Well,my mother tongue is Polish. I speak fluently English. I've learned for 4 years German, for 2-Spanish. This year I began learning Swedish and Norway. I also have Latin lessons.

My mother tongue is Czech and I study English and French at university (translating and interpreting) so I should be (unfortunately I'm not) almost as good as native speakers at these two. In fact, this school might be too difficult for me but I'm determined to finish my studies I learned Spanish for a year (it was easy as I speak French) and Russian for a year and a half (also easier for me as it's similar to Czech) so I could have a conversation in Spanish or Russian (although I forgot a lot because I concentrate on English and French right now). And few months ago I started learning Irish but only to learn the pronunciation and some basic phrases

My mother tongue is Chinese but my native language is English (if that makes sense ) that is - my second language has completely eclipsed my first. I primarily think in English & if I was to converse with someone in Chinese, I actually have to translate backwards from English into Chinese.

Culturally, I'm even more of a bad cocktail. Let's just say that the linguistic disorientation gives one enough to go on without even considering the cultures that are the complete opposites of each other.

I am fluent in English (sure hope I come off that way...) I speak enough German to get around, understand some Spanish... Have learned a tiny bit of latin too.

I started looking up Irish as a self study but couldn't focus... I might get back into that if I do get to work for the Irish delegation under the Eurovision

I want to learn French, Italian and either Japanese or Chinese...

Criosdan wrote:

(Sometimes words come to me in English instead of German. )

That always happen to me! When I lived at home I would drive my mother nuts asking her what the Danish word was... I actually think I'm a lot better at English than Danish by now; which is a little bit scary. 

When I ran Pre-school we had many bilingual children and also one who was trilingual (English, French & Italian). There is no problem for young children to switch (and indeed mix) between languages. The best idea is for one parent to speak one language consistently and the other to speak the other. The majority of young children are basically programmed to absorb languages., rather than 'learning' them in the traditional sense.

Has anyone noticed that, if you speak at least one 'foreign ' language when you come to try and think of a word in another foreign language and cannot quite think of it, then instead of thinking of the word in your 'mother tongue' the word that pops into your head will be from one of your learnt languages? For instance: being stopped in the street by some French students, I could not think of the word for a 'corner' in French but the word that popped into my head was 'Ecke'  not 'corner'.

mother tongue : greek
understand and speak english quite well
understand and speak french well
understand and speak german a little - learnt and reached a satisfying level a few years ago, but it's too difficult to remember without practice
wanna learn russian and portuguese (love the accents!)

p.s.1. what I love about languages in general is how one gets used to them when one hears a lot of them. I mean, when I watch lots of french movies or listen to the same french songs, after a couple of days many french words come to my mind all the time. or during the period I was watching "Sherlock" (almost every night), the same happened with english.
p.s.2. what I love about romance/ neo-latin languages is how you can learn one, and kind of understand many others. that's the case with italian and spanish - because I know french, I can understand much stuff in spanish, and italian, and portuguese - actually more easily than german, which I spent 3 years studying (german : charming and challenging language though, if only I had time to learn it better)

Last edited by antigone (February 14, 2014 10:49 am)

This Is The Phantom Lady wrote:

When I first started learning German and was still new at English I would really mix the two...

The two share a common gutteral sound and even a few words.

  I have lately tried to tidy up my English though; I have spoken a hybrid form of American, British and Scottish and it has really been getting on my nerves.

Language is rarely perfect. As spoken, written and read by the average person in the street, it's constantly evolving and definitely a work in progress. If I were speaking to you, as long as you could make your English understood, I wouldn't give a thought to your accent.  As an American native speaker of English, the only problem I have with foreign-born English speakers is the words they use that are not part of my vocabulary. But that's actually interesting, and I would have no problem asking what something meant. Perhaps you need to be not so hard on yourself?

I'm curious, how did you become such an English-speaker that you rarely use your Danish? How is that possible?  Just wondering.

