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stumar

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As i put down my "Basic German" text book for the evening i was just wondering how many RFF'ers are Bi/multi Lingual or are there many of you leraning a new language too?

I am , Very slowly, trying to learn some German, for no real imediate purpose other than for my own self fulfilment as it were. Anyone have some good language learning tips they could share?

Stuart.
 
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Hi Stuart, I am right there with you.

http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34579

Slow going with my Italian but I am plugging along. Shortly I will make the leap and purchase either the Rosetta Stone computer based learning program,

http://www.rosettastone.com/en/offer/googlepage

Or the CD based Pimsleur,

http://www.pimsleurdirect.com/s.nl/sc.15/.f?gclid=CKPQop3-i4oCFRZrNAod52rBQA

Rosetta Stone seems more comprehensive being multi media and is less expensive, but Pimsleur will be more portable for me.
 
I have been a student of Spanish for the past 6 years. The only advice I would have for you is to go live about 6 months in Germany if you can swing it. It will help you to start to think in German rather then just memorize words. When you stop trying to translate into German and just start thinking in German then you have really gotten the language down. Many times when I get back to the states I find myself stopping to think about what I want to say in English rather then Spanish which is my first inclination upon re-entering the states. Guess I do not multi-task very well.
 
stumar said:
As i put down my "Basic German" text book for the evening i was just wondering how many RFF'ers are Bi/multi Lingual or are there many of you leraning a new language too?

I am , Very slowly, trying to learn some German, for no real imediate purpose other than for my own self fulfilment as it were. Anyone have some good language learning tips they could share?

Stuart.
Click to expand...

I fluently speak Arabic, English and German.
Languages open up the doors to other cultures.
I simply "grew up" in three countries, so my three languages came to me the natural way.

Raid
 
Raised in western Canada, I speak English. My mother is Icelandic. I know a few polite phrases in that language. My father is Ukrainian. I know only the choicest swear words in his mother tongue.

As a young adult I moved to Quebec in the 80's in order to:
1. Learn French
2. Chase girls

Mission accomplished on both counts. I met my wife in Trois Rivieres and 21 years later we still only speak French at home.

Years ago, we moved to Italy for a short while . I was able to learn enough Italian to get myself in and out of trouble.

I'm now working on a bit of German.
 
German, English, and French fluently, and a bit of Italian and Farsi.

Blame it on the women and my parents ....

Roland.

PS: and C, C++, Pascal, Modula, Fortran, Algol, and others 🙂
 
CraigK said:
Raised in western Canada, I speak English. My mother is Icelandic. I know a few polite phrases in that language. My father is Ukrainian. I know only the choicest swear words in his mother tongue.

As a young adult I moved to Quebec in the 80's in order to:
1. Learn French
2. Chase girls

Mission accomplished on both counts. I met my wife in Trois Rivieres and 21 years later we still only speak French at home.

Years ago, we moved to Italy for a short while . I was able to learn enough Italian to get myself in and out of trouble.

I'm now working on a bit of German.
Click to expand...
OK, l'accent de Trois Rivieres ... gotta be special, eh?

So where is home now? I vote a kitchen party chez vous.
 
languages and drfting and...

languages and drfting and...

besides regularly and expertly mangling english, i'm working on spanish, french, russian, chinese (mandarin) and eventually arabic. joe, i tried american sign language as a volunteer interpreter and was/am a great "finger speller" in the least/most - yeah, right.

living in texas i get alot of opportunities to speak spanish and get even more baffled with "spanglish" and "tex-mex" varities. 😉

my niece finnished a degree in france (and as someone already mentioned) says total immersion was the key to making her american college french workable.

meanwhile, i babble to her in my pimsleur-learned french and she helps me get it right. being a truck driver, i get the occasional truck driver from quebec on the cb and we both have a chuckle over my "command" of french. 🙄 😀 🙄 😀

my russian is mostly basics like "who or what or where" and basic courtesies. when i went to beslan, russia in 2004 (after the terrorist attack and massacre there at middle school number one) i was glad to hear that i retained some of my high school russian (from decades and decades ago).

as for chinese, it's like a giant riddle and it keeps my fading foggy faculties fresh. i would like to better understand that gigantic portion of the world. thank goodness for pinyan, because i don't know when i would ever learn to write in traditional chinese characters. it' more than enough for me to sort out the six different spoken meanings for "ma". if i'm not careful i can call someone a horse or scold them when i'm just trying to make a statement a question by using the incorrect intonation/emphasis.

as for arabic, i would also like to better understand that huge part of the world. studying history is one thing. in learning the basics of some of the languages i'm trying to learn, along the way i have gained some cultural insights. not sure where i'm ging with this, so i'll jump off this bus. 😱

in my few travels abroad i have discovered you can be "sort of" functional if you can ask and understand basic necessity questions & answers, use basic expressions of courtesy & count to ten (hundreds or thousand are even better). 🙂

i get some confused and/or amused reactions sometimes when i try to use my very limited language of the country i'm visiting. i mostly get a smile and i think an appreciative nod from the other person. 🙂

the more i study other languages and cultures, the more i understand how much we share in common and how little we are different. these are lessons i strive to pass on to my five year old grand daughter. 🙂

i guess that's more-than enough musings from the gulf stream of my consciousness for now. thank you for wading through it all. 😀 😛 😀

