I must first apologize for one of the previous topics; I kind of destroyed the harmony of Textkit. I’m still new to this whole forum thing; this is the first I have joined after all. So once again, I’m sorry. Well, that said, let’s continue.
We seem to have many people from all around so I have some simple questions: what is your native language? How many languages do you know? What does English sound like to non-English speakers?
That last one I have always wanted to know. All that I have ever been told is that English is spoken with such hard Ss that it sounds like the hissing of a snake. Whoa, just repeat that last sentence and listen. But other than that, does it sound harsh, soft, or just… weird?
How is English regarded in difficulty to learn? I know that Japanese relate English to Latin. While we get our technical words from Latin, Japanese do so from English on top of borrowing much of their vocabulary from us. English is a very difficult study and business language for them.
I bet some of this has been asked before, so excuse me if it is so. That pretty much sums it up. And?
My mother tongue is Korean.
But my parents are educated during the Japanese ruling and my father speaks japaneses more fluently than the contemporary natives because he kept reading books written in japanese for his life.
I’ve started studying English since I don’t remember how old(or how young) I was then.
But the methods were not very effective and it was slow. In Korea they had been saying that English is easy to start and terribly hard to master. (Korean? hard to start and hard to master. )
Anyway, with the advantage of starting earlier than my peer, and doing hard excercise for decades, I managed to score 875 in TOEIC.
But I still feel quite a bit hard to understand the news report in CNN.
Free conversation is easier because the native speakers can slow down for a foreigner. Reading and writing is much more easier because I can control the speed, and can refer to a dictionary.
Ich habe Deutsche gelernt im hochschule, but after I graduated highschool I seldom studied it. Only, have read a few books. And I forgot much of it. Ich habe alles vergessen.
Frances est un langue utilitee when searching info’s on the web. But I’m almost illiterate of it.
Ikh mol kent a Amerikaner ver zogt Yiddish un er gebt mikh a Yiddish lerbikh. es iz a -charming- sprakhele, un es iz -similar to German-. Yiddish lidele zint liblikh
Spanish is another charming language though I also forgot most of it since I took a semester’s course in the college. Hmm… rummaging thru my memory, Yo no hablo Español.
Wow, Mingshey! I am impressed by how much you know and are learning, and I’m surprised at how much I could understand of the western languages you used because of learning Latin. Learning Latin does help alot in many ways. But then you switched to eastern ones, and I got lost…
You have an interesting way of writing Japanese. That’s another thing that makes Japanese difficult, no one over here agrees on how to write it in romaji. But it is spoken so fast it sounds more like
“WatashiwaNihongomosukoshibenkyoushimashitagaamariwakarimasenne.” Heh, that’s how it’s written like in Hirigana anyway.
No matter how congested I write Japanese, you can at least read it(and the suffices are written like that in hiragana anyway) and it wouldn’t be totally a jabberwocky to a Japanese. But if I write a Korean sentence in roman characters and let an American read it, few Korean would understand it.
My first language is English and my second German (I’m bilingual). Otherwise I can understand quite a few other languages and know a bit of modern Greek and French, but only a bit , I wish I had more time to learn French…
My first language is Hebrew, and english is my second.
i speak english very fluently,
and my accent is so british as to make people think i am originaly from england.
Korean is a beautifull language!
hearing it is like hearing music.
and the accent is so different to anything else i usually hear… all i hear is english, and the terrible hebrew (even i agree on that) and arabic, which are so sharp (hebrew is like the sounds of a barbery, and arabic of a slaughterhouse).
My native language is English. The second language I’m most comfortable with is Indonesian. If I have to, I can read French and Spanish. If I try to speak them Indonesian gets in the way. I studied Latin and Greek at school up to A level, but they’ve almost completely rusted away. I’m trying to get them back now.
My first language is English. As far as being able to speak a language goes, it’s also my only. But I can read French most of the time (I will bump into words I don’t recognize more often than I like, but that’s why they invented dictionaries) and I can understand simple spoken sentences in Spanish. (How’s that for Ss?) Because I learned French from textbooks, I can read it but not understand it spoken; because I learned the little Spanish I know from hearing it spoken, I can understand it spoken but not read it, not well anyway. And I wouldn’t call myself fluent in it, either. No comprende. (I can’t spell, either.)
I’ve started carrying on short (and one-sided) conversations in Gaelic with my mother’s Irish hydrangea, Erin. I am also learning to spell Gaelic, which has been a very interesting experience.
I would be doing beautifully in Latin if I were to take the time to sit down and study it (but that won’t happen until after Christmas), and even though I have been studying my Greek, it remains elusive.
So, there you have the extent of my real-world language fluency.
My first language is German. I’ve been studying English for 8 years, French for 4 years and Spanish for 3 years.
Well, English doesn’t sound better than German…in fact I think it sounds sometimes really weird.
I think that if that were the first post a person read when visiting this site in search of a language resource, that person would be utterly turned off. I already know of at least one woman who left awhile ago because of incessant Welsh-bashing (she PMed me). Discussion is great, even if negative, but it would be nice if it were a bit more tasteful.
Anyways, I don’t like playing disciplinarian. Kailan, I didn’t think your post was too offensive, since you did say why, but Episcopus tends to just insult. O Episcope, cur non tibi imperas?
)
