Who wants cheese?

[apple_pathways]

The POLL to accompany my post about languages. As usual, I cut myself off because I ran out of time, and not necessarily because I finished asking everything I wanted. So take note: there may be follow-up questions! XD

For the purposes of this poll, we will use the following definitions from Wikipedia, that bastion of academic rigor and accuracy: (Also see this article on multilingualism.)

Language fluency is used informally to denote broadly a high level of language proficiency, most typically foreign language or another learned language, and more narrowly to denote fluid language use, as opposed to slow, halting use.

Conversational means able to carry on a casual conversation, but not necessarily without halts in speech, or gaps in vocabulary.

Skip any questions that don't apply. Pretend that it's not weird I spend so much of my free time coming up with meaningless LJ Polls written in unneccessarily-academic language.


[Poll #1706752]

Please leave any details you're willing to share about your language abilities and experiences learning foreign languages in the comments below!

Comments

[jesterjoker.livejournal.com]

That's a lot of people who haven't replied in comments! I'm curious.

In a friendly context :D I like to say I can hold a conversation in Spanish. If it revolves around subjects I'm a nerd for and have picked up words by reading the Spanish newspaper El Pais, I can ramble about ghosts and monsters and scifi and some traces of technology.

I've watched tons of anime so I was exposed to lots of Japanese from damn near the very beginning. I like to watch them in the original language unless the dubs are good (if the series is good or not all that long, I'll watch both!) and I've been working on actually /remembering/ some of the words I find. Seems important, you know?

I listen to lots of gothic and symphonic German music, so I've picked up a bit of it.

I want to learn more and more languages, but it isn't always easy to find the time. When I find scifi/fantasy/techno/metal in the languages I have a slight idea of I try to keep my hand in. I watch so many Hong Kong movies Cantonese is starting to sound extremely cool to my ears, too. :D

[katyscarlett76.livejournal.com]

I'm English and did French and Spanish at school. I also did beginners German but can't say much beyond "my name is.." and "I am 15 years old"(which is helpful when I am a lot more than 15 these days lol!) I have real life friends who are both French and Spanish so that helps me keep them up a little as I sometimes have to help translate for them if they don't quite understand something and I sometimes just hear them speaking. I can read basic things in both languages but would find writing hard. I have my own hang-ups about actually speaking but that's mainly because I think I sound stupid in French lol!

When I was at school and maybe particularly in my school it was considered very uncool to do well at languages, even the real swotty kids didn't boast about it. I did well in my exams but didn't keep it up and I wish I had. I have one real life friend who is Finnish, lived in Sweden and now in the US, she speaks Finnish, Swedish, English and German fluently and at one point was learning Spanish. I was always fascinated how she could switch easily between them! My BFF is married to a Palestinian and they are bringing their kids up to be fluent in both English and Arabic which I think is amazing! To hear English and Arabic words coming out of a two year old is fabulous!

[sabriel75.livejournal.com]

My parents were religious fanatics. My father began teaching me Greek at 12 and by the time I moved out at 16, I was expected to read out of the Greek New Testament on my own. Don't ask me about Greek now. I've repressed it and can only recall it for cross word puzzles.

Also, I was exposed to many, many different languages because missionaries would often stay in our home and they usually loved me. As a child, since I had a fascination with learning and asked loads of questions, adults usually found my presence tolerable. My mom used to say I was five going on thirty.

[alt_universe_me.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty exhausted right now, so I'm not going to be able to comment a lot. My B.A. is in Spanish, and I've also taken French, German, and Russian at the university level, although I never finished the Russian course for personal reasons at the time. The only language other than English and Spanish that I would say I might be able to get by with is French--in fact, my reading comprehension in French is fairly decent. I forget--did you comment on my poll about Doctor Who and languages a while back? If not, it's definitely worth a look for the interesting answers people gave. If you want, I'll dig up the link for you later.

Good night :)

[jobey-in-error.livejournal.com]

I'm so crappy at any languages I've "studied" that I don't even want to get into it because it'll just depress me.

I will say that, while I adore Latin, taking it in high school in lieu of a modern language was a huge mistake.

All I remember from a year and a half of Arabic is the alphabet. (Which is TOTALLY BEAUTIFUL.)

Current project is Spanish. SO finally made me buy $50 work of materials to study with, said it'll help me stick with it. So far he's right. It also helps that I'm actually interacting with Spanish speakers a lot these days now that I've moved to work in a school in Southern California. There was never any incentive except intellectual fun before, and apparently I'm not as pure Ravenclaw as I thought. ;)

[inkdancer.livejournal.com]

As I said earlier, I am fluent in German (by the above definition- I still feel that I have much to learn) and conversational in French. I want to learn more, particularly either Mandarin or Japanese. I know a few words in Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian, and Russian, but those are mostly for fun and would not get me even as far as the nearest restroom or train station in any of the countries that speak them. (Knowing the Spanish word for "bubble" and how to say "slower" in Italian will not be much use to me, I feel.)