_____________________________________

breathe, relax, smile and enjoy
_____________________________________

hasta la vista, voyez-vous plus tard, daskorava, fino al prossimo tempo, auf wiedersehen, adeus para agora, la revedere, shalom, zaijian & later y’all 😛 😀 😛

“...patience and shuffle the cards.” miguel cervantes

kenneth lockerman
NEVER FORGET BESLAN
www.neverforgetbeslan.com
www.neverforgetbeslan.org (under construction)
 
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I had eight years of grade school/high school French and can understand it well, but my speaking ability isn't very good anymore. I also speak German and Hebrew, both of which I learned in intensive courses for my job.

Alex
 
German; English, Russian and Farsi; then Arabic, French and Uzbek; then Turkish; then a couple of other languages in which I don't have much fluency worth speaking of.

German is my native language; my parents boringly enough both being Germans in Germany, I never had much of an opportunity to grow up functional in more than one language. At school I learned English and French, as well as Latin and classical Greek, but the latter two probably don't count (I can read Italian or Greek newspapers now with great trouble), and my English is much better than my French, I'm afraid.

In university I systematically studied Persian/Farsi/Tajik, Arabic and Russian and dabbled in a few other languages such as Finnish; I think the latter should be described as "philological knowledge" where you don't really speak the language, but you know how it works. My Persian is a bit better because I used to work as a Farsi teacher for some time, and I speak Russian at home with my wife every other day, so these two are again a lot better than my Arabic, which I definitely need to brush up on. Then I learned some Uzbek for my field research more or less by immersion, and currently I'm trying to stuff some Turkish into my head, more for enjoyment.

It's good to start early on with languages that have a systematic and developed grammar. I'm very much a grammar person when it comes to languages. My first foreign language was Latin, and even though I don't really use it in any sensible way I think it was still very formative for the way how I learn languages. I find that children who grow up with English as their first foreign language have a more difficult time picking up the grammar of a new language, partly because English has such a simple and straightforward grammar that you don't really have to start to think about the language as a systematic entity. So I think the first foreign language you learn should have a lot of grammar.

The big question for me is if I can pass any of this down to my children. IMHO languages are really one of the greatest gifts that can be given. I hope that we'll at least manage to educate them towards functional bilinguality in German and Russian. However I've seen so many mixed couples around where the children at age four or five simply start to reject Russian (because the language has a very low prestige in Germany now, and maybe because children don't want to stand out in kindergarten or in a school yard). I'm not sure yet how we can avoid this. Currently we have Russian days and German days at home, I hope this will work.

Philipp
 
Dutch, English, enough German to have a decent conversation, some French and Mongolian (both enough to get groceries, ask directions and time, etc but not much more).

My wife: Mongolian, English, Dutch, Hindi, Japanese and some Russian and can understand Tuva and Buryat (related to Mongolian). Not a word of Chiense, though, even though China is just next door from Mongolia. History ruled differently on the matter of political and economic influence.

My 8-year old is fluent in English and Dutch, and with some practise she can communicate in Mongolian as well. Many of her classmates are bilingual as well, having Dutch and foreign parents. I love for people having a grasp of more than a few languages, especially languages that aren't much related to your own. It forces you to delve into that language's culture and history a bit more, and with that broadened view comes understanding and tolerance. We need more of that.
 
Guten Tag. Wie geht es?

Guten Tag. Wie geht es?

pingle said:
I try to keep up my German and French:

http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2007/01/11/bilingual-alzeimer.html
Click to expand...

interesting article- thanks for the link. I wonder about the results of such a study in a SE Asian sample because here, to get by one is compelled to be at least bilingual as far as spoken language is concerned.

That said I'm learning German too, much too slowly, using an old Linguaphone set. I probably need to sign up for a course at the Goethe Institut.

Tschuss

David
 
My only English practice currently is at RFF and when I'm translating pages of my website, what bores me a lot... (it's better to start with them, later translated to German). Anyway webstatistics say that it's hardly worth the effort, but I fear my kind of writing in German is difficult to understand for Non German native speakers. I'm always amused about "babelfish" translations of it...

Probably people younger than 40 should try to learn Chinese best...
 
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French Italian, Sicilian and English fluently, Czech up to some point (generally improves when I drink beer) although czech people sometimes think I'm Czech 😉 No probs as well with Slovak. Good understanding of spanish and portuguese. Tiny basics in german. I can also understand bits of polish & other slavic languages. I can also transliterate russian & greek alphabets.

My plans include learning classical greek & latin (I want to get a PhD in history), as well as german.

Cheers,
Max
 
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