2/21/2023 Question of the day

[petrea_mitchell]

International Mother Language Day: What is your native language? How many languages do you speak fluently or near-fluently? How many languages besides your native language have you studied?

My native language is English and I've never managed real fluency in any other. As for ones I've studied, settle in, this may take a bit...

French - My grade school included French as a standard subject for the lower grades, though as best I recall it mostly involved learning lists of words and starting over every year. I retained very little of the vocabulary or grammar, but the pronunciation did stick with me. Tried picking it up again with Rosetta Stone a couple years ago, and still need to get back to it because all the good up-to-date information about medieval Africa seems to be available in it and not in English.

Mandarin - A small amount of formal exposure when I was 8 or 9 in a summer-school class. Again, very little of it stayed with me, but for some reason figuring out stroke order for writing Chinese characters did. Study currently ongoing again since December of 2021.

Latin - The middle school grades at my school subjected students to Latin instead, in a more organized manner and picking up at the start of the year where the previous one had left off. Mostly this has been useful for deciphering fancy words and scientific names.

Spanish - In high school, I got the standard (at the time) choice of French, Spanish, or German. I went with Spanish on the grounds that it was the likeliest language to have a chance to use in real life. I have, in fact, managed to use it briefly on a couple occasions. However, the next language I learned reorganized my brain somehow, with the result that I can still understand a fair amount when reading, but can't form grammatically correct sentences anymore.

Japanese - So in college, I wanted to take a new language to help fill out my breadth requirements, and since I'd done the practical thing in high school, I wanted to learn something totally different this time. The only non-Indo-European language on offer at that particular moment at that particular campus was Japanese. I got through three years of it, then fell out of practice as I hadn't become a big anime fan yet.

Sanskrit - Then there was that one time when there was an intensive class in Sanskrit available during summer term and I decided why not. Suddenly the Latin ablative case made a whole lot more sense. (It's the original Proto-Indo-European ablative case, plus the intrumental and locative cases, all collapsed together. In Sanskrit they're still separate sometimes.)

If you were to include every language where I've gotten hold of a book and learned a few words from it, this could be a much longer list.

Comments

[delosharriman]

I recall being introduced to the ablative of small swamps and ditches, a joke on the way that the Latin ablative sweeps up any odd bits of grammar or usage that are floating around.

Why, yes, I have actual medals from the ACL/NJCL National Latin Exam, and I delivered my high school valedictory address in Latin, why ever do you ask?

[petrea_mitchell]

Your Latin class sounds more fun than mine were.