Foreign languages

Is anyone here currently trying to become fluent in a foreign language? If yes, how are you approaching the task? I am still trying to regain the conversational German that I lost after I graduated from college but German tourists have been slim pickings in my area for a few months now. However, Youtube videos have been a decent alternative though. At least I've greatly improved my vocabulary and reading skills thanks to the all-mighty internet.

I haff good been at zer jerman ja!

Took some German 20 or so years ago but recall only a little.

I've found that the conversational skills are the first thing to go when you don't use a language on a daily basis. It's much more difficult to regain those skills compared to learning vocabulary and grammar.

I think I can say that I am pretty fluent in english.

My Dutch gets better everyday but boy is it a struggle, I have no feeling for languages at all.

I'm ok understanding the people from this area, but go to the next town and I can not understand a word of what they say, the dialect is so different it's almost a foreign language

I have been told that I speak without an accent but others say I speak like someone from this town

Wife and son are both fluent in English, and my wife also speaks German and French as well as her native Dutch.

Thanks for sharing this Alicatt!


One of the things that strikes me the most as an American is just how radically different accents and dialects of the same language can exist within relatively small geographic distances in Europe. Of course there are different accents within the US but I never once in my life found it impossible to understand what another American was saying. The difference just isn't as radical as what you will find in Europe. I have a good friend from the North Rhine Westphalen region of Germany and he told me a story about how he attended a wedding and several of the guests were from the Swabia region and he literally could not understand anything they were saying. He said it was essentially a foreign language to him.

Exhibit A: Ebonics
Exhibit B: "Steve from Wichita", the hotline guy

When we first moved to a village here in Worcestershire there was a most friendly old geezer, who had never left the village and was a casual labourer on local farms all his life who used to come and chat as we worked on the new garden. couldn't understand a word he said until we got attuned to his 'Aysum' (Evesham, nearest market town) dialect after a few months. He must have thought us townies were idiots.

Worked for a few months on a store opening up in the N.E. of England. Had to make out I was slightly hard of hearing and 'could you speak slowly and louder please', so I could make out what they were saying to me. As for Glasgow, Belfast and Londonderry, well, every word addressed to me sounded to my London ears like a threat to my person

Had to take French in school for G9, 10 and G11-13 if one wanted to go to university. Was Parisian French so pretty much useless here. A friend in HS was Quebec French and barely passed French class. Have lost most of the conversational Quebec French I learned over the years from lack of use.

Pretty fluent in English and Russian, my German and Serbian usually take about 2 weeks being in the country to come fully back to me. My French is enough to buy stuff and read the paper, but not to have a meaningful conversation.

I would start re-learning the basics first, in the following order:
1) The verbs Haben/Sein
2) Expressions of time
3) EACH DAY, practice the following table until you've memorized it by heart: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8f/89/64/8f8964eded93c38a89954d0fe9638815.png

If you learn this table early, when you start learning to apply grammatical cases you'll pick it up much quicker. It also allows you to puzzle together sentences like a native (oh, here it's den, so it's either a masculine or a plural word)
4) "where", "where to" and "where from"
5) "to", "at", "in", "on", "from"
6) the mein sein dein ihr unser table
7) "which", "that" , "who"
8) negatives (no one, nothing, not yet, etc...)
9)Adverbs of quantities and degrees
10) Adverbs of position and direction
11) "how", "so", "also"

12) And only after all that, you start with the grammatical stuff of present/past/future tenses, and the application of the grammatical cases.

Whilst continuing practicing grammar, continue on with:
13) sein, in combination with sitting, standing, lying, to put
14) sein in a negative context (i have not, you are not, she isn't, etc..)
15) getting married, divorced, being born
16) dying, being ill, hurting, loving, liking
17) verbs of motion (fahren, gehen, etc..)
18) spelling and grammar rules (when to capitalize, when to use a point in a date, etc...) this should already be familiar from the "time" lesson

Reading german children's books and watching german children TV is a great way to practice the language, although i personally prefer watching commercials/infomercials.and reading about subjects that i already know like the back of my hand.

Also, the best way for me to learn a language, besides living there, is to ONLY watch news/tv/movies from that country or dubbed in that language. If you can receive/stream ARD, ZDF, WDR or RTL, that would be outstanding help, but there are plenty of german TV shows and movies worth watching (the Heimat 1/2/3 Chronik and Goodbye Lenin, are among my favorites)

Replacing the labels on my bottles with the ones from the country and before using something is also a good one, first repeating what's on the package 3 times (this is not for everyone, but I have plenty of time and OCD, so it works for me)

@Alicatt: it's not you, some flemish dialect have more to do with Klingon than with Dutch. In The Netherlands, we actually had the "Jambers Quiz" going on for a couple of years, where the objective of the contestants was to translate a belgian dialect sentence without subtitles, into proper Dutch. It was hilarious!

Did it happen to be the Newcastle area?

Wow Vaderini, thanks for that extremely detailed and helpful post! I will be saving that one.

Did 4 years of French in university but have forgotten most of it. I can bumble through a ( toddler level ) conversation in most of Northern France but have great difficulty understanding Quebec french and hardly get a word in northern New Brunswick

It's been a real eye opener for me to find out that Parisian French and Quebec French are indeed very different.

