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Languages of your family

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
27 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3
DaisyMaisy
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5140 days ago

115 posts - 178 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish
Studies: Swedish, Finnish

 
 Message 25 of 27
28 October 2013 at 6:32am | IP Logged 
Most of my family has been in the US for a couple hundred years and before that, came from England. So English is it for us. I do have a set of great grandparents who were Swedish speaking Finns from the western coast of Finland. My grandfather spoke only Swedish as a young child, but when he started school his parents decided he should speak only English. He ended up basically losing his Swedish and never taught my mom any. That was the way it was then (1910-1920s), just assimilate. This is probably why I'm drawn to learning Swedish due to feeling some kind of connection to it, however distant. The next connection is Finnish since my family once lived there (and it is really cool). My next and remotest connection is an as yet undecided upon Celtic language (my dad did one of those Y DNA tests and he is the type of the R group associated with being Celtic). I can't decide whether to study Welsh or Gaelic. Admittedly this is a tenuous connection but there are worse reasons for studying languages!

What I really should do is focus on Spanish which is spoken by about 50% of the population of my town, at least going by demographics, and is very useful in many ways.

So many languages, so little time!
1 person has voted this message useful



shk00design
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 4204 days ago

747 posts - 1123 votes 
Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin
Studies: French

 
 Message 26 of 27
29 October 2013 at 3:04am | IP Logged 
My grandfather on 1 side of the family was quite multilingual. Being Chinese and lived in a Dutch colony until the
1920s he acquired Dutch as his first language and Chinese Hakka. Over the years he also mastered English,
French & Spanish. My grandmother knew Chinese and Spanish. The 2 preferred to communicate in Spanish.

Very few of us in the family managed to learn more than 2 languages with English and Chinese. Where I am living
there are relatives who went to Chinese lessons on weekends to learn how to write. Some of my relatives like to
watch Chinese movies & drama series on videos. When it comes to written Chinese, I'm 1 of the few who made the
effort to retain the characters by reading subtitles in movies, local newspapers. I know at least 1 person in the
family who is very fluent in spoken Chinese but completely forgotten even the simplest characters. When we eat
out in Chinese places she would order common items off her head. Other than that she would just ask the waiter /
waitress items on special and pick from the words spoken without reading the menu.

In my family our parents encouraged us to maintain the mother-tongue to a certain extent. But when my cousins
are all together, almost all of us would speak English. Personally I like to keep my ears tuned to news and
information from the other side of the world. Being brought up in a strict family with dominating parents, the rest
of the family tend to associate strict parenting with the Chinese culture and not very keen to maintain fluency in
the language.
1 person has voted this message useful



eyðimörk
Triglot
Senior Member
France
goo.gl/aT4FY7
Joined 3859 days ago

490 posts - 1158 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*, English, French
Studies: Breton, Italian

 
 Message 27 of 27
29 October 2013 at 10:13am | IP Logged 
DaisyMaisy wrote:
My next and remotest connection is an as yet undecided upon Celtic language (my dad did one of those Y DNA tests and he is the type of the R group associated with being Celtic). I can't decide whether to study Welsh or Gaelic. Admittedly this is a tenuous connection but there are worse reasons for studying languages!

This is just my personal strategy, but I'd look at what's the most useful... and if you don't live on the same continent as either of those groups, and nowhere near the diaspora, it's probably Welsh. It has 700,000 speakers, compared to 60,000 Gaelic speakers (unless you mean Irish, which Americans sometimes refer to as just Gaelic, in which case you're up to 235,000 but possibly just as much available media as Welsh). Of course, there's also Breton (originating from Common Brittonic, of which the version spoken in Wales came to develop into Welsh) with 300,000 speakers and a fair bit of media being produced. ;)


1 person has voted this message useful



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