How many languages can you speak?

[cuchulain]

Really just English. As mentioned elsewhere, I studied French and Spanish in school. Took Spanish in college as well. Had a Spanish girlfriend for a bit and I could get by with remedial Spanish at the time. But have forgotten everything but the girl since then.

Was in France in May of 2007 and I tried to remember my Elementary School French. Wanted desperately to let a waitress know that she had the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. Could not remember what to say . . . reverted to sign language and it quickly went downhill from there. She started out smiling and seemingly happy about the attention, but my snap-shot sign spooked her.

:>(

Have always wanted to learn Irish. That's my first project in my next life.

[aquablue]

English, ASL (American Sign Language), and Spanish in order of proficiency.

[Eric]

You can learn Irish by buying the Teach Yourself Irish book with two CDs. If you buy the old Teach Yourself (book only) second hand, you can supplement the course for the bits that aren't well explained in the newer course.

But putting it off till your next life might be a foolish enterprise. In the life after death, who says we'll need verbal language to communicate? However, if you believe in reïncarnation, you'd better negotiate a place in the Gaeltacht, as you might be reïncarnted as a frog in Patagonia (where only Welsh would be of any use) or the President of the Royal Society.

[cuchulain]

Originally Posted by Eric

You can learn Irish by buying the Teach Yourself Irish book with two CDs. If you buy the old Teach Yourself (book only) second hand, you can supplement the course for the bits that aren't well explained in the newer course.

But putting it off till your next life might be a foolish enterprise. In the life after death, who says we'll need verbal language to communicate? However, if you believe in reïncarnation, you'd better negotiate a place in the Gaeltacht, as you might be reïncarnted as a frog in Patagonia (where only Welsh would be of any use) or the President of the Royal Society.

Actually, I don't really believe in reincarnation. But I'm hoping one of my past lives changes my mind.

But, you're right. I should get a CD or DVD course and just learn it.

[Eric]

You could always learn Georgian over the weekend...

[Ellen]

English, Germany and French should be enough to hold a conversation.

[Eric]

Yes, Ellen, English, German and French will get you a long way. You could spend a whole lifetime reading poetry, novels and newspaper in just those three languages.

I found this on the net about Georgian and other languages in the Caucasus:

New York Times
August 24, 2008
Barriers That Are Steep and Linguistic
By ELLEN BARRY

Two weeks ago, when Georgian troops began shelling Tskhinvali, Eduard Kabulov couldn’t stop thinking about the trouble he had taken to learn Georgian: its base-20 counting system; its ridiculous consonant clusters (“gvprtskvni”); its diabolical irregular verbs.

Mr. Kabulov, who is 22, had grown up in a valley where South Ossetians have coexisted with Georgians for many centuries, but that didn’t make it any easier. Ossetians speak a language related to Farsi; Georgians speak a language whose closest relative, some linguists say, is Basque. Mr. Kabulov’s friends were so hostile to the Georgians and their language that he kept his studies secret. He sounded bitter, talking about it.

He hasn’t opened a textbook since Aug. 8.

The languages of the Caucasus explain much about the current conflict.

Some 40 indigenous tongues are spoken in the region — more than any other spot in the world aside from Papua New Guinea and parts of the Amazon, where the jungles are so thick that small tribes rarely encounter one another. In the Caucasus, mountains serve the same purpose, offering small ethnicities a natural refuge against more powerful or aggressive ones.

As a result, there is a dense collection of ethnic groups, the kind of arrangement that was common before the Greek and Roman empires swept through the plains of Europe and Asia, shaping ethnic patchworks into states and nations, said Johanna Nichols, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley.

Medieval scholars concluded that the Caucasian groups scattered when God wrecked the Tower of Babel. Since then, generations of linguists have made their painstaking way into the mountains to document such tongues as Svan, Ubykh, Udi, Tsova-Tush and Bzyb.

As the field gradually explained how the world’s languages shade into one another, the Caucasus remained “a residual problem area,” said William J. Poser, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the University of British Columbia. Though the Caucasian languages fall into three main groups, so far none has been decisively linked to any other language on earth.

The riddle of the Caucasian ethnicities became suddenly relevant this summer, when local hatreds in South Ossetia opened up into the biggest rift between Russia and the West since the cold war. The Georgians and the Ossetians both claim to have arrived first in South Ossetia — a land that Georgians sometimes call “Samachablo,” that is, the property of the Georgian Machabeli family, according to a report on the conflict by the International Crisis Group. Ossetians regard the valley around Tskhinvali as their homeland; Georgians disparage them as “guests.”

A war between the two groups in the early 1990s divided them almost surgically. Young Georgians stopped learning Russian, the lingua franca for the entire region in Soviet days; young Ossetians did not learn Georgian. Older people, who spoke both, pretended not to.

