I'd love to know...

[kristinat0rz]

Are you learning a language? Do you already know more than 1 language? What way(s) did you learn? Did you think your learning methods were successful/helpful?

But mostly I want to meet and talk to people who are learning another language, or even just interested in learning another language. ^^

A little bit about me: My name is Kristin, I'm 20 years old and I live in Alaska. I'm currently learning Mandarin Chinese through a class at my university, but I am also self studying Korean (though not much progress has been made because I have little time).

[Tc Frorleivus Almus Ph]

I'd like to pop in and contribute to your thread!

I am learning a language. I do know more than one already.
How I learned is a complicated process. Several of the languages I'm studying are ancient or dead languages, so immersion isn't exactly an easy possibility. Several of the languages also have very scarce resources. Based on what I do already, I'd say they were pretty successful in terms of myself. If I were to apply my method to someone who has no linguistic background, it probably wouldn't work out well for them.

I'm always interested in meeting people learning languages too!

I'm 26 and am studying to be a historical linguist. :B

[Pugnacious Banana]

i'm from scotland so english is my first language.

i studied french in primary/highschool for 6-7 years. it was successful i guess since i still remember most of what i learned even though i'm not using it often.

i studied latin in university for 6 months. it was great at the time and i felt like i learned a lot but i forgot pretty much everything right away when i stopped studying.

i've been self-studying japanese off and on for a few years using a few different textbooks. it hasn't been all that successful (not a failure but my level is nowhere near where it should be) because i either haven't had a lot of time to focus on studying or didn't feel motivated when i did have time usually. when i was focusing on the textbooks they were helpful though so i guess i'll get back into it sometime. going to japan and getting practice speaking and listening to people helps too.

i started learning korean a few months ago partly studying by myself, partly meeting with a korean coworker weekly who would teach me (i also had a few informal lessons with a canadian guy here who speaks korean) and partly just by being in korea and having to read things and speak to people (i live in korea now). it's not going too badly but it could be better if i actually focused on studying by myself more often.

[kristinat0rz]

Tc Frorleivus Almus Ph

I'd like to pop in and contribute to your thread!

I am learning a language. I do know more than one already.
How I learned is a complicated process. Several of the languages I'm studying are ancient or dead languages, so immersion isn't exactly an easy possibility. Several of the languages also have very scarce resources. Based on what I do already, I'd say they were pretty successful in terms of myself. If I were to apply my method to someone who has no linguistic background, it probably wouldn't work out well for them.

I'm always interested in meeting people learning languages too!

I'm 26 and am studying to be a historical linguist. :B

Thank you! I'm so glad someone actually replied!

So are you studying Latin? You said dead and ancient and of course Latin is the first thing that comes to mind for me. But it's awesome that you're able to learn on your own so well!

Do you live in the U.S., or in another country?

You're the first person I've ever met that's studying to be a historical linguist! But that's so cool! What exactly does that involve? I have a general idea, but I'd love to know more about it! Like what about it interests you and such?

[kristinat0rz]

Pugnacious Banana

i'm from scotland so english is my first language.

i studied french in primary/highschool for 6-7 years. it was successful i guess since i still remember most of what i learned even though i'm not using it often.

i studied latin in university for 6 months. it was great at the time and i felt like i learned a lot but i forgot pretty much everything right away when i stopped studying.

i've been self-studying japanese off and on for a few years using a few different textbooks. it hasn't been all that successful (not a failure but my level is nowhere near where it should be) because i either haven't had a lot of time to focus on studying or didn't feel motivated when i did have time usually. when i was focusing on the textbooks they were helpful though so i guess i'll get back into it sometime. going to japan and getting practice speaking and listening to people helps too.

i started learning korean a few months ago partly studying by myself, partly meeting with a korean coworker weekly who would teach me (i also had a few informal lessons with a canadian guy here who speaks korean) and partly just by being in korea and having to read things and speak to people (i live in korea now). it's not going too badly but it could be better if i actually focused on studying by myself more often.

Wow! What is Scotland like?!

I wish that I had the option to take a language for that long in high school. I went to a pretty small school so until my last year we only had Spanish as an option and I didn't want to take Spanish.

Yeah, self-studying is usually very hard if you don't have anyone to help you with the language. Especially when it comes to grammar, I feel like that can tend to be the hardest part about a language.

Wow! I am so jealous that you are in Korea now. What do you do there? And how do you like it? I would love to visit Korea someday. It will happen eventually. crying

[Pugnacious Banana]

kristinat0rz

Wow! What is Scotland like?!

I wish that I had the option to take a language for that long in high school. I went to a pretty small school so until my last year we only had Spanish as an option and I didn't want to take Spanish.

Yeah, self-studying is usually very hard if you don't have anyone to help you with the language. Especially when it comes to grammar, I feel like that can tend to be the hardest part about a language.

