|
 |
What is on your radar? | ||
Tags: Choosing a Language | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| LeadZeppelin Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5022 days ago 59 posts - 85 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 17 of 67 09 November 2013 at 5:10am | IP Logged | |||||
|
I must be the only person on this site who doesn't suffer from wanderlust. :)
Portuguese - I want to live and travel through all of Latin America soon. I'm learning Spanish now and Portuguese is on my horizon. Pretty simple for me. :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4359 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 18 of 67 09 November 2013 at 8:06am | IP Logged | |||||
|
Right now I'm actively learning Italian. I'd like to learn the languages of the Mediterranean:
review French learn Hebrew Turkish Arabic Spanish Portugese and a couple more, that is German and Russian. I also keep coming back to latin, but I don't see that happening to be honest. One never knows! I keep studying Greek as well. I have a good mind one day to grab Athenaze and read it from cover to cover. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 19 of 67 09 November 2013 at 9:30am | IP Logged | |||||
Haha. The first sentence is a joke. But that's also part of my reason for learning Swedish, actually. I should do the same with Finnish since some of those bands started my path to musical development. One certain Finnish band forum gave me long-term relationships and friends all over the world. (though nothing to do with Finnish). So one day I should learn Finnish. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7206 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 20 of 67 09 November 2013 at 9:50am | IP Logged | |||||
|
German - There are several Great Books originally written in German. Librivox.org already has a lot of them.
Russian - Has many great novelists, but harder than German for an Anglophone. Greek and Latin if life expectancy is increased by 30 years or more. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4252 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 21 of 67 09 November 2013 at 10:01am | IP Logged | |||||
|
I guess that I'll list the ones at the top of my list:
German - I took it for six years in middle school and high school. At one point, I was pretty good at it. It is probably the foreign language that I would probably be able to pronounce the best as well. I'm pretty sure that it will be the next language that I start working on. French - I've always wanted to learn this language, even when I was in middle and high school. Unfortunately, it's never anything that I've gotten around to... German was the only language offered in middle school, when I got to college Spanish seemed to be the most useful, and so I never really had the chance to study it. I've dabbled in it a bit, but not even too seriously with Rosetta Stone. Italian - I lived in Italy for a while and I should pick up the language again. Chinese - I think that Chinese is a practical language considering how the country is an up-and-coming economic powerhouse. Hebrew/New Testament Greek - For Bible study. Arabic - Mostly to give me an edge as a blogger. There are certain "news makers" who will say one thing to the English-speaking world and will say something else in Arabic. That will keep me busy for a while :-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4773 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 22 of 67 09 November 2013 at 10:21am | IP Logged | |||||
|
Like tarvos I want to learn pretty much every language, so I'll limit this list to just the languages for which I already have some resources (at least, more than just unaccompanied audio courses and bookmarked links). Right now I'm studying for JLPT N1, so most of my non-Japanese languages are in standby mode and taking up new ones is out of the question (or supposed to be... I just couldn't resist the temptation of Latin), but here are some of the languages I'm prepared to take up once I'm satisfied with my Japanese (which may or may not be "never").
