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The last language you would want to learn | ||
Tags: Usefulness | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| lloydkirk Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6414 days ago 429 posts - 452 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 42 of 346 09 July 2007 at 9:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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Schaumgebrest: Out of sheer curiosity, may I ask why French is at the bottom of your list?
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| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6944 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 43 of 346 09 July 2007 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | ||
That's what motivates most hobbyist language learners, myself included, but I don't consider it inappropriate to take the fact that I am not immortal into account as well. Difficulty alone doesn't exclude a language, but it does raise the bar on just how enamored I have to be of the culture to take it up. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lloydkirk Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6414 days ago 429 posts - 452 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 45 of 346 09 July 2007 at 11:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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Maybe a little more detail...
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| winters Trilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 7045 days ago 199 posts - 218 votes Speaks: Croatian*, Serbian*, Russian*, English, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek Studies: Greek, French, Hungarian | Message 46 of 346 10 July 2007 at 7:24am | IP Logged | ||
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In all honesty - and hoping that this will not offend anyone - there are far more languages which I would not learn than those which I would learn.
I used to believe that I studied languages for joy and for the sole sake of studying languages, but really, I do not, and the more time I spend studying languages the more am IK aware of that - I study them exclusively out of cultural reasons and literature written in them, therefore, I have a very specific set of languages I wish to learn which correspond to my interests in those fields, whilst I cannot claim that I would learn anything out of that repertoire unless forced by necessity, or unless my interests changed rapidly (there is always a possibility of that), or unless I actually learnt the entire set and then felt curious enough to tackle something entirely different to that which I studied. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Karakorum Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6570 days ago 201 posts - 232 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written)* Studies: French, German | Message 47 of 346 10 July 2007 at 11:01pm | IP Logged | ||
Don't believe the hype :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 48 of 346 11 July 2007 at 3:46am | IP Logged | ||
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For scientific minds who want to thoroughly understand the phenomenon of language the ideal situation would be to learn some of the usual languages plus a selection of 'weirdos' - i.e. languages that are extremely different from the usual stock of Indoeuropean languages (though for a Chinese or Korean the Indoeuropean languages would of course be the weird ones).
Most practical language learners will however appreciate things like an ample and high-quality supply of reading/listening materials, maybe even the possibility of personal encounters, good dictionaries, grammars and textbooks and all that. So for us lazy and dumb people precisely the languages that might teach us a lot about languages as such are the ones we tend to avoid. I recently read something about a bunch of paleo-siberian languages from Siberia. They are rapidly dying out, they are in linguistical terms utterly isolated and have only left a minimal number of written sources, the few remaining speakers are scattered in some of the world's most inhospitable and inaccessible regions, and there are not one single reason on this planet except scientific curiosity that could induce anybody to study them, - and your friends and neighbours haven't even heard about them. They are high on my list of languages that I won't ever learn. Edited by Iversen on 11 July 2007 at 5:30am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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