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Post by vaiche on May 14, 2014 18:09:05 GMT
Are you guys interested in, and/or learning any other languages besides Japanese? If so, what language(s), and why?
Personally I love languages! I love how they work and sound. I LOVE grammar, even though most people hate it.
In Sweden, we don't really need to learn another language. Swedish is our native language, but, we are immersed into the English language from birth. Most of our TV shows are American/English, and they're never dubbed. Games are almost always defaulted to English as well. They teach English to us in school from grade 3 as an obligatory subject. Most children can read, write, and speak English natively by 6-7th grade. (Most people have that stereotypical Swedish accent though xD)
You could say that we are natively bi-lingual here, which is great! I never learned English grammar in school, so everything English I write and say with my gut feeling.
Nobody here likes languages. They aren't interested. They already know 2, so why bother with more of them. I used to think like that. Then I found Japanese, and after that I loved languages. I think about it all the time...
Got a little off topic, but uh well yeah xD
I'm obviously interested by all languages, but the ones I'm currently having focus on are Japanese, Spanish and Esperanto.
This fall, I'm probably going to a linguistics High School. It's international, and all in English. It has the choice of learning 2 languages + obligatory Latin.
Got off topic again, damnit...
Edit: High School in Sweden is 10th grade to 13th grade. Felt like I had to clarify that.
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Post by chocopie on May 16, 2014 18:10:29 GMT
I think it would be nice to know more languages, but practically speaking I know I don't have the motivation/reason to stick to learning another language. I studied French, Spanish and Latin when I was at school and based on that I would say that I don't enjoy learning languages in general. I preferred science.
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Post by 魔 on May 17, 2014 13:06:58 GMT
Maybe a programming language, I doubt I'll learn another foreign one.
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Post by Bokusenou on May 18, 2014 0:39:52 GMT
Great thread idea vaiche! It's pretty cool that people pretty much learn English by immersion in Sweden! Where I am in the US, people usually study French or Spanish in high school and then forget it. It's interesting, when I studied at a language school in Japan, all the people from the US & UK didn't know any other languages besides some Japanese, while most of the non-native English speakers from Europe or Korea spoke good to fluent English. I toy with Portuguese somewhat, since I have relatives which speak it, but I want to get other things done before I really focus on it, getting Portuguese learning materials in Japanese, etc. If programing languages count I know a few...
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Post by Jade on May 19, 2014 7:10:18 GMT
I used to study Chinese and French a few years ago, but I barely remember either of them outside of 我不喜欢咖啡 (I don't like coffee) and je ne parle pas français (I don't speak French).
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Post by Underlig on May 29, 2014 13:24:07 GMT
I'm also from Sweden, and I like this subject very much:) Thanks for bringing it up! Anyway, we also have to study a third language in school(spanish for me), spanish is kind of the reason I love languages. I'm currently trying to improve my English(by reading 19th century books with uncommon words xD) and learning, Spanish, Jpanese and German. I love Spanish because I know English(and it sounds awesome of course), I can learn words or guess because I know the word in theother language, like when I read Divergent, "Amity" was easy to get the gist of because of the spanish amistad/amigo German is the same, I explore how Swedish has changed and I get this awesome feeling every time are the same or alike(which is often)xD Japanese is the odd one, it's my experiment, I love seeing how you describe things differently in different languages and as JP isn't IE, it's really interesting It's the bestfeeling ever when you hear that something's wrong in your L2, I mean, when you reach the level where you can self-correct(which I sometimes can with Spanish and Japanese(and English)) P.S. I'm sorry if I spelled something wrong here, it wasn't because I can't spell but because I'm using my dad's computer and its keyboard is really bad :/
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Post by MidoriAbby on May 30, 2014 0:22:46 GMT
Hi guys! Sorry to traipse in here after such a long hiatus and post randomly, but I didn't quite know how to make my reappearance on Gaiwa gracefully so I just decided hey, let's jump back in. For those of you who don't know, I'm a regular member now as high school is more challenging than I originally thought and it's best to leave the work to the capable hands of our more experienced and time-management savvy staff members. Anyway, I'm still here and I still love this place.
So other languages! Excellent thread idea. I think I've talked before about studying Chinese and Korean and Spanish along with a few others, but as of this year I've started a new language journey; Greek. One of my new best friends in school is from Greece, and he has been nice enough to teach me, so I decided to begin self studying as well. It's probably now my second favorite language besides Japanese. Interesting things I've noticed: -There are a bunch of tenses and grammar that English simply does not have. -The capital letters are very similar to English but the lowercase ones tend to go all over the place -Pronunciation sounds very far from romance languages, extremely different from Latin, in fact when I first heard it I thought it sounded like a mix of Turkish, German and Spanish. -It has politeness levels just like Japanese does, that incorporate themselves into the verb tenses. I'm starting to think English is the odd one out, as most of the languages I study do have politeness tenses built into grammar and English just... doesn't. I wonder if it ever did and it just disappeared over time, or if it was originally an outlier in that area.
Anyone else have any experience with Greek? If so let me know.
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Post by chocopie on May 30, 2014 15:20:19 GMT
I'm starting to think English is the odd one out, as most of the languages I study do have politeness tenses built into grammar and English just... doesn't. I wonder if it ever did and it just disappeared over time, or if it was originally an outlier in that area. This is just my personal view, but I think it probably has to do with French being the language of the court for a few centuries after William the Conqueror invaded in 1066.
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Post by MidoriAbby on Jun 10, 2014 20:16:46 GMT
chocopiethis is an interesting way of looking at it; since I don't know much about that part of history I'll look into it to see if I can learn more.
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Jacob
Junior Member
練習して、がんばりますね!
Posts: 95
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Post by Jacob on Jan 14, 2015 4:16:26 GMT
Hablo español en mi escuela, pero... Ya so I just reverted back to English. I have a German exchange student for the next 5 months so I may pick up some German since they live in my house lol. But what I have learned so far is supppeeeeerrrr hard to pronounce and remember to me.
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Post by Princess on Jan 26, 2015 4:34:24 GMT
My list (possibly in order): Japanese first, and I'll mainly focus on that for a long while because it's where I plan on actually living for awhile, then Korean, probably Chinese, then Greek POSSIBLY I really like non roman alphabet languages, minus arabic because I swear my eyes are not good enough to differentiate all those squiggles.... Learning Chinese after Japanese would make more sense but I love the circles in Korean and how even though it's so close to China and Japan, it's so unique! Greek is literally just so foreign to me it makes me interested in it. I studied two years of Spanish in high school and I don't want to waste it either....all that and I can't even study for my Japanese tests properly haha
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Post by Jembru on Jan 28, 2015 1:27:27 GMT
I'm probably going to pick up German again next year. Even if my Japanese still isn't where I want it to be by then, I think it should be clear enough in my mind that I won't mix up Japanese and German (the reason I had to quit Japanese when I started German, and later quit German for Japanese). There are a lot of things I know now that I wish I'd known when I was starting out in Japanese, so it would be nice to start over with German to see if I really could have learnt Japanese in less time. Of course, German apparently takes around 2 years less than Japanese, for English speakers to master.. so who knows, maybe I could get it nailed in just 3 or 4 years!
After that, I would learn Indonesian. It's the native language of one of my closest friends, and she told me it has such low vocabulary that even native speakers often use mime to clarify meaning. I heard her speak it to an Indonesian friend and it was very pretty. It sounded a little like Spanish to my ears. She's already helped me a lot with my Japanese, so maybe she'd be willing to do the same for me with Indonesian. I can only ask! German first though...
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