Wow! I am so jealous that you are in Korea now. What do you do there? And how do you like it? I would love to visit Korea someday. It will happen eventually. crying

scotland is okay. it's pretty average. we have free healthcare and college so that's pretty cool.
where i went to school french was mandatory for about 5 years (but if you were getting bad grades in english class you didn't have to take french for the last 2 of those years because they think it'll be too hard i guess). my school only had french and spanish as language classes and you could only take spanish in the last two years of highschool (and i didn't take it because art was my favourite class and spanish was at the same time as art).
yeah learning general vocabulary can be easy but then stuff like verb forms and all the little words in between sometimes end up being confusing if nobody is showing you how to use them properly or correcting if you're misunderstanding something.
i'm an english teacher in korea. it's not bad. i get to do a lot of cool things at weekends and holidays and sometimes even at work i get to go on cool field trips. it's a small country but there are a lot of things to see and do here. recently when i hear about something cool i write it on my list of 'things to do at weekends' so i can remember to do all the things i've heard about eventually.

[kristinat0rz]

Pugnacious Banana

scotland is okay. it's pretty average. we have free healthcare and college so that's pretty cool.
where i went to school french was mandatory for about 5 years (but if you were getting bad grades in english class you didn't have to take french for the last 2 of those years because they think it'll be too hard i guess). my school only had french and spanish as language classes and you could only take spanish in the last two years of highschool (and i didn't take it because art was my favourite class and spanish was at the same time as art).
yeah learning general vocabulary can be easy but then stuff like verb forms and all the little words in between sometimes end up being confusing if nobody is showing you how to use them properly or correcting if you're misunderstanding something.
i'm an english teacher in korea. it's not bad. i get to do a lot of cool things at weekends and holidays and sometimes even at work i get to go on cool field trips. it's a small country but there are a lot of things to see and do here. recently when i hear about something cool i write it on my list of 'things to do at weekends' so i can remember to do all the things i've heard about eventually.

Free healthcare and college is more than okay. Paying for college sucks, big time, so many things I worry about would go away if I didn't have to pay for school *sigh*

I kind of wish that more schools in the U.S. required you to take a second language in high school. I feel it's so helpful to learn another language. Even if you don't retain as much when you get older, at least knowing basic phrases can help you so much, especially for people who like or want to travel. But also I feel a lot of people are on their high horse and seem to think English is a universal language when it isn't. *rolls eyes*

Good luck on your Japanese, though! If I could help you I would, but I can't since I know very little about the language.

What made you decide to teach English over there? I know many people do it, but I guess I'm just curious! It's good you've taken the initiative to learn a little Korean though. I have heard many stories of people who are interested in Korean music and move to Korea or stay for an extended period of time and literally make no effort to learn the language at all. Of course they probably live in areas with more foreign people anyways, like Incheon, but still I don't really know what the point of going somewhere is if you don't have any interest in the language or even really the culture?

[Pugnacious Banana]

kristinat0rz

Free healthcare and college is more than okay. Paying for college sucks, big time, so many things I worry about would go away if I didn't have to pay for school *sigh*

I kind of wish that more schools in the U.S. required you to take a second language in high school. I feel it's so helpful to learn another language. Even if you don't retain as much when you get older, at least knowing basic phrases can help you so much, especially for people who like or want to travel. But also I feel a lot of people are on their high horse and seem to think English is a universal language when it isn't. *rolls eyes*

Good luck on your Japanese, though! If I could help you I would, but I can't since I know very little about the language.

What made you decide to teach English over there? I know many people do it, but I guess I'm just curious! It's good you've taken the initiative to learn a little Korean though. I have heard many stories of people who are interested in Korean music and move to Korea or stay for an extended period of time and literally make no effort to learn the language at all. Of course they probably live in areas with more foreign people anyways, like Incheon, but still I don't really know what the point of going somewhere is if you don't have any interest in the language or even really the culture?

yeah free college is really good, i think not many countries have that. i still have debt from college because i took student loans for books and materials (i studied art so i had a lot of stupid expensive materials to buy) but the total of my loan debt is only about the cost of one year's tuition fees. and the student loan company in scotland (or maybe the whole UK, i'm not sure) kind of works like. if you earn less than a certain amount of money you don't have to pay anything back. if you start earning over a certain amount they automatically take a small amount of money from your pay every month. if 30 years pass or you reach age 60 (maybe 65?) without finishing paying the loan then they just forget about it forever. so you can just pay an insignificant amount of money for a long time and it's hardly noticeable.

