Languages

[Acklow]

I find it strange. Mexico is right next to USA but Spanish isn't a compulsory subject.
China is like all the way on the other side of the planet, but Mandarin is required o___o.
Poor neighbor.

Anyway, if you guys need help in Mandarin, you can always ask me. I'd be willing to help.

I'm pretty sure some schools in the south require learning Mexican Spanish seeing as there is a large population of Mexican immigrants in the south. Chinese is becoming increasingly important for US citizens to know if they plan on doing any sort of business internationally as a lot of services are outsourced to China. Spanish, German, and Chinese were offered in my high school as electives. I took 4 semesters in Chinese (Mandarin) but because the teacher had a hard time controlling the class it was hard to retain anything. I would like to relearn Chinese down the road but that's not a major priority for me yet.

 

[bb skarm]

Completely fluent in both French and English and am taking up Arabic as I am of Lebanese heritage and prioritized the other two languages for some stupid reason. I learnt French and English both by school and house tongue respectively. I have a tutor for Arabic who comes regularly.

When I was 12ish I took Chinese/Mandarin for an elective and was pretty bad at it and ended up taking a secondary programming class, how the fuck do you Asians speak that shit?

 

[gvmgvm40]

I'm fluent in Turkish and English, lower intermediate in German, and I have a basic knowledge of French and Spanish. I can also read and write simpler texts in Old Anatolian and Ottoman Turkish.

The cool thing about Turkic languages is that they are pretty closely related so I can understand a bunch of languages like Gagauz, Azeri, Crimean Tatar, Turkmen, Uyghur and Uzbek pretty easily. Hell, I'm pretty sure if the political situation was different, these would be called dialects and not separate languages.

Language fascinates me. I want to start learning Persian and Greek sometime.

EDIT:

Just btw, when are you even permitted to call yourself multilungual? To what extent of your knowledge of a particular language can you say you "know it"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILR_scale
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common...ference_for_Languages#Common_reference_levels

 

[Cresselia~~]

Completely fluent in both French and English and am taking up Arabic as I am of Lebanese heritage and prioritized the other two languages for some stupid reason. I learnt French and English both by school and house tongue respectively. I have a tutor for Arabic who comes regularly.

When I was 12ish I took Chinese/Mandarin for an elective and was pretty bad at it and ended up taking a secondary programming class, how the fuck do you Asians speak that shit?

I think it's difficult only because it's so different.
Like when I took French when I was 13 ish, I was completely shocked why some languages are like that. I had never encountered such complex grammar before. (especially the verbs!!) Back then we thought the English "is", "am" and "are" were complex enough. We thought memorizing the past tense for English verbs was a hell lot of work already, but French absolutely took it to a whole new level.

 

[Rugi]

I speak Spanish and English. I'm learning Japanese. I actually tried to learn French but I found it boring as I had no passion for the culture and the language itself isn't that new or interesting to me as it shares a lot of rules and has a lot of similar words to both Spanish and English. I guess I find it easier to study Japanese just because of how absurdly different it is. Interestingly with effort I can get a somewhat correct interpretation of the text of other Latin languages simply by knowing Spanish. It even helps me out in English class as I can tell which words have Latin origin.

 

[destinyunknown]

I speak Spanish and English fluently, can understand Italian (and speak a bit), and I used to study French but I have to pick it up because I've forgotten most of it.

Side note, Smogon helped me immensely to improve my English

 

[internet]

I have to use the context to remember whether I read something in English or Dutch.

 

[strawberry]

I speak English which I mostly learned myself with school helping out, and Serbian since it's my native language. Learning Russian is absolutely on my to-do list, I already have some basic knowledge of the language and since it does have similarities with Serbian it shouldn't be too difficult to get into. I'd love to learn Italian as well because how fascinated I am with it, and I just like how the language sounds overall. I'm not too sure that I'll bother to learn it though, It's probably going to end up with me saying "Damn, I should really learn Italian" from time to time, and never going through with it.

 

[dwarfstar]

I'm only fluent in English. I used to know some Hebrew when I was a kid, but I've long since forgotten almost all of it. I studied Japanese for three years in high school and my first quarter in college, but going two years without practice means I'm starting to lose my grip (I no longer have a good accent and I'm starting to forget some of the kanji and vocabulary that I've learned, although my grammar is still as good as ever). I was exposed to bits and pieces of Yiddish growing up, and I'm making an effort to use it more often and learn more of the language because it's more or less dead at this point, which is a damn shame because it's wonderfully expressive. I can't really recall any specific methods of learning I used when I was learning the languages that I studied in a formal setting (Hebrew and Japanese), mostly because I have enough of a natural talent for languages that I never really had to work much at it (barring some of the more complex kanji).

