Tadaima, Meiri

[IdolEyes787]

Shay also says that a smile is universal, so all of them.

[shaina]

Shay also says that a smile is universal, so all of them.

[shaina]

Shay says the Pig Latin also counts as a foreign language, so Pig Latin.

Ywhay ouyay osay uglyway!?

Fakalete + ewa elsma ikla oopa

I can say i prefer Yiddish as a second language, but every time i read Mackys posts, i have to relearn English

[mjmacky]

Pardon. In better keeping with the spirit of the internet I shall now post a bunch of words while doing my best to avoid answering your question.

I can speak French because I'm Canadian though it would probably make more sense if I was French.
I can speak a mean Latin because I'm pretty sure that at some point someone is going to invent time travel and I needed to make a case for being a candidate.
I can say "Get the fuck out of my fucking way, you fucking asshat" in Italian because I used to race bicycles and sadly, you can't always count on a thrown water bottle hitting someone in the head.

Shay says the Pig Latin also counts as a foreign language, so Pig Latin.

Assuming you're comfortable with French, or even with English for that matter, can you imagine coming up blank for a word just because you worked so diligently at cementing the same word in, let's say, Arabic? That seems a little crazy for me, granted I haven't used it in like 4 years, but still. It's like forgetting how to count...

Fuck, I think I forgot how to count.

[mjmacky]

One whore, two whore, three whore, four
The ugly ones go out the door
Five whore, six whore, seven whore, eight
No more need to masturbate
Nine whore, ten whore, and double digits
To pluralize I did forgets
Too many whores, grammar can wait
Especially the need to conjugate

[IdolEyes787]

Assuming you're comfortable with French, or even with English for that matter, can you imagine coming up blank for a word just because you worked so diligently at cementing the same word in, let's say, Arabic? That seems a little crazy for me, granted I haven't used it in like 4 years, but still. It's like forgetting how to count...

Fuck, I think I forgot how to count.

It's called growing old.The good news if that you only have to deal with it for a finite amount of time.

[Snee]

Has anyone else undertaken the task of studying multiple languages over their lifetime?

I was having a difficult time remembering the days of the week in Japanese until I took a systematic approach behind their meanings. I finally conquered it, and then I forgot how to say most of them in Serbian. This is strange to me because I used to be able to say them with a natural sort of feeling, whereas I struggle to recall them in Spanish and German and my ability to recall them hasn't really changed.

What's going on here?

It happens, if you've studied them intensely during, say, a year, and then cease using them. If you've kept at it for far longer, it's much harder to lose a language, however. I've also found that with a second language, my accents can change and fluency, or rather flow, can come and go fairly rapidly, depending on how much I use it.

I studied norwegian, danish, russian and english in an organised setting, with the aim of being able to speak them, and on top of that I studied japanese and dutch on my own.

Added to that I've had classes on finnish grammar, and absorbed enough out of several other languages to have a basic vocabulary, and use simple sentences in each.


These days the only languages I am fluent in are swedish and english, and my english accent has gone from eton-ish (the version I was primarily instructed in), through welsh-seeming (the welsh intonation is closer to my native dialect, and I wasn't speaking much english), into a heavily accented mess, and then, in around six months time into something somewhere between GA and some unspecified canadian accent (I now live with an american woman, but there's something about how canadians use their vowels, that rhymes with my native tongue).

I lost norwegian and danish, because I speak swedish, and what with swedish, norwegian and danish being close enough to be nearly be dialects of the same language, I didn't need the others, and they fell out of use. I still understand them just fine, I just don't use them back.

I lost dutch (though I can understand it somewhat, still), because I didn't need it at all, so got no practice.

I lost russian, because who the hell needs russian.

I lost japanese through lack of practice, though I could probably have kept it if I'd have stuck with the anime.

When I say lost, I'm not saying I don't understand one iota, but I don't really understand everything anymore, except in the case of danish and norwegian, where I understand, I just can't pronounce.


edit: I should note that I seem to be genetically predisposed for learning languages (my sister speaks japanese like a native, according to natives, after a relatively short period of studies, to name but one example), so I never had to work very hard to pick up a language, when I did, and because I didn't need, or engaged in, many exercises with repetition in mind, maybe it didn't settle in my long term memory very well, as it were.

If you're like me, maybe you need to put in more work at grinding in what you know in serbian, through repetition. But then again, your wife was serbian, so idk

[megabyteme]

As a 'Merkin, I say if God wanted me to speak like a foreigner, He would have just forsaken me to begin with...

[IdolEyes787]

As a 'Merkin, I say if God wanted me to speak like a foreigner, He would have just forsaken me to begin with...

If God had intended America to try and placate foreigners, He would haven't given it so many guns.


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[megabyteme]

As a 'Merkin, I say if God wanted me to speak like a foreigner, He would have just forsaken me to begin with...

If God had intended America to try and placate foreigners, He would haven't given it so many guns.