Languages!

[sonia]

Via ofearthandstars.

1. How many languages do you speak?
Fluently? Two - English and Spanish
Know Enough to Understand Simple Conversations? Two more - German and Hebrew
Learned but forgotten? I studied a LOT of French in high school and college. I can still read it fairly well but it would take me a while to regain speaking and understanding vocabulary.
Can read their alphabet/pronounce their words, understand a few that occur a lot in folk songs? Bulgarian, Georgian, Croatian, Romanian, Hungarian

2. What is your mother tongue?
It's complicated. I learned Spanish first from my parents, but I was born in the US and educated in English. I sing a lot in other languages, and I find other pronunciations and accents sliding into my English these days.

3. What is a language that you would like to learn and why?
See above for the many I know bits of and want to sing well.

4. Does it bother you when people speak a language you don't know in front of you? Why or why not?
I love hearing other languages. It makes me feel safe and at home. I have relatives across the world and visiting them meant hearing a welter of languages. I like being able to identify the language even if I don't know it.

5. Speak to me.
Shalom. Hello. Bonjour. Straveite! Gamarjos. Guten tag. Hola.

A side effect of having bits of so many languages is that sometimes I feel like I'm rummaging through a trunk throwing out first one language and then another when I'm trying to remember a particular word in a particular language.

Comments

[redbird]

I'm not fluent in any language but English, and have forgotten much of my Spanish (grammar as much as vocabulary), but, like you, I like hearing languages other than English, for some of the same reasons of feeling safe/at home.

[sonia]

Interesting that it does that for you as well! Do you know why?

[ofearthandstars]

The "rummaging through a trunk" analogy is very apt! I remember trying to transition from French to Italian and my sentences would come out in a garble. Having spent so much time off of them, I don't have that problem any more, but because I've been steady with Spanish, it tends to take up most of the trunk contents these days.

[sonia]

It's always interesting talking to my aunt, who grew up speaking Spanish and German, learned English in school, and has been in Israel speaking Hebrew for many years. Sometimes we have to go through several languages to find a word or get an idea across.

Ah! Languages!

[jesse_the_k]

Learned English from my 1st generation, native-speaker parents, who spoke Yiddish to keep secrets from us kids.

When we lived in Athens for a year I became 4-year-old-fluent in Modern Greek, but it went away almost instantly and I don't think I even learned the alphabet.

I had six years of French in school. I'm amazed at how much has stuck -- while I rely on subtitles for French programs, I recognize the emotional weight of the French words.

Four years of Russian in high school -- we were lucky to have a native speaker in our class who wanted to fill in the formal grammar knowledge she'd never got as a kid. Had to quit French after two years in Russian -- I was always grabbing from the wrong language for the helpful-glue small words.

Studied ASL in community settings with three deaf teachers over five years. The need for interpreters was so dire that I qualified (as a "communication assistant") for three years.

I've got weird remnants left.

I can still hear word boundaries in French and Russian, and see them in ASL. I can slowly sound out Cyrillic letter by letter, but not really read it anymore. I can't read fingerspelling anymore, though I spell out words to help me remember them. The arrival of effortless video communications provides me with thousands of videos I can't fully understand on first viewing.

Re: Ah! Languages!

[sonia]

Wow, that's a lot! Fun to learn new things about a long-time online friend!