 

[Bughouse]

Native English, more or less fluent in Spanish. Formerly more or less fluent in Hebrew, but I haven't spoken it in ~9 years so it's basically gone, though I bet I could pick it up again.

Unfortunately, anyone learning languages at this point in their life is at a supreme disadvantage. You will basically never have the fluency of a native speaker, which is why I said "more or less" above with regards to my non-native languages. It's science. I can have studied Spanish for almost a decade and have lived abroad in Spain for a few months, but that does not make me fluent. Proficient, perhaps. But I personally think people use the term fluent way too loosely.

http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies?language=en

 

[Thatsjustpeachy]

I notice that quite a lot of you are learning Mandarin. Why is that? Is it trendy in your place?

I often see people pick between Spanish, French, or German here in the US. I remember having to learn Spanish in middle school but none of it stuck with me since I had no interest in it. Then in high school I had no interest in the Euro languages either. I mainly thought about whether or not a language class out of the ones available in high school would be worth the time investment and came to the conclusion that it wasn't. How many people forget the language they learned in school or got no usefulness out of it besides some small chitchat? Happens in too many cases. Even if you do have the dedication and interest, oftentimes it's more of a hobby.

I was required to take some language/culture courses so I was forced to reconsider learning another language. I had heard about the easy grades for the beginner courses and there were a ton more languages to choose from in college. I ended up picking Chinese since it was challenging, different from the norm (in my opinion), and I figured if I did get any good at it I could communicate with like the 1 billion mandarin speaking population. Now that I finished my required courses, I still keep up with my Chinese studies outside of class by speaking with friends and reading novels. Making new friends with the large population of Asian international students was probably the reason why I didn't lose my drive. I could live in China pretty comfortably now at my level though I still suck at writing (拼音输入万岁）.

Probably just a coincidence that there are a couple Chinese speakers on smogon. From what I know, Mandarin isn't really a common choice for US students. Most high schools don't offer it and the college courses were very small in size compared to the other languages. Then you also have to factor in the Asian Americans who already know the language to a proficient degree and are just in it for the super easy A. I remember back when doing business with China was a big thing and Chinese course enrollments were high for the job opportunities. Nowadays, more and more Chinese students are required to learn English (with many wanting to study in the US as well) and the gamble for Americans is too much especially after the recession. The Chinese businesses hiring for English speaking talent can now just look at their own nation's talent pool or grab someone who studied abroad in the US. So I wouldn't say it is trendy at all from a practical side either.

 

[Chou Toshio]

I find it strange. Mexico is right next to USA but Spanish isn't a compulsory subject.
China is like all the way on the other side of the planet, but Mandarin is required o___o.
Poor neighbor.

Anyway, if you guys need help in Mandarin, you can always ask me. I'd be willing to help.

I dunno, why don't all Hong Kong folks speak Mandarin, or study Vietnamese? Value of a language is just like value for anything-- it's demand-driven.

For Americans, we speak English as our first language, the world's primary language for trade, science, academics, and even diplomacy. In a sense, Americans can just "fall back on English" at almost any stage in their lives. Inversely, America is a diverse country-- we may not be as ethnically or religiously diverse as China or India just in the number of minority groups, but we're very diverse in the sense of being "an immigrant nation" with people of backgrounds from all over the world-- and international trade ties just as diverse. Who is to say what tongue could be of greatest use for any 1 American youth-- which is why where possible, we'd rather provide choice.

China has the biggest population in the world, the second biggest economy, and the greatest economic growth. It's simple sense that these powerful market forces would motivate accelerated enrollment in classes and development of Chinese education programs. Spanish is also a highly useful language in my opinion-- but compared to Mandarin? :/

Of course the reality is that retention is very poor-- western student retention of Asian languages is very poor, but American retention of 2nd languages is ALSO poor in general. College students may sign up in bulk to take Chinese, but not be motivated enough to master it-- because it's difficult, and primarily because we still got that English to fall back on.