i actually feel really guilty if i'm in a foreign country and have to ask people if they speak english. like i'm in their country so why should they be speaking my language there ? usually i learn first how to say phrases like "sorry i don't speak ___" or "i only speak a little ___" or "my ____ isn't very good" instead of just being like "can you speak english" because at least then i'm apologising for being an ignorant foreigner who doesn't speak their language rather than just expecting people everywhere to speak english like some people i've met. like yeah usually if you're at least in a big city you can probably find someone who speaks english somewhere but you shouldn't expect that all the time.
i'm not really super into stuff like korean music or dramas or whatever but i like just watching tv and seeing what stuff is on or just knowing which groups or songs my students are into (and seriously i learn about a lot of songs and famous people just from seeing/hearing things around in the street or shops etc). i talk to a lot of people online who are really into that stuff and want to come to korea though. (usually those people add me on facebook just because they saw i live in korea but then i end up not really getting along with them..)
i live in a small country town that's almost as far away from seoul as you can get so there aren't many foreign people here (i know all the foreigners in my town, there are 9 of us) and hardly any korean people here speak any english at all. so i kind of have to learn at least basic things in korean to ever communicate with anyone and get by in life.

sorry for long post rofl

[Nuclear Muchacho]

I'm polish and I've a long history of linguistic research.

First off I got to know english for the purpose of gaming and english tele. Not sure if I can call it learning as I've been picking it up gradually as I went on, but I had to get the basics and got 'em from one english fer kids thing (plus a dictionary in hand when I was gamen, and it was the time of late 8-bit, if you must know).
In the meantime I had german in school and although I was good at it I forgot most of it, as I don't use it anymore (had some german tele too but not anymore). I'm quite sure it'd come back but can't get myself to re-learn it (lazy-a**).
Then I started to get into japanese, having discovered the vast world of anime and j-games for various emulators. I wouldn't say it's very good (still in quite basic degree though I got the general idea how this works) but I think it's among my favorite languages.
Along the way I picked up some basic korean (had a korean channel and they were doing lessons) but it was brief and not very insightful (probably wouldn't read hangul anymore, something I was able to and need to pick up again).

So I know a number of languages but somewhat vaguely. Funny thing is I'm all self-taught. Been picking up languages as I needed and doing it all by myself which is a very doable method as long as you take care of a few things.
First you need a good insight of the language construction and basics. Unfortunately you'll be taught most of the time about various postquam perfectum and wtf not while all you need is to know what to say in a certain situation. Thus the best way is to bombard yourself with plenty of subtitled material - eventually you'll figure out how to phrase things and pick up entire phrases.

In case you were wondering I've been thinking of picking up more languages, like chinese and/or spanish. Recently I figured I might try portuguese too but since I've no particular necessity to learn any of those I don't expect it to happen in the near future. And I'm in hardly the capability to do any of it for the hell of it at the moment.

Well, that sure turned into a rant... Oops sweatdrop

[Tc Frorleivus Almus Ph]

kristinat0rz

Thank you! I'm so glad someone actually replied!

So are you studying Latin? You said dead and ancient and of course Latin is the first thing that comes to mind for me. But it's awesome that you're able to learn on your own so well!

Do you live in the U.S., or in another country?

You're the first person I've ever met that's studying to be a historical linguist! But that's so cool! What exactly does that involve? I have a general idea, but I'd love to know more about it! Like what about it interests you and such?

You're quite welcome. I'm glad my response was appreciated.
Yeah, I've studied Latin. It's in my signature, actually. ;B Along with Classical Greek. Specifically, Ionic Greek, but I've dabbled in other dialects as well. Primarily the Attic dialect, since that's the one that much of the currently known corpus exists in. I've also studied Old Norse and Old English, but Old Norse for longer than Old English. To be quite honest, Old Norse makes more sense to me than Old English does, despite being rather similar languages. Go figure, since English is my native language.
Yeah, I live in the U.S. I've also studied a few modern languages, including Japanese, French, Dutch, Swedish and Icelandic.
I'm glad you think that's cool. I'm pretty sure that makes you the very first person to ever tell me that. :}
It's kind of difficult to explain what it involves exactly. Let me start with what interests me about it and I'll try to work my way around. This may get lengthy(-er than it already is), so I apologize ahead of time.
It starts with just the fact that people use this set of tools built right into our bodies, our mouths, teeth, tongues, throats and more, to communicate in such an intricate and sophisticated way. When you study a new language, you immediately learn that there is more than one way to express the same idea. It opens your mind quite definitively; English has one way of going about it, and a language like French may have a similar way, but sometimes very different ways. Then, a language like Japanese usually has a way to express something that is fundamentally different from English in nearly every way. We're all people and we all may convey the same idea, but have these hugely successful, yet sometimes drastically different ways to do it. So then, what makes this diversity so intriguing?
A language in and of itself is not necessarily set in stone, or something that must be physically adhered to like laws of physics must be. Gravity will always draw you toward the center of the planet whether you like it or not, but language is a lot more abstract. It's simply an agreement by everyone in a society to understand one another. And like the human mind (to which language is inexorably linked), language is dynamic; it undergoes changes over time, and the longer a language has existed, the more it changes. Take the Romance languages as an example. If you didn't know, the Romance languages are largely the languages of the west and south of Europe: French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Umbran, Catalan, etc. They all descended from one language, Latin. This didn't happen overnight, or even quickly; it took hundreds of years. Classical Latin developed into "Vulgar Latin," spoken by the common folk, then into Old Spanish, Old French, and into Middle French/Spanish, so on. It wasn't until generally the 15th century that many of these languages shed their medieval characteristics and became the modern variants we know and love today. So if we trace French back, we find that it has a relationship with Spanish through Latin. But it doesn't stop there: we can keep going.

