Entiendo mas Español que hablo y escribo, desafortunadamente. :(
― Just Deanna (Dee the Lurker), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 05:01 (twenty years ago) link
― C J (C J), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 05:04 (twenty years ago) link
― Tag (Tag), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 07:55 (twenty years ago) link
― dog latin (dog latin), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 07:58 (twenty years ago) link
― Chip Morningstar (bob), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 08:08 (twenty years ago) link
...The v.modest "command" of German i may've once had (studied the language for two years at uni, passed exams) is now practically non-existent.(And the studies of Latin were a nightmare - my own falt, that)
Mmm, though Finnish and Estonian are pretty similar in a few respects, my comprehension of what our overseas relatives are really talking about is patchy at best.
― t\'\'t (t\'\'t), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 08:12 (twenty years ago) link
― joan vich (joan vich), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 08:18 (twenty years ago) link
― nestmanso (nestmanso), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 09:57 (twenty years ago) link
― Millar (Millar), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 10:41 (twenty years ago) link
― Chris V. (Chris V), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 10:44 (twenty years ago) link
Likewise, dear neighbour. Me, I speak Finnish, obviously, Swedish and a bit of German, though I think since high school my German skills have lowered to the level of "Ich habe Sauerkraut in meine Lederhosen."
― Tuomas (Tuomas), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 10:48 (twenty years ago) link
― Tuomas (Tuomas), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 10:51 (twenty years ago) link
Try "Ich habe einen Stahlschwanz" instead. Iron rusts, you don't want that.
― Sommermute (Wintermute), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 10:52 (twenty years ago) link
― Nordicskillz (Nordicskillz), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 18:02 (twenty years ago) link
― gygax! (gygax!), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 19:06 (twenty years ago) link
― Tep (ktepi), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 19:08 (twenty years ago) link
my uncle has the stahlschwanz, I get it whenever he gekickens der bücket.
― Millar (Millar), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 19:12 (twenty years ago) link
Why did I write this like I'm referring to myself as royalty?
― Nordicskillz (Nordicskillz), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 19:15 (twenty years ago) link
― Orbit (Orbit), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 20:25 (twenty years ago) link
fairly fluent:spanish
"hi how are you where is ____ may i have thank you excuse me":frenchgermanczechitalianjapanesecantonese
o catholic school and classics studies, almost entirely forgotten/repressed:latinancient greek
― gygax! (gygax!), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 20:51 (twenty years ago) link
I can buy beer in russian, spanish, greek, german.
In college a friend of mine said that all the Spanish she needed or cared to know was "Dos cervesas, por favor."
― j.lu (j.lu), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 21:32 (twenty years ago) link
― Leee (Leee), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 21:52 (twenty years ago) link
I speak some German and I took a year of Mandarin, but don't even ask me to remember any of it.
J'aime beaucoup parler francais--mais plusieurs fois je parle anglais et mes amis me reponds en francais. Ca marche!
― cybele (cybele), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 22:03 (twenty years ago) link
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Wednesday, 30 July 2003 22:56 (twenty years ago) link
― dyson (dyson), Thursday, 31 July 2003 00:20 (twenty years ago) link
Mr Don and Mr George to thread. Huevos....
― Matt (Matt), Thursday, 31 July 2003 00:36 (twenty years ago) link
― Sébastien Chikara (Sébastien Chikara), Thursday, 31 July 2003 00:37 (twenty years ago) link
― Sébastien Chikara (Sébastien Chikara), Thursday, 31 July 2003 00:42 (twenty years ago) link
Spent my junior high and HS years taking Latin, so useful for reading French, Italian etc. but not much help in speaking. Keep meaning to sign up for lessons but beens aying that for years now with no movement.
― H (Heruy), Thursday, 31 July 2003 08:59 (twenty years ago) link
― Fabrice (Fabfunk), Thursday, 31 July 2003 09:01 (twenty years ago) link
Also, asking questions is fun.
― Roxymuzak, Mrs. Carbohydrate (roxymuzak), Thursday, 22 September 2005 13:53 (eighteen years ago) link
― Teh HoBB (the pirate king), Thursday, 22 September 2005 20:37 (eighteen years ago) link
― kelsey (kelstarry), Thursday, 22 September 2005 20:38 (eighteen years ago) link
― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 22 September 2005 20:39 (eighteen years ago) link
― kelsey (kelstarry), Thursday, 22 September 2005 20:49 (eighteen years ago) link
― s1ocki (slutsky), Thursday, 22 September 2005 20:51 (eighteen years ago) link
― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 22 September 2005 20:58 (eighteen years ago) link
― viborgu, Thursday, 22 September 2005 21:01 (eighteen years ago) link
"I am not good"?
― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 22 September 2005 21:04 (eighteen years ago) link
― Daniel_Rf (Daniel_Rf), Thursday, 22 September 2005 22:32 (eighteen years ago) link
― ken c (ken c), Thursday, 22 September 2005 23:59 (eighteen years ago) link
― ken c (ken c), Friday, 23 September 2005 00:00 (eighteen years ago) link
― M. White (Miguelito), Friday, 23 September 2005 04:19 (eighteen years ago) link
― Sym Sym (sym), Friday, 23 September 2005 04:24 (eighteen years ago) link
― Roxymuzak, Mrs. Carbohydrate (roxymuzak), Friday, 23 September 2005 15:48 (eighteen years ago) link
viborgu, i've been curious about pimsleur & often tempted to buy it. i studied in college for two years & studied abroad for 6 months. that was approx. 5-6 years ago. what level should i start with?!