Japan is actually in a very similar boat. English is mandatory and has been for years, but Japan is one of the poorest English-speaking countries in Asia, despite being the wealthiest. More likely, because it is the wealthiest. When you reach something like the wealth and economic scale of a US or Japan, it's hard to motivate the youth to learn language when most see themselves not needing it to get through life. Those who succeed in picking up a second language are usually driven by fun/interest rather than a sense of urgency.

Ironically, this lethargy is self-feeding. Because people of the 1st and 3rd largest economies in the world suck so hard at learning 2nd languages, the global demand for English and Japanese skills remains so solid. People elsewhere are driven to pick up English or Japanese because they want to do business with those countries-- which in turn makes it less necessary for Americans and Japanese to learn other languages.

Mandarin Chinese is of course, the other language of immense value. I think that the difficulty of acquisition of each of these languages along with the fact that they're all extremely unique from each other puts them on an even higher pedistol. (Japanese and Chinese share no linguistic roots-- the systems of these languages are totally different, and the only transferable skills are the shared Chinese characters, and Japanese having some Chinese loan words as a result).
Getting Chinese, English, and Japanese is a totally different project than adding on other western languages. The difficulty enforces scarcity and further drives demand.

As for myself, I am Fluent in Japanese for all intents and purposes. Despite being from a Japanese background, I'm proud of the fact that I'm self-taught, and that my second language was acquired. I also speak Mandarin Chinese at an intermediate level-- again, despite being of Chinese ancestry as well, it's self-acquired.

Ironically, intermediate Chinese is not all that useful in China when you are a Chinese American-- they look at you and say "Why is your Chinese so AWFUL--!"
(though Japanese people have no expectation for us Japanese Americans to speak Japanese(

BUT intermediate Chinese is pretty useful when you meet a Chinese person in Japan. "OMG 你说中文!!!" (OMG you speak Chinese!!)

 

[Cresselia~~]

I dunno, why don't all Hong Kong folks speak Mandarin, or study Vietnamese? Value of a language is just like value for anything-- it's demand-driven.

For Americans, we speak English as our first language, the world's primary language for trade, science, academics, and even diplomacy. In a sense, Americans can just "fall back on English" at almost any stage in their lives. Inversely, America is a diverse country-- we may not be as ethnically or religiously diverse as China or India just in the number of minority groups, but we're very diverse in the sense of being "an immigrant nation" with people of backgrounds from all over the world-- and international trade ties just as diverse. Who is to say what tongue could be of greatest use for any 1 American youth-- which is why where possible, we'd rather provide choice.

China has the biggest population in the world, the second biggest economy, and the greatest economic growth. It's simple sense that these powerful market forces would motivate accelerated enrollment in classes and development of Chinese education programs. Spanish is also a highly useful language in my opinion-- but compared to Mandarin? :/

)

We all speak Mandarin. It's a compulsory subject from kindergarten onwards.
Just that we don't want to speak it outside class because China's forcing us to forget about our own language. We just need to prioritize our own language first. It's about priority and preference.
Just like how all French people know how to speak English but are unwilling to speak English to tourists.
Plus most people born in the 80's and 90's know Japanese-- it's a country close to us, right? An increasing amount of people are also learning Korean these days.
We are doing very well in understanding our neighbors.

Verses USA, which only has Mexico and Canada as neighboring countries. Canada speaks English. And USA has made no efforts in understanding Mexico?
I just feel very bad for Mexico.

 

[Chou Toshio]

We all speak Mandarin. It's a compulsory subject from kindergarten onwards.
Just that we don't want to speak it outside class because China's forcing us to forget about our own language. We just need to prioritize our own language first. It's about priority and preference.
Just like how all French people know how to speak English but are unwilling to speak English to tourists.
Plus most people born in the 80's and 90's know Japanese-- it's a country close to us, right? An increasing amount of people are also learning Korean these days.
We are doing very well in understanding our neighbors.

Verses USA, which only has Mexico and Canada as neighboring countries. Canada speaks English. And USA has made no efforts in understanding Mexico?
I just feel very bad for Mexico.

Not all people in HK speak Mandarin well or comfortably-- which what I was talking about; and physically Vietnam is much closer to HK than Japan or Korea. Culturally much closer too. Why don't HK people rush to learn Vietnamese?

Because the language doesn't carry the economic value of Japanese, or even Korean.

Regardless, it's clear we have very different values.

The US is a country built on independence and individual freedoms-- where as I have no idea what kind of value drives an idea that physical proximity should determine some arbitrary social responsibility to learn a language.

