which is not the same as actually picking up Russian vocab.

Doesn't @Ronnie usually weigh in whenever this subject comes up as well? I suspect I must've mentioned NativLang last time it was discussed on here, but it's worth another plug all the same. In short, languages are fascinating. Never trust a monoglot! 

[Ronnie]

58 minutes ago, Fog Dude said:

Doesn't @Ronnie usually weigh in whenever this subject comes up as well?

Yes, I suppose I probably do, but I don't have too impressive a record as far as speaking languages goes: I'm functionally fluent only in French and Esperanto. I'm not too bad at speaking Italian in short bursts but I've only ever had the opportunity on holiday so we wouldn't be having a chat about the rules of darts or anything like that, which I could do easily enough in the other two.

If I looked through my collection of foreign-language novels, I'd find examples in Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan, but those languages are all so closely related that it's not so challenging once you've got a couple of other relatives behind you. It sounds impressive but it's not too dissimilar to reading something in Scots if you're a native English speaker. I've read one in Romanian too but that was really hard; it's sufficiently different from the other Romance languages that doing a couple of textbooks wasn't nearly enough preparation for a novel.

If anybody's looking to use their new-found downtime to learn a language, Teach Yourself are offering 80% off several of their ebooks. There are the usual ones (French, German, Spanish, Italian) plus Swedish and Esperanto too. I don't have the dedication to do more than dip into languages personally; seeing my other half with a 500-day streak of at least 30 minutes of Russian a day plus watching TV only in German or Croatian for the last few years has really hit me over the head with just how difficult it is to get actively competent in a language.

[Fog Dude]

Ah yes, I neglected to touch upon constructed languages, which are a whole different kettle of fish again! I met some Esperanto speakers at the London Language Show back in November and they were certainly an interesting bunch. I'd certainly recommend to anybody with even a passing interest in linguistics to attend that event one year, by the way.

I'm still not sure I could explain the rules of darts in French, and I started learning that a quarter of a century ago. Bad arrows. You shouldn't sell yourself short though, Ronnie. Being able to do so in three different languages (since presumably you know the laws of the game in English like the back of your hand) is seriously impressive.

I watch a couple of shows a week in German (though one is currently on its Easter break) and two more that happily code-switch between Spanish and Catalan/Galician, but that's definitely not the same as being constantly exposed to a language. And as you say, even then you might not absorb it easily. 

[Carbomb]

The one phrase of Esperanto I remember I owe to Red Dwarf: "Bonvolu alsendi la pordiston, lausajne estas rano en mia bideo."

[Frankie Crisp]

I applied for a job in Currys once but my poor Latin let me down.

[simonworden]

I speak rudimentary Vietnamese these days, enough to order and go through the typical 5-10 questions an old person has when meeting a foreigner. That might sound strange but most of my in depth Vietnamese conversations comes along when I head off on the bike into the sticks and the little front yard coffee shop owners want to have a chat. 

[Ronnie]

13 hours ago, Fog Dude said:

I met some Esperanto speakers at the London Language Show back in November and they were certainly an interesting bunch.

I may have been one of them, since I worked all three days. There were usually more people working at any one time than were needed, so I was AWOL a fair bit helping out at the Teach Yourself stand or perusing the floor. You'll know if you met me if you recall somebody looking like The Gruffalo (or La Krubalo, as we call him).

13 hours ago, Carbomb said:

The one phrase of Esperanto I remember I owe to Red Dwarf: "Bonvolu alsendi la pordiston, lausajne estas rano en mia bideo."

Nearly: you're missing a couple of accents. That laŭŝajne is a bizarre choice anyway. I only got 106 hits for it in a corpus check; the standard verŝajne reached the maximum 1000 hits in seconds. There's a bit of bad Esperanto dotted around Red Dwarf quite regularly: the word nivelo (level) appears fairly often stencilled onto a wall. Unfortunately, it's the wrong word, a natural result of somebody receiving a list of contextless words and just returning a single translation instead of having the sense to ask for clarification about the sense or providing alternatives to choose from. (It's supposed to be 'level' as in 'floor' or 'storey'. Unfortunately, the translators provided the word to mean 'a grade', 'a position on a scale'.) There could've been a lot more Esperanto in the series but the translators didn't truncate anything, so their responses weren't usable. Where the English might be a new term like 'holomatter', the translators parsed the response literally, with answers along the lines of 'solid-light projection technology'.   

[Wild_Skelliger]

Lithuanian (mother togue), fluent in English, the basics of Russian and Lithuanian sign language