Quote:
Originally Posted by Phi  Hmmm, guess I can't compete with the people in the this thread. Only Danish, English and a very small amount of French and German.
Why do you study all those languages? Do you need them because your live in foreign countries, travel a lot or is it just for fun? |
It's not a competition
I study languages for a few reasons - they boil down to geography and curiosity. I was born in the English-speaking part of Canada, but have been living in Switzerland for over a third of my life, and Switzerland has 3 official languages (or 4 if you count Romansh) - French, Italian, and German.
I started picking up Esperanto when I was minorly ill for a week once and found that I could chat online using a dictionary in it after a few days - at that point, I only spoke English and really terrible Italian, so that was really cool for me (I could understand a fair amount of Esperanto in written form before I ever studied it, due to shared vocabulary with English/French/Italian, all of which I could read to various degrees - nowhere near fluently in the latter two cases). I haven't studied Esperanto as much as I'd like to, and I'm still far from fluent, but how quickly I could manage basic conversations was an "oh wow" moment for me, after several years of very frustrating language study with extremely low marks in school (after 3 years of French in elementary school in Canada, I couldn't conjugate avoir, one of the most basic verbs, meaning "to have", in the present tense, and my first 3 years of Italian study were barely better, which was all-the-more frustrating as foreign languages were the only topic I'd had anywhere near that degree of trouble with).
I intermittantly study Japanese for several reasons: it's a non-Indo-European language, with totally different root words and a different style of grammar from anything else I know, the writing system interests me, and if I ever become proficient in it, I'll be able to see more of a distinct culture with a long historical tradition which isn't the one(s) I was raised in. And I like Anime
With other languages, like Swedish and Dutch (and to a tiny, tiny degree, Danish) I've dabbled a little - ie, read some web pages on the grammar, looked at wikipedia in them and tried to read a few articles, and chatted a little bit online with patient friends who were more than happy to teach me a little bit of their native languages (I've found speakers of all 3 languages to be extremely friendly when I try to pick up even a few words, which is neat).
I've travelled a bit; I picked up a few phrases in Arabic when I was in Morocco for a while, but not a significant amount, and I've forgotten nearly all of it, unfortunately.
The above also reflects my philosophy/style of learning: I like to dabble in a million things. I'm a computer science student, and I suppose I got interested in natural languages through computer ones, as I dabbled in everything from Smalltalk to Haskell and learned more about different ways of thinking and framing questions and thoughts. It's not a very guided way to learn, and it doesn't lead to quick competence, but I find it enjoyable, and it seems to work well for me over long time periods.
I've been more than mildly interested in human languages for less than 3 years, so given my approach, I'm still fluent only in English, although my Italian is coming along reasonably (I write it quite poorly, but can read it fairly well, and hold conversations, though quick group ones with lots of slang or dialect can still lose me.)
Long live fun.