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riggerrob

What is your second language?

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My mother tongue is English.

I learned to speak French at Canadian Forces Base Valcartier ... hint: it's near Quebec City.

I learned to speak the basics of German while serving at CFB Baden-Solingen, West Germany ... enough to take German-only tandem students.

I learned the basics of Spanish while working in Perris Valley, California.

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I’m relatively close to fluent in Portuguese (I’ve been native fluent in the past). I can converse back and forth in Spanish as long as they don’t talk too fast, and I can make myself fairly laboriously understood in French.

Wendy P. 

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French A-level (highest UK school exams taken at 18 years old) - can function socially in french, spanish, italian given a couple of weeks in the various countries.

 

Regret not doing more languages at school because I really enjoy it now.

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(edited)
12 hours ago, Stumpy said:

French A-level (highest UK school exams taken at 18 years old) - can function socially in french, spanish, italian given a couple of weeks in the various countries.

 

Regret not doing more languages at school because I really enjoy it now.

. . . . duplicate

Edited by kallend

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Just now, kallend said:

Yes, it takes me a couple of weeks before my ear gets tuned to French.  In restrospect I wish I had taken Spanish instead of Latin in school.  However, Latin was a requirement for admission to Oxford or Cambridge back then, regardless of what your intended major was.

 

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Reasonable English, can work in German, am comfortable in French, and can get around in Spanish.

It helps to be in a country for a week or so to get attuned to what people are saying.  The flow of English is a bit different between, say, Birmingham, AL and Birmingham, UK, and the German spoken in Berlin is not the same as Zürich.

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14 hours ago, Stumpy said:

can function socially in french, spanish, italian given a couple of weeks in the various countries.

I can't even function socially in english - been here for decades and still don't know wtf anyone's talking about.

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French.  I was part of a program called the Experiment in International Living.  Lived in Guadeloupe for a time as part of my high school classes.  I was fairly fluent.  Now it's only the most rudimentary of sentences.

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(edited)

In college, I took a couple semesters of Spanish, and a couple semesters of Russian.

Spanish, because I planned to eventually move to the SW portion of the country. That part of the plan worked out.

Russian, because the Berlin Wall fell while I was in school, and I thought there might be business opportunities opening up with the former parts of the Soviet Union. I didn't expect Russia to go back to having a czar a few years later.

Edited by ryoder

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Fluent in English or nearly so. 

I can make myself understood in German, though reading/listening is a lot easier for me.

I know the bare essentials in French (Donnay mwoh beer sil voos play, Carson) and can say at least "thank you" in Polish and Rumanian :-)

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Studied Russian in college, which was buried under Japanese during two years in Okinawa.  My Arabic education was too short (2 classes), and immersion was only a year, so I even have trouble sounding out pronunciations anymore.  Finally studied Turkish for a year before working in Turkey for three years.  I then picked up a little Tok Pisin while in Papua New Guinea the past two years, but really only a few words.

These days, if I try to reference even pleasantries in Japanese, Russian or Turkish, I can usually count on the wrong language coming out.  On a few select occasions I have even started a sentence in one language and finished it in another! :/

Thinking of using some of my education benefits to go back to formal university study of Turkish and Russian.  I have always wanted to add French, so perhaps I will consider a second Baccalaureate in linguistics once I retire. 

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1 hour ago, TriGirl said:

Studied Russian in college, which was buried under Japanese during two years in Okinawa.  My Arabic education was too short (2 classes), and immersion was only a year, so I even have trouble sounding out pronunciations anymore.  Finally studied Turkish for a year before working in Turkey for three years.  I then picked up a little Tok Pisin while in Papua New Guinea the past two years, but really only a few words.

These days, if I try to reference even pleasantries in Japanese, Russian or Turkish, I can usually count on the wrong language coming out.  On a few select occasions I have even started a sentence in one language and finished it in another! :/

Thinking of using some of my education benefits to go back to formal university study of Turkish and Russian.  I have always wanted to add French, so perhaps I will consider a second Baccalaureate in linguistics once I retire. 

Respect. I'm not terribly familiar with Russian or Turkish but I know Japanese is HARD.

At least french, spanish and italian are all kind of related!

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12 hours ago, Stumpy said:

Respect. I'm not terribly familiar with Russian or Turkish but I know Japanese is HARD.

At least french, spanish and italian are all kind of related!

Correct! French, Spanish, Italian, Portugese, Romanian and Rato-Romansh (sp?) are all based upon Classical Latin. Romansh is only spoken in a few valleys in Eastern Switzerland.

In other news: modern German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Afrikans (South Africa) are all based on Old German.

But it gets confusing when a language includes two or more roots. For example, modern English many be based upon the dialects imported by Germanic-speaking  invaders from Jutland (Denmark), Anglia (Germany), Saxony (Germany) and plenty of Vikings (Scandinavia), the language adopted almost half its words from the French invaders who arrive in 1066. While William the Conqueror may have spoken French when he landed in 1066, he was the 5 th generation grandson of "Rollo the Viking" so English nobility spoke French for many centuries.

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