|
 |
Greetings from Germany | ||
Tags: Germany | Introduction | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Members profiles |  | |
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4835 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes  Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 1 of 4 31 August 2011 at 10:22pm | IP Logged |
|
Hello everybody,
I've recently joined this forum and just wanted to introduce myself. I am a 27-year-old student from Germany who has a great interest in languages. Everything started in grammar school ("Gymnasium") where I learned English, Latin and French. I also studied Italian and Swedish on my own when I was still in my teens and I also taught myself the basics of Ancient Greek. Then I went to university where I took two semesters of Swedish apart from my major subjects Musicology and Philosophy. About two years ago, I rediscovered my love for languages when I started to teach myself Dutch. I didn't get very far, because it was too close to my native language German. I could always understand the gist of what was being said in the textbook so I never really learned vocabulary, which resulted in a lacking ability of speaking. After my love of languages had been rekindled I continued by teaching myself a little bit of Scottish Gaelic - a wonderful, but rather complicated language. Especially the pronunciation and the lenition rules are really hard. At that time - about a year ago - I discovered Professor Arguelles' language videos on Youtube and was really fascinated, especially by the Icelandic language video. Shortly after that, I discovered this language forum which I visited more and more often. I really enjoyed the forum's atmosphere with its various different characters and the seriousness with which discussions were held here. In June this year, when I was in the middle of my final exams for university, I started with my study of Icelandic, the first language since grammar school which I really tried to learn by heart. I must say, I'm doing pretty well after only two months of studying. Even the highly inflected grammar - which is by far worse than Latin or Ancient Greek because the nouns and verbs are so irregular - does not prevent me from getting a good foothold in this by all means very interesting language. And now, I'm new to this forum and looking forward to many interesting discussions and finding new friends all over the world. Hope to see you soon! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| LebensForm Senior Member Austria Joined 5041 days ago 212 posts - 264 votes Studies: German | Message 3 of 4 01 September 2011 at 7:42am | IP Logged |
|
Ja, herzlich willkommen!
Hope you find this site useful. I do. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4819 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 4 of 4 21 September 2011 at 7:53pm | IP Logged |
|
Hello Josquin,
I started studying Dutch on my own many years ago, around the age of 20 (cherchez la femme ... :-) ), and although I could read it to a reasonable extent, the opportunities for hearing it were not as good as today, so I never really learned to understand the spoken language or speak it very well. Much later on, I started studying German, and have continued doing so, off and on, until now, so my knowledge of German is much better than my knowledge of Dutch ever was (or is likely to be). However, now when looking at some written Dutch, I will often recognise words that remind me of German, and usually get a good idea of the meaning. I had always assumed that Germans would find learning Dutch quite easy, but I see from your experience that this is not necessarily the case! Thanks for this insight. I suppose you have almost a similar problem to that of Scandinavians learning the languages of the other Scandinavian countries, which has been discussed elsewhere in this forum (even if Dutch and German are not as close as the Scandinavian languages are to each other). I often wonder how the Germans who live very close to the Dutch border get on - are they likely to understand Dutch better than the average German? 1 person has voted this message useful |
If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