Magdalena Frichova, who monitored the conflict in South Ossetia for 10 years for the crisis group, recalled watching local officials wait, poker-faced, for a translator even when it was obvious that they understood. Over time, people began to struggle with languages they once spoke fluently.

“They consciously make an effort to forget it,” she said. “I’ve heard that over and over again. You can actively make choices of what you hear and what you remember.”

Of course, there was never anything neutral about languages in the Caucasus, where great powers have tried again and again to expand their reach.

The Soviets so discouraged work on small linguistic groups that in the 1960s, the first complete transcription of Svan — work that took at least 10 years to complete — simply went unpublished, said Anna V. Dybo, a Caucasian expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

This dynamic continued after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and she recalled her horror at hearing Dzhokhar Dudayev, the Chechen leader, cite work from her institute in support of Chechen independence, during the build up to a bloody war with Russia.

“At those moments, you feel like the inventor of the atom bomb,” Dr. Dybo said. She was so wary of her work being used politically, she added with some amusement, that she learned to write in intentionally abstruse language, so that “no one knows what I’m talking about.”

That feeling of political risk has returned in post-Soviet Georgia, say researchers who document minor languages there. The resistance to their work may be couched in scholarly courtesy, but behind it lies a muscular assertion.

“A language is the prime indication of the existence of a people,” said George Hewitt, a University of London scholar of Abkhaz, the language spoken in Abkhazia, another separatist region of Georgia. “If a language dies, the culture dies as well. The people will become assimilated.”

One more question to be answered in the calm that comes after the end of fighting: Dr. Dybo has yet to hear from a library in Tskhinvali, which held a magisterial lexicon of the Ossetian language that was compiled over the course of many years. It’s a single manuscript, never transferred to a computer.

She is not sure, she said, but she thinks it burned up on Aug. 8.

[Stewart]

I guess I should chime in and confess my woeful inadequacies of language. I did four years of German at school, returning to it for a twenty week evening class a few years back. There was also a year of French at school, with a module at college to pad out the timetable.

I struggle to understand French and always will. German I can do okay in when I'm learning it, but once stopped I don't practice and the whole vocabulary goes out the Fenster.

My father spent some time in Japan a number of years back and I tried to pick up some of that via his Linguaphone tapes. Other than konichi wa and a few other choice mutterings, it never stuck. When I was twenty I worked on a ship with a Polish crew and most evenings were spent downing vodka and playing darts: I learnt the numbers to shout back scores, but didn't really learn much beyond that. Every time I would ask, they were like, "Why you want to know? You not need to know Polish." I can still remember the numbers clearly, and can say them, but can't write them down.

I had a shot at Russian too, about five years back. The Cyrillic alphabet I found extremly easy to learn and the phonetic nature of the alphabet was a breeze. But when it got actually learning words, the way the words decline just lost me: The whole you/You/He/She/They/It things.

[Eric]

Stewart, don't be too woeful. My own school experience is little different to yours. I too learnt the Cyrillic alphabet pretty easily, at about the age of twelve, initially. But alas, I was in the B stream and only the A stream would go on to do Russian. So 40-odd years later I'm still struggling with Russian.

But as I've said in other postings, as there are four skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) you don't actually have to be good at all four. One extreme example in my own case is that I've translated a whole book out of Danish but I can't, for the life of me, understand that language when spoken. My understanding of a written text comes from my knowledge of Swedish with some extra vocabulary work.

As I'm interested in literature and newspaper stories, I find a reading knowledge far more useful than a spoken one. With this Georgian crisis, it's handy to be able to read what other nations have to say, not just the NYT, Guardian, Times and Washington Post.

Another thing is that learning one language makes the next in the same language group easier to learn, as there are things common to different languages. With Russian, Polish and the other Slav languages, I don't find the endings on the nouns that bad; it's their special verb system which drives you barmy. The endings on the nouns fit with prepositions. But the verbal thing doesn't quite correspond to anything we have in English.

It's more or less the same for all Slav languages. But this does mean that one language helps the next. I read Polish reasonably well, am brushing up my Russian. This means, curiously, that I can read Ukrainian at a lower intermediate level - because Ukrainian, both linguistically and geographically, is between Russian and Polish (as is Belarusian, for that matter). But I've never had one lesson in Ukrainian in my life!

Poles don't want Brits to learn Polish. Brits are right chumps, because they have no secret language to speak among themselves. Unless a Brit speaks Geordie or Welsh, every Tomasz, Ryszard and Henryk can understand everything. But the Poles have their "secret" language, which can be used to mock Brits behind their backs.

If you want a challenge, why not learn Georgian? But not over the weekend, as I joked earlier. The alphabet thing does slow you down a lot with any language not written in our alphabet. I know the Cyrillic one pretty well now. But with Georgian, you have to spell the word like a five-year-old - and then you still don't know what it means. But it is at least an alphabet, unlike the Chinese system of ideograms.

