Golden Deer Pub Community Forums

What languages do you know?
Do you have any favourite words or languages?

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I know French, English, a little bit of German¹, a little bit of Swedish² and a tiny bit of Japanese³.

¹ I was taught German in school instead of English because I live near the border. I had abandoned it after graduating because the declensions were such a bother… I picked it up again years later when I realized it could be useful. Now I can understand some of it, but I'm still unable to hold a conversation easily or construct a correct sentence quickly; what I need is more practice.

² As a result of trying to find courses that fit into my schedule at university. It turned out to be fun and relatively easy though! So I kept following the courses the Scandinavian studies offered.

³ All but useless now, since I was more curious than committed and have forgotten all the vocabulary… but it was interesting to get to know a language that works in a completely different way from the ones I'm used to.

If I had to take up another language now, I'd probably try one that's completely different too.

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Some words I like or find useful:

Dutch is my native language. Being from a small country right between three big countries, we learned English, French and German in school ("middle school", but age-wise it corresponds more closely to what USAians call highschool). English I always found quite easy, but I didn't really like German and French and dropped them after fourth grade (age 15/16). I've used those two languages only a few times afterwards, German more than French. I can usually figure out what a text is about without much trouble, but writing or speaking are hard.

Oh, almost forgot Latin. I had five years of that in middle school, but never liked it. I scored only a 6(/10) on my graduation exams. The only thing it's useful for is knowing the etymology of words really, and I could've done without the endless grammar for that. Classic Greek I had only one year of. About the only things I remember from that are the alphabet and a few words.

I've been trying to learn Japanese off and on for the last decade or so, but I find it hard to stick with actual studying from textbooks, so most of what I know of it is from anime. And lol @ the くノ一 thing. I use it to remember that the horizontal stroke goes last in the 女 kanji ^_^

I was taught French in school for 6 years, but that ended 14 years ago now and it's pretty much entirely gone. I started to learn from about 11ish through to 16ish.

I did one hour of German once a week for a year and all I can remember is Donnerstag which was the day of the week the lesson was on :/.

Foreign languages are not taken seriously at all in England.

I haven't learned any languages. They seem neat.

The only languages I can use to have a proper conversations are Finnish(mother tounge) and English(thanks games!).

Languages that I understand and can say few sentences here and there and maybe have a tiny bit of small talk:
Swedish(second mother tounge of anyone from Finland), Dutch(studied it for 5 years like 15 years ago..), Japanese (too many years of watching anime..).

Languages I have studied only 1 course(which is ~6 months):
Spanish, Russia. For both of these languages I can only say few words..