In this global world we live in, physical proximity is hardly an important driver in the value of language and culture studies-- this is certainly true for people of a country central to the world economy like the US, but is pretty much true anywhere.

 

[Soul Fly]

^Chou, I've heard that there is so much cultural mixing of the eastern countries, particularly between Japan, South Korea, and China (mainly Hong Kong) that people pick up a smattering of all three despite being a native of one nation if they travelled around a lot. Especially multi-national executives.

I'm personally trilingual (more actually given that i am well versed in 2 different dialects of one) and equally fluent at all of the languages. I also know broken French that I picked up in school, but I never bothered with it later.

Also I wanted to learn a vastly different language, I was thinking Japanese, because I already know a Germanic language, and the Indo European family. I want to learn a language with a completely insulated cultural root and syntax. That's like one of the farthest major language.

But the language is really baller. :/ informal Japanese is different for deferent (formal) Japanese which is different from the very strict 'business' Japanese used in white collar workspaces. Given that it has little use to me beyond maybe being on bleeding edge of otaku culture I'm on the edge here.

 

[Chou Toshio]

^Chou, I've heard that there is so much cultural mixing of the eastern countries, particularly between Japan, South Korea, and China (mainly Hong Kong) that people pick up a smattering of all three despite being a native of one nation if they travelled around a lot. Especially multi-national executives.

I don't think that's correct-- not even of traveling executives, but definitely not the common folk. Sure there are people from international or cross backgrounds (like the Koreans living in Japan) but looking at the whole picture, it's a really, really small percent.

I would say Koreans who speak Japanese would be the most common-- those two languages DO have common roots (Altaic language family, related to the Mongol and Turkic languages) and my understanding is that the grammar is near identical. Koreans can learn Japanese very easily, and the reverse is mostly true as well-- but considering the aforementioned Japanese lethargy, non-Korean Japanese who speak Korean are very rare.

Taiwan is kind of in a different boat since their education system was built by the Japanese during ww2-- so the oldest generation all speak Japanese, and Japanese culture is highly popular with younger gens-- there are lots of Taiwanese who speak Japanese. You can meet many Chinese who have studied Japanese (professional reasons or interest in Japan's much more developed pop culture), but the reverse is again a very rare breed. Looking at the broader billion of China's population, a few million Japanese speakers is a drop in the bucket.

HK is really different because of it's small size and international background.

One thing for sure is that it's totally incomparable to Europe. East Asian relationships are "tolerant" at best.

Also I wanted to learn a vastly different language, I was thinking Japanese, because I already know a Germanic language, and the Indo European family. I want to learn a language with a completely insulated cultural root and syntax. That's like one of the farthest major language.

But the language is really baller. :/ informal Japanese is different for deferent (formal) Japanese which is different from the very strict 'business' Japanese used in white collar workspaces. Given that it has little use to me beyond maybe being on bleeding edge of otaku culture I'm on the edge here.

It's true the most challenging aspect of Japanese is all the multiplicity of forms. You've touched on the different ways of speaking, but we also have 3 writing systems, and learning Kanji is generally much more difficult than Hanzi in Chinese-- for one because characters are less simplified (Japanese kanji are more simplified than the traditional Hanzi used by the Taiwanese commonly, but are still more complex than the simplified Hanzi used in China), but moreso because of the multiplicity of readings. In Chinese, the vast majority of characters have only 1 pronunciation, with just some exceptions. In Japanese, practically all kanji have 2, typically 3 or 4 different pronunciations. The trade off is that Japanese do use fewer kanji (2000 needed to read most of Japanese, maybe 3-4000 for Chinese), but this is hardly consolation for a western language learner new to character reading, just trying to remember the first 10-20, and learning the basics of stroke order/writing.

Than there are male/female speech differences, difference even in just casual speech styles, and dialects. Japanese dialects are much more similar to standard than in Chinese, but this also means they get more air time and no subtitles. Not being able to at least understand Kansai dialect is an issue for people looking to emerge in the culture.

These are just the hardest parts of the language-- but Japanese has it's simpler sides too, like very limited range of sounds and alphabets with 100% uniform phonetics (none of this "read or read?" crap). Also, while Japanese is "tonal", mistakes in tone rarely affect a person's ability to communicate (unlike in Chinese). Most importantly, Tokyo probably creates more media content than any city in the world besides Hollywood. A well-developed and internationally influential pop culture = LOTS of great study material.