[miercuri]

English is the only language that I master at a near native level and I will probably never forget it. However, in spite of my efforts in the last couple of years, my French is improving slowly and unless I practice constantly I tend to forget even elementary things. I can read in French without having to consult the dictionary very often, but I can never seem to find my words when I try to speak it and I can hardly understand it when spoken by natives, unless they speak really slowly.

Apart from English and French, I studied German for five years as a child but as soon as I gave up on it (I changed schools) I forgot almost everything. I still remember a number of words and the grammar doesn't seem completely unfamiliar but overall my knowledge is pretty useless.

I am a quarter Greek and my grandaunts and grandfather tried to teach me when I was really young, but I didn't really pay attention and now I regret it. I hardly know the alphabet and probably no more than twenty words. No one in family speaks Greek anymore.

As a Romanian I can understand Spanish fairly well. I have never taken classes of Spanish but I would like to. It seems I would be able to pick it up easily. I also understand some Italian but I am not very fond of how it sounds and most likely I am not going to improve.

In college I just started studying Russian and I am very excited about it. I also have in mind to take some Catalan or Portuguese classes in the next few years and maybe try to pick up some Hungarian from my native speaker friends.

[Eric]

Miercuri says:

I can read in French without having to consult the dictionary very often, but I can never seem to find my words when I try to speak it and I can hardly understand it when spoken by natives, unless they speak really slowly.

I sympathise. I've translated two 300-page novels from Estonian, but am always wary of speaking it - partly because I often don't understand what they say back. Older people enunciate very well. But younger people mumble terribly. Otherwise, I am pretty good at speaking two languages: Swedish and Dutch. There, I can more or less cope with most accents. And I can read several more - with or without a dictionary.

Because languages come in groups or families, Miercuri will have a big advantage over native-speakers of English or German when learning Catalan, Portuguese or Spanish.

[Max Cairnduff]

As well as English, I speak Italian fairly well and intermediate Spanish. I speak and communicate better than I read, though I can read them (but I fare far better on technical texts than literature).

I can't speak French, I can read it at a basic level but that's it, which is rather a shame given how much French literature I want to read in the original. But there you go, work doesn't permit time for study, so that's likely to be a retirement project many years from now.

[Eric]

The dilemma is: time and priorities. As English is my mother-tongue, I can theoretically swan all over the world without picking up anything of anyone else's language. But I am satisfied that I have insights. While I am ashamed at the number of languages I have merely dabbled in, the few I've learnt well are satisfying.

Language learning is a slog. I enjoy it in bouts, but I do tail off. And building up vocabulary varies from topic to topic, as Max suggests. If you can read a novel in, say, German, you can't necessarily read a contract, and vice-versa. Specialist vocabulary is one thing, all-round everyday vocabulary, mixed in with some specialist words, is another. And language evolves over time. You have to be sensitive to regional and archaïc features when reading literature. But a management report written within the past five years will have a fairly standardised vocabulary (assuming the manager writing it is literate and consistent!).

[Guillaume Barkero]

Spanish (born-living in Costa Rica), English (bilingual background), Italian, French and a little bit of Catalan. I can say, with the utmost honesty, that if you learn French and Spanish, the rest of the Romance languages is not so impossible...

[Wandering Aengus]

English and Italian well, Spanish somewhat, French very little (but learning). I'm also in the very beginning phase of learning Mandarin Chinese.

[rabbitfast]

English is not my mother tongue but it's the only one I'll confess to (I'm staring to lose the mother tongue...or tongues????...to my eternal shame). My French is woefully inadequate...they really don't teach it well at the highschool level here (unless you're in French immersion)...I do hope to eventually bring it up to a more decent level...I can read simple texts and can understand when people speak slowly...I have a smattering of Spanish and am able to understand some Italian (surprise, surprise).

[Eric]

There's an interesting article today on the BBC website about the complexities of the Belgian language situation:

BBC NEWS | Europe | Belgian ethnic rift baffles immigrants

[fausto]

Belgium, sad state of affairs.

[Eric]

Sad, maybe, but very interesting. It seems to ironic that Belgium is one of the nearest neighbours to Britain, which is a country where the domination of world language English is so powerful that no other language (except, maybe Polish...) really counts.

As I'm interested in languages, Belgium and Finland fascinate me. Belgium, with its two national languages and one regional one (German), its multiplicity of dialects of Dutch and French, and the fact that language quarrels are serious things, is something that Brits should learn about.

[Betelgeused]

Unfortunately, only my mother tongue.

But I'm always trying to improve my English. I can read and understand it easily, but when it comes to writing I have some difficulties.

I understand a little French and Spanish, the last due to similarities with Portuguese and its common usage here too.

I had a few Esperanto lessons, but abandoned it. Didn't like it.