[evilhippo.livejournal.com]

I wanted to claim "conversational" in a couple of other languages, but there are only a couple of contexts I can work them out in... Spanish in general conversation, though I don't know any of the grammar and thus can't speak it, and Japanese in... anime? Actually, it's kind of a shame I let my study of Japanese fall off. I used to work with a fan-subbing group, and in editing all the English scripts straight out of translation I ended up with a really interesting relationship to the language. I couldn't (and still can't) read a word of it, but I know a lot of the grammar and a lot of nuances of meaning for really random things, to the point that I could correct translations if they didn't look right. (I love, love, love working with things in translation, though there were a few lazy translators I often wanted to strangle, and an equal number that probably hated me because I'd come to them with really weird nitpicky questions.)

It actually makes me sad that it's so easy to get by on English in the world. I mean, people in Paris automatically switch to English as soon as they notice your accent (and I think it's probably the same in a lot of other big/touristy cities), so there's not even enough of an impetus to learn other languages if you're travelling. In fact, one of my friends at work was telling me about her trip to Hong Kong, and how she got away with never having to deal with anything in Chinese and ate nothing but American food the entire time (I forgave her for that only because she was there as part of her job and couldn't afford to get herself sick). I mean, Hong Kong is especially English-oriented since it only recently was given back to China, but still... everyone hates American tourists, yet they refuse to make our lives more difficult!

[voltaires-vice.livejournal.com]

I was part of the first generation of Dutch kids to learn English at age eleven, in the second-to-last year of elementary school.

In secondary school I did Dutch, English, German, French, Latin and Greek, being already fluent in the first three.

I grew up five minutes from the Dutch/German border, so German came easily.

[ladylovelace.livejournal.com]

Ahem ::rubs hands::

When we were in primary school, German was required, because a second language was required at the time in all state schools. When I was about 10-11, I was fluent in German, but they changed over to Japanese, I never used the German again, and now I sort of... remember bits of it. I can read it, basically, and understand what people are talking about, but I wouldn't trust myself to actually formulate a sentence.

In highschool I took French for... well, one and a half years, and then I tried to get into the class in the third year, but they didn't run one because no-one else wanted to learn it, because the Italian teacher was a complete idiot and let the class run riot. I had to take Italian for six months and the little of it that I speak comes straight from Latin. French I can just about muddle through, provided I am in Paris (because the regional differences are a very real language barrier).

Latin I can read. That was all by myself. I can't see me going much further with it, and I'm far from conversant in it (who would I even converse with?).

I can read Swedish, too. Mostly. I intend to become completely fluent in it. It's a pretty language. I'd actually take classes, if I could find one (sadly the Swedish population of Australia is itty bitty, since they've never fled their country en masse).

Does Old English count as a separate language? Can I count it? (Also self-taught because dammit Beowulf is prettier in the original).

All that said, I suspect that they don't make you take another language in America as a child? It's always seemed natural to me to have other languages floating around (if I went out to the shopping centre now, I would expect a solid 25% of the people there with me to have a different first language than I do), but I suppose there are places in America that are recent-immigrant-heavy and place that just aren't (here there kind of isn't. There are recent immigrants everywhere - my mum included).

[roh-wyn.livejournal.com]

I don't know if my poll answers need a bit of explanation, but you get one anyway. ;)

I'm not a native English speaker. In fact, I didn't speak any English till about age 5 when I started school. But tbh, I've been speaking English pretty much since that time, and arguably I speak it better than any of the other languages I speak.

I learned my native tongue via my parents (imagine that), but I also learned a couple of other Indian languages by cultural osmosis (movies, mostly). I grew up in Canada in an officially bilingual city, so I learned French in school, and later, we lived in Francophone Africa, so more cultural osmosis/immersion, lol.

At college, I learned German (because of a boy...isn't that always the reason, lol?), and I really enjoyed that. Then, because I wasn't quite done with the whole language thing, I also learned Italian. I'm not fluent by any means, however.

Finally, thanks to law school, I have a working knowledge of Latin, although again, nowhere near fluency.

[bwblack.livejournal.com]

I would like very much to speak more languages but pick up languages that I hear pretty quickly. I understand what people are saying way before I can speak and I usually can read pretty early on as well.

I am currently taking Norwegian lessons in my free time and want desperately to learn Finnish despite my Finn friend telling me it's pretty much a lost cause.

My mom grew up hearing it. She wanted desperately to learn as a child,, as well, but her grandmother gave up trying to teach her because she couldn't make the ai sound which was the very first sound in the primer.

I used to try to persuade my grandfather to speak to me because I pick up spoken language quickly but the man only said 15 words on any given day in English and trying to get him to say extra was hard... so days of the week, numbers, and food items was pretty much as far as I got. Desperate, though, desperate.

[stick-poker.livejournal.com]

Bah, I'm not just British but English, and thus never really needed to learn any other languages. Like a lot of English people I feel slightly guitly about it but not enough to do anything serious about it. I had to learn French at school, to what would probably be a converstational level, but I've not had reason to use it since. And I've made efforts to learn some basics of other languages (I particularly like other alphabets) when going abroad but, you know, not so they've stuck, not least because I then don't ever really hear them again.