 

[Cresselia~~]

^Chou, I've heard that there is so much cultural mixing of the eastern countries, particularly between Japan, South Korea, and China (mainly Hong Kong) that people pick up a smattering of all three despite being a native of one nation if they travelled around a lot. Especially multi-national executives.

If you mean pop culture and fashion trends, then this might be the case. Especially fashion trends is really shared.

 

[g]

Well i fluently speak Italian for obvious reasons and English a little bit less fluently (gotta work on it) and I have a decent knowledge of Spanish since I took courses for six years + I know Latin decently and I discovered I can also get something out of written Romanian fsr. I also tried to get into languages such as Russian and I know the alphabet well but only know basic phrases/names at the moment.

Привет!

 

[PumpedAaron]

I've spent time dabbling and language learning too, but I don't think I've ever stuck with it deep and long enough for it to really transform my linguistic resources, practically speaking...

Hm let's see, I took Spanish classes a lot as a child, one Japanese class, most recently French classes for about 2 school years, and most recently, I'm trying to learn Thai using Internet resources such as Google Translate, and various organizations or info hubs I found by searching for it :P.

 

[Fishin]

I've been casually studying Japanese for a couple years now and gotten good enough that I can generally play video games in Japanese without having to look at a dictionary constantly. Can confirm that the minor differences between kanji are a real source of headaches, it took me awhile to realize that, say, 冥 and 真 were different, and I oftentimes end up relying on context for differentiation between multiple similar characters, though I would guess even native speakers often do with certain things like 力 vs カ. Then again Japanese is an extremely contextual language anyways what with half of sentences having the subject implied so it feels kind of appropriate somehow.

 

[Chou Toshio]

I've been casually studying Japanese for a couple years now and gotten good enough that I can generally play video games in Japanese without having to look at a dictionary constantly. Can confirm that the minor differences between kanji are a real source of headaches, it took me awhile to realize that, say, 冥 and 真 were different, and I oftentimes end up relying on context for differentiation between multiple similar characters, though I would guess even native speakers often do with certain things like 力 vs カ. Then again Japanese is an extremely contextual language anyways what with half of sentences having the subject implied so it feels kind of appropriate somehow.

And somehow the Koreans were the only ones in north east Asia to realize the Chinese character system is stupid and awful, and that they should make a new writing system that makes sense.

I think English, Chinese, and Japanese can all look at Korean and see that it IS possible to make writing that is logical, easily mastered, and effective.

(By enabling wide-spread literacy, Hangul would spark a cultural renaissance of literature, performing, and folk arts in Korea-- didn't hurt that the Koreans invented the metal-mechanic printing press at about the same time. How many centuries later would common Chinese and Japanese become literate?)

 

[Fishin]

Yeah, I've always thought it was really cool how a monarch was able to go "You know what, our language has some major issues" and actually do something to imrpove it. Then again Chinese has traditional vs simplified so they at least tried to make things better too.

 

[Cresselia~~]

And somehow the Koreans were the only ones in north east Asia to realize the Chinese character system is stupid and awful, and that they should make a new writing system that makes sense.

I think English, Chinese, and Japanese can all look at Korean and see that it IS possible to make writing that is logical, easily mastered, and effective.

I do not agree.
Korean writing does have its problems especially when it comes to homophones. There is not a way to distinguish homophones with distinct meanings if written in Korean.
Many Koreans nowadays do need to use Chinese in certain occasions just to specify things, especially when it comes to the meaning of their names. (That they will always keep the Chinese version of their names)

As I recall, Japan once tried to abolish the use of Kanji, and then failed miserably because Japanese do have a problem of having too many homophones.
From what I've heard of, there's a generation of Japanese people who aren't good at writing Kanji as a result.

And no, I don't think 冥 and 真 look alike at all. They look very different to me, and are written very differently. You just need more practice.

 

[Fishin]

I haven't gotten those two mixed up in a long time, it's the sort of mistake that's easy to make when you're learning though since they have a similar general shape even if the composing characters are different. Something like 滅 vs 減 is probably a better/worse example.

 

[Gale Wing Srock]

I learned Hindi and Tamil as my Native and English in School. I really like Spanish, and was actively trying to learn it, but then got lazy. French is something that interests me too. Learning method is just hearing people speak, learning the words, pronunciation, grammar and writing. I never got past words for Spanish, lol. Would love to start it back again.