― kelsey (kelstarry), Friday, 23 September 2005 15:50 (eighteen years ago) link
― Confounded (Confounded), Friday, 23 September 2005 18:03 (eighteen years ago) link
― M. White (Miguelito), Friday, 23 September 2005 18:04 (eighteen years ago) link
― El (Ken L), Friday, 23 September 2005 18:09 (eighteen years ago) link
Used to be fluent in "official Irish", i.e. the version that has nothing to do with what native speakers speak. Have gone from fluent to passable in German through lack of use. Also passable in French - I can watch a movie without subtitles but at best I catch 80% of what's happening. I have a degree in Sanskrit but at this point could not read or produce a single sentence.
― Choco Blavatsky (seandalai), Monday, 20 November 2017 00:01 (six years ago) link
I've got a question: What, linguistically, could be deemed the most efficient world language? The one that's pronounced how it's spelled. The one that has the fewest exceptions to the rule. Is there such a thing?
― Fox Mulder, FYI (dog latin), Monday, 20 November 2017 09:54 (six years ago) link
I’m going to guess that it’s not one using the Latin Alphabet or a least if it does they’ll be a lot of diacritics.
― American Fear of Pranksterism (Ed), Monday, 20 November 2017 10:06 (six years ago) link
But then what about regional variation? If spelling will reflect some form of standardised pronunciation then regional differences will break the relationship.
Standard Italian is follows the spelling very closely if you are Milanese but not if you are Sicilian.
― American Fear of Pranksterism (Ed), Monday, 20 November 2017 10:08 (six years ago) link
Spanish is pretty good on the whole "pronounced like it's spelled" front i've got a new strat for my French. Les Pieds Sur Terre from France Culture. a new 30-minute podcast episode every day. if i can get to the point where I'm enjoying it and not having to pause and go back etc then I'll be v happy.
― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Monday, 20 November 2017 10:14 (six years ago) link
Ed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographia_bohemica ?
― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Monday, 20 November 2017 10:15 (six years ago) link
That was interesting and led to this
Languages with a high grapheme-to-phoneme and phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence (excluding exceptions due to loan words and assimilation) include Maltese, Finnish, Albanian, Georgian, Turkish (apart from ğ and various palatal and vowel allophones), Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian), Bulgarian, Macedonian (if the apostrophe denoting schwa is counted, though slight inconsistencies may be found), Eastern Armenian (apart from o, v), Basque (apart from palatalized l, n), Haitian Creole, Castilian Spanish (apart from h, x, b/v, and sometimes k, c, g, j, z), Czech (apart from ě, ů, y, ý), Polish (apart from ó, h, rz), Romanian (apart from distinguishing semivowels from vowels), Ukrainian (mainly phonemic with some other historical/morphological rules, as well as palatalization), Belarusian (phonemic for vowels but morphophonemic for consonants except ў written phonetically), Swahili (missing aspirated consonants, which do not occur in all varieties and anyway are sparsely used), Mongolian (apart from letters representing multiple sounds depending on front or back vowels, the soft and hard sign, silent letters to indicate /ŋ/ from /n/ and voiced versus voiceless consonants) Azerbaijani (apart from k), and Kazakh (apart from и, у, х, щ, ю).
― American Fear of Pranksterism (Ed), Monday, 20 November 2017 10:31 (six years ago) link
"apart from"
― mark s, Monday, 20 November 2017 10:35 (six years ago) link
(apart from h, x, b/v, and sometimes k, c, g, j, z)
― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Monday, 20 November 2017 10:48 (six years ago) link
not what you're looking for but making use of the fewest sounds is kind of efficient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotokas_language
― Choco Blavatsky (seandalai), Monday, 20 November 2017 10:58 (six years ago) link
Russian is pretty much pronounced as spelled - Polish probably as far in the other direction as any language I can think of.
I need create own polish alphabet, it will be gut pic.twitter.com/XYqcRZbtXZ— ⭐Jag. Thornproof♠ (@SanJaguar) October 10, 2017
― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), Monday, 20 November 2017 11:22 (six years ago) link
presumably thanks to this?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthography#The_post-revolution_reform
my dad's parents* were reds in the 30s: my dad told to me once that he could remember his mum teaching herself russian in the bath, adding that she was learning from a tsarist-era guidebook so it probably would have done more harm than good come the worldwide bolshevik revolution
*one of them ended up very reactionary, the other stayed secretly red till the end in her 90s, i don't really know how they negotiated this personally
― mark s, Monday, 20 November 2017 11:40 (six years ago) link
adding: my dad was naturally good at languages, picking up the useable basics very quickly -- he taught himself serbo-croat in order to read an untranslated paper abt karst landscapes* and once (in lapland) held a halting conversation with the woman running a post office in esperanto lol
― mark s, Monday, 20 November 2017 11:45 (six years ago) link
might learn Volapuk one day so I can curse the Esperanto-speaking masses
― Choco Blavatsky (seandalai), Monday, 20 November 2017 12:48 (six years ago) link
starting scottish gaelic classes on saturday, something I've been meaning to do for about a decade. procrastination is bad news.
― khat person (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, 21 February 2018 19:15 (six years ago) link
Ashamed to say as a Scot that pretty much the only words I know in Gaelic are a song about porridge
― carrotless, turnip-pocketed (fionnland), Wednesday, 21 February 2018 20:59 (six years ago) link
i know next to nothing apart from the words that are similar/the same to the bit of Irish I learned on Duolingo.
I don't think it's incumbent of Scots to know any gaelic - as long as they don't have that tiresome anti-gaelic road sign attitude - I just have always been interested in threatened languages in general and it seems like it makes sense to learn the one that's closest to your home. I was inspired by walking past a classroom at the university I work at here in Vancouver and hearing young indigenous people learning the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh) language
― khat person (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, 21 February 2018 21:09 (six years ago) link
kinda neat
https://localingual.com/
― F# A# (∞), Thursday, 31 May 2018 18:08 (five years ago) link