The English I learned at school was sort of British, the English the movies and people spoke around me was American, and a Scottish girl taught me online... That was back when I could hardly put a sentence together... I still admire her patience with me.

Yes, I often see foreign English speakers on TV, people from Germany, France, Scandinavia, etc, and they speak with thick British accents. Once in a while, someone speaks in an American accent, and I always sit and wonder how that came to be-- perhaps they went to school in the US or something, or had an American parent. I think of the actor John Barrowman, for instance-- Brit through and through, but raised in the US from the age of 11, and his accent is now American, although he can slip back into his Scottish brogue and speak as his parents do at the drop of a hat.

Now when I write my fan fic I am looking up certain words for their American and British counterparts. Like the words 'Pavement' and 'Sidewalk', I prefer British. I am also working on my accent and I feel I have come far..  Watching a lot of Sherlock and Benedict Cumberbatch really helps that along.

As a Dane, speaking and writing your English as the Brits do is probably better and more understandable to the people in your area of the world anyway; you're a long, long ways from the US and Canada, for sure. But for writing fan fic, IMO you should write and spell in the way the characters would. If you're writing British characters, then it's kerb. If they're Americans or Canadians, it's a curb. Even that can be confusing, though, because Canadians use British spelling-- colour, realise, theatre, programme, etc.  On and on it goes But whatever, in fan fic, IMO again, just don't mix the Brit with the American in the same story-- that should be rule #1, in as far as there are any rules for fan fic, lol.

Davina wrote:

When I ran Pre-school we had many bilingual children and also one who was trilingual

This is actually very common in Asia (for countries like China & India) because for political reasons, languages that aren't dialects at all are classed as dialects to avoid the notion of "we speak another language, we'd like our own country!" Government response = "nice try but no you cannot have your own country & your language is from the same language family/strand as the main language in this country anyway so ethnically, you're not different people".

Because China is a mostly atheist country with no "official" state religion, linguistic identity is stronger than religious identity. People might say "we believe in (fill in the blank)" & government goes "good for you (sarcasm)" but if someone goes "my culture/language is different" then government will go "better take a look at that guy; he's abit of a trouble maker". The case with falungong is not a religious one. They treat it as a cult - same as how most people think of Scientology.

As Americans, being very geographically distant from anyone but Canada or Mexico, we're English-speakers, pretty much exclusively.

There are regions of the US that have a lot of Spanish speakers (southern Florida, southern Texas, southern California, for instance), but pretty much, in this country, if you want to be employed at any "real" job, you'd better speak, read and write English. IMO TPTB in education don't do any favors to immigrant kids who are not required to learn English by immersion in their classrooms--  they used to be, but now a lot of their education is in their native tongue. I understand that in the LA school district alone, there are over 50 different languages being used in public classrooms. I think that's ridiculous, because how does that prepare those kids to go out and work someday? But..... there ya go. Greater minds than mine think they know what they're doing.

The US has no official language, not even English. Unlike Canada, for instance, whose official languages are both English and French, so everything public is posted in both languages. In the US, you better speak English, or there will be no sign-reading for you. For those who push to make English our official language, the Spanish-speakers get all up in arms about that. There's even been a movement underfoot to make us have two official languages, English and Spanish, but it would then be very costly to change our money, our signage, our official Congressional paperwork, etc. Probably not ever going to an official nod to Spanish, for economic reasons, if nothing else.

We fought a war back in the mid-1800s, when the south wanted to make its own nation and keep slavery intact. Abraham Lincoln et al would have none of it, a whole generation of men died to keep this nation together, and even after a century and a half, no one's forgotten. There are no rumblings about "make our own nation" here, with the exception of the American Indian reservations, and that's very minor in the overall scheme of things.

America is called a melting pot, and it truly is. That's set us up for lots of problems over the centuries, but it's also quite wacky and wonderful and is a big part of who we are, why we are who we are, etc. Unless we're native Americans, none of our ancestors were born here, after all.