Mandarin: The more I learn about and become fascinated with the Sinitic languages, the more I develop the kind of dismissive attitude towards Modern Standard Mandarin that Chung has towards Russian and Serpent towards French. Unfortunately, Mandarin appears pretty much unavoidable if I intend to study any other Sinitic language without having a direct access to native speakers. Besides, I take the train between Moscow and Saint Petersburg quite frequently and I nearly always travel together with tourist groups from China, and it feels increasingly awkward to be able to recognize their Beijingese r's and h's while being unable to engage them in conversation. Resources: Pimsleur, a pronunciation and character guide companion to Pimsleur I, an old Chinese-Russian dictionary. Cantonese: Probably the only somewhat realistic option if I were to try to properly learn a Sinitic language without the intermediation of Mandarin. Besides, I find Hong Kong fascinating and would really like to travel there someday. Resources: Pimsleur, FSI course. Korean: as someone with Koryo-saram ancestry, this one is a heritage language. Would love to learn the Hamgyeong dialect, which is most likely what my ancestors spoke and which is about equally far removed from the southern and the northern standard Korean, but resources for it not in Korean are probably quite scarce. My Japanese should help, considering the shared Chinese borrowed vocabulary and similar grammatical structures. Resources: Pimsleur, an old North Korean self-study book. Estonian: Have long wanted to get into Uralic languages. Always thought I would start with Finnish, since it's spoken near my hometown and has plenty of resources, but my mother went to Estonia last year and bought an Estonian self-study book as a souvenir for me, so it's been tempting me ever since. Besides, Estonia is about as close and actually interests me a little more. Ingrian: A critically endangered Uralic language indigenous to the area where I was born. While I have no immediate ancestral connections to this language, I still feel obliged to familiarize myself with it at least to some extent, before it disappears from the face of the Earth. Resources: a self-study guide. Bashkir: A Turkic language indigenous to the area where my paternal ancestors are from (although it's not part of modern Bashkortostan and there aren't many Bashkirs left). Even though my family denies this, my surname sounds like it could be Bashkir in origin. Additionally, I find something intriguing about the idea of a Turkic language whose phonology contains dental fricatives (the only other one, AFAIK, is Turkmen). My familiarity with Kazakh, another Kipchak Turkic language, makes Bashkir slightly transparent to me already, so it wouldn't require me to divert too much attention from my other languages. Resources: an academic grammar book. Ukrainian and Belarusian: probably not going to aim for high level productive skills, but I think it would be nice to develop perfect passive understanding, which is something many Russians mistakenly believe to possess without any dedicated study. Resources: Ukrainian Pimsleur (already completed), bilingual (Ukrainian/Russian) collection of fairy tales, bilingual (Belarusian/English) text of King Stakh's Wild Hunt. Chechen: after having dabbled in Abkhaz my appetite for the languages of the Caucasus has been piqued, so now I would like to familiarize myself with a Northeastern Caucasian language in order to compare and contrast. Unfortunately it's unlikely to go beyond dabbling, since race relations in Russia aren't pretty right now and from what I hear many Chechens don't take kindly to what they perceive as cultural appropriation. Resources: self-study book. Edited by vonPeterhof on 09 November 2013 at 8:08pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Papashaw Newbie Australia Joined 4104 days ago 28 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 23 of 67 09 November 2013 at 11:33am | IP Logged | |||||
|
I have German and Mandarin.
I took Mandarin for six months in school as a second subject but now am trying to maintain what I have until I can save up for a course. Since it isn't related to English, I can't just absorb it through watching TV like German to the same degree. The grammar is much more natural for me than German since it is analytical too. Yet for me the lack of cognates make it so time consuming and the writing system is bothersome. German is harder but less time consuming as many of the words come naturally. I have peaked on and off for months at what certain words are so by the time I started attempting to immerse myself two week ago, I knew what the endings were and what for. I make trips to grammar websites to check what a particular word is for or what the word order is. I just have that hunch if I lived in Germany for a few months I would pick it up. For now I just attempt to read and watch. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| espejismo Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5052 days ago 498 posts - 905 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Spanish, Greek, Azerbaijani | Message 24 of 67 09 November 2013 at 12:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
OMG. This is but a pipe dream, but here it goes:
Azeri and/or Turkish - I <3 Azerbaijan and its traditional and jazz music. Turkish speakers might be easier to find in places other than Moscow. Ukrainian - My mother asked me the other day for the name of that Ukrainian song that became the anthem of the Ukrainian Orange Revolution, and I answered her in Ukrainian: "you mean that song they sang on Maidan Nezalezhnosti? Razom nas bahato, nas ne podolaty?" She looked at me as if I were insane, and I had no idea how I was able to say that. :)) Most of my family has Ukrainian roots, so it would make sense for me to learn to understand the language. Latin - There are so many interesting things written in ecclesiastical and classical Latin! Besides, I went to a Catholic school for nine years (without being Catholic). It would be kind of cool to read the Pope's tweets in Latin. A hardcore Germanic language (read: not modern English) - either German, Dutch, Norwegian or Old English. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