Quebecois: donnez-moi le hammer compared to donnez-moi le marteau

Sounds more like Franglais.

I was thinking the same thing. The equivalent where I live is called "Spanglish".

Interesting timing as I was thinking about this just today. Early this morning I posted that I'm wrapping up Assembly language, the last difficult subject in my current study term. The next one will begin next week and we'll finally get started on Russian (wife's been bugging me, the highly-disciplined studious type...I bring fun, passion and music, but lack direction and long-term motivation...this combo should work).

What made you curious about learning Russian? Being in LA I figured it would have been French.

Me: Fascination with 80's Cold War.
Wife: Already reading up on Russian vacation (possibly not until Anniversary #40 in 7.5 years), wants to see a ballet in St. Petersburg or Moscow (will visit both).

I can see that. Most of the Russian words I know I learned from watching HFRO, Firefox and 2010. No joke!

Since we're not in the '50s...

My Cold War playlist Cold War & Space tunes... includes renditions of the Soviet National Anthem (first time I heard it was HFRO). I've heard both Russian and English versions back-to-back so many times that I think I already understand some of the Russian version!

Of course, I won't know for sure until I study it.

I learnt Russian at school, instead of German, Italian or French. Was in the Soviet Union in 1991, a few months before the elements of the Soviet army was used in/to oppose the autumn coup, but the tensions on the streets were palpable.

Well I wish you the best since you will be learning a new language AND a new alphabet.

I knew this was the right place to be!

Except that we're missing Airdrop...

==========
St. Louis University School of Law, Juris Doctorate

- Graduated cum laude

- American Jurisprudence Excellence Award – Civil Procedure

- The University of Kansas, B.A., Political Science with Russian language concentration

- Kansas Honor Scholar
==========

I still think of him from time to time. RIP


He's long gone now but we used to have a Russian born SimHQ member by the name of "SIM". I believe he became a USAF pilot.

It's pretty much the same alphabet, except that the Russian letters are mirrored.

You gotta love games that do this, like EA's 688 Attack Sub (1991) with backwards "R"s and "N"s simply replacing their English counterparts.

BTW, the developer of 688 Attack Sub/SSN-21 Seawolf, John Ratcliff (along with Paul Grace) is co-author of my first dedicated game programming book that I'm about to tackle.

We had a super hot teacher in high school for French Language, full class, always!

How much French do you still remember?

There was a super hot one at our local high school too... Thank goodness I had already left school and I was in the process of divorcing my ex
She really could not eat garlic, it would make her ill, always made me suspicious if she was actually French


Still don't know any French, maybe it was because I only gave it lip service ...

LOL!!! A brilliant use of innuendo there Alicatt.

I didn't take French in high school but my wife did, and our school also had a beautiful French teacher (definitely my type, even as a grown woman and even looked French to me).

Hi Mrs. Rougeau!

++++++++++

Russian lessons start Wednesday, I'll make the occasional progress post.

Хорошо, товариш Марк!

I took russian as a second foreign language in high school. It was more because the teacher had no authority than other things, like 90% of my school mates. It was during the end of Yeltsin begining of Putin era, a period when Russia made headlines nearly every months. So the little game we had was asking our teacher (an orthodox priest from Russia) what he was thinking of an event. Obviously the only thing I learnt is I can read russian, and some sentences. The russian grammar is a hell, but to be honnest russian alphabet is pretty simple, a pure phonetical alphabet, one letter one sound.

Like 99% of french kids the first foreign language I learnt is english, like I said russian was the second, and I took spanish as a third foreign language. I was nearly fluent in spanish when I left school, but no practice since then, I lost everything. About english, I learnt more on the web, watching sports, movies, series and playing video games than at school.

I can count to ten, that;s it

And that is about the extent of what I remember from my high school Spanish.


Wheels

When we went as a whole family (22 of us) to Catalunya in 2017 I used a little app on my iPhone called Google Translate, the woman who had rented their villa to us could speak only a little Spanish as she spoke Catalan, we both used the app on our phones to talk with each other, it worked

Where we were it was almost a half hour drive to the nearest shop and bakery, the owner of the bakery could speak English

Think the French make croissants?
Catalonian croissants!

The photo looks like it was photoshopped.

It comes from you though so I know it is genuine. I had no clue such massive croissants even existed.

^ Lol, Alicatt!

++++++++++

I haven't looked into it yet, but I wonder what Cortana speech translation is like? A Win10 feature I might actually enable if it does what I need it to. There's also a big Win10 update now available, maybe with enhanced language/translation features? I'll want to experiment with this...

Why German is Awesome:



Epitaph for a productive chicken.

heh! It was really a display model from the bakery, my wife and I bought it as a joke to say we could only get the one croissant, it was freshly baked and it did taste good too.

Marko Ramius now has an account on my laptop (using JPG vs. PNG for size).



Using Microsoft Translator at the moment to translate my Russian speech into English. Cortana may be useful in the future (includes a full conversational translator?), I just don't feel like making a Microsoft account to access it.

I'm still at the flash card stage, I'll post some Russian in my own handwriting soon (along with some cool math...graphing calculators are freaking amazing).

Marko Ramius did indeed speak Russian but his native language was Lithuanian.

Having said that, I like that desktop!