There's an archaic Greek letter called "digamma." It represents the sound /w/, and by the classical period of Ancient Greece, was obsolete. The form of Greek that I learned doesn't utilize it. However, if you are aware of the archaic spelling of Ancient Greek words, you can find some interesting things. Here, we'll take the word νἐος [neos]. It means "new," from which we got the prefix "neo-." Its old spelling used to be ΝΕFΟΣ [newos]. Compare other old languages, like Latin novus (for which the letter v also represented the sound /w/), Old English niwe, which led to modern "new," and even the Dutch form "neeuw." It's starting to look a lot like the Romance languages, isn't it? More and more of these similarities crop up as one digs deeper, so this must be evidence that we English speakers are actually connected to French speakers, Spanish speakers and even Greek speakers through a common ancestor too. From this, the hypothetical language Proto-Indo-European came about. There's no attestation to the existence of this language; it's just a theory. Either way, I want to find that truth, and all the while I really like to find all these diverse ways to express the things in my head. They're almost like foods, each language having such a flavor and they all taste so wonderful.

Okay, that's enough. I'm sorry for this encyclopedic account. I get a little carried away. redface

[moon light dreamer11]

kristinat0rz

Pugnacious Banana

scotland is okay. it's pretty average. we have free healthcare and college so that's pretty cool.
where i went to school french was mandatory for about 5 years (but if you were getting bad grades in english class you didn't have to take french for the last 2 of those years because they think it'll be too hard i guess). my school only had french and spanish as language classes and you could only take spanish in the last two years of highschool (and i didn't take it because art was my favourite class and spanish was at the same time as art).
yeah learning general vocabulary can be easy but then stuff like verb forms and all the little words in between sometimes end up being confusing if nobody is showing you how to use them properly or correcting if you're misunderstanding something.
i'm an english teacher in korea. it's not bad. i get to do a lot of cool things at weekends and holidays and sometimes even at work i get to go on cool field trips. it's a small country but there are a lot of things to see and do here. recently when i hear about something cool i write it on my list of 'things to do at weekends' so i can remember to do all the things i've heard about eventually.

Free healthcare and college is more than okay. Paying for college sucks, big time, so many things I worry about would go away if I didn't have to pay for school *sigh*

I kind of wish that more schools in the U.S. required you to take a second language in high school. I feel it's so helpful to learn another language. Even if you don't retain as much when you get older, at least knowing basic phrases can help you so much, especially for people who like or want to travel. But also I feel a lot of people are on their high horse and seem to think English is a universal language when it isn't. *rolls eyes*

Good luck on your Japanese, though! If I could help you I would, but I can't since I know very little about the language.

What made you decide to teach English over there? I know many people do it, but I guess I'm just curious! It's good you've taken the initiative to learn a little Korean though. I have heard many stories of people who are interested in Korean music and move to Korea or stay for an extended period of time and literally make no effort to learn the language at all. Of course they probably live in areas with more foreign people anyways, like Incheon, but still I don't really know what the point of going somewhere is if you don't have any interest in the language or even really the culture?

This post is so spot on it isn't even funny especially the first half of it. (Sorry just thought I would let you know)

[Blood on my suit]

I'm from Norway, And I speak Norwegian, English, French, Japanese, and a little bit of Russian, Dutch, Irish and Icelandic. Currently studying Old Norse.

Okay so my mom really wanted smart children, so she tried to teach me Russian when I was 7. It kind of worked, I learned the Cyrillic alphabet and I could hold a simple conversation in Russian. I have forgotten most of it now, though I still remember a few phrases and words.
I learnt English at school and through the TV.
Through learning English and Russian, I found out that learning languages was really fun, so I went a bit overboard, lol.

I personally try to learn the grammar rules first, then I spend a long time learning the words, then I try reading something in the language I am learning, accompanied with a dictionary. I don't know if it is a good way for learning, but it works for me.
Websites like Duolingo are also super handy.