Languages you speak, are trying to learn/ improve

This comprehensive article might be of some use for some. Check it out.

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-approach-the-lifelong-project-of-language-learning

English as my mother tongue.

DamoXt7942 wrote: Mine is Japanese of course, and I've learned English ... anyway my EngRish cannot work yet.

Spanish. I've picked up a little bit here and there but never really got very far. I know enough to maybe barely get by if I was in Spain or something but then again maybe not. I know about maybe fifty words in Spanish. Other than English it's the language I know the most by far but that's not saying much.

tszirmay wrote: My mother tongue is Hungarian, which I can read and write though never having gone to any Hungarian school, French is my education tongue (bacc A), English by neighbourhood in Montreal, all by the age of 5. Then I learnt German every Saturday and Spanish every Sunday for 12 years! Italian and Portuguese came with high schooling in Switzerland. But I must state that there is no talent required, its is a huge misconception! Any child with a musical ear and /or an average IQ can learn up to 11 languages simultaneously , its the power of any young thirsty mind. By the time we reach our early 20s , it becomes harder to store all that information in accessible compartments. Teach your kids multiple tongues when they are toddlers, the brain will sponge it all up.

Wow, impressive. Also your last sentence is correct. If you begin to learn a language after the age of 4 or 6 (I cannot exactly remember), it isn't becoming one of your "native languages"; so you're basically becoming a learner like a student. There are many ways of becoming a "native-like" speaker, but I think being a native and native-like has a subtle and profound difference.

My case could be strange. My mother is a retired English teacher and I began hearing English lessons inside her, while she was pregnant to me. I never studied English with mom but my English has always been noticeably better than most of my classmates. I wasn't a hardworking student and I wasn't getting the highest marks but I've always had the talent. Perhaps coupled with my musical ear and my singing experiences, my English always makes people surprised. Some are shocked that I've never been abroad, an English (I mean her nationality is English) headmistress of one of the most prominent private shcools in Turkey couldn't believe that I'm Turkish. I learned that she even asked one of my co-workers (teacher) if I had lied about being Turkish, haha. 

Anyway, I really want to learn Latin. I cannot envision myself speaking French, Arabic, Dutch or German. To my ears, they are not sonorous and they can even be disturbing. But who knows what the future brings...

Edited by Shadowyzard - October 14 2020 at 20:45

Lewian wrote: I'm German and this is my native language. I lived in London for 14 years so I'm fine with English, but of course the more you know, the more you know your limits. I'm now living in Italy and my Italian is fluent, but still particularly regarding understanding what people speak or sing without concentrating a lot, writing without truck loads of mistakes, and getting the humour (most difficult thing in any language!) I need to improve a lot! I have learnt French at some point, after I finished university as a hobby, but I don't have contact with people who speak French now, and my Italian has pretty much killed my active French. I can't make a French sentence anymore that doesn't come out at least half Italian. French understanding is also pretty bad, reading is still OK. I am from Hamburg, northern Germany, but I have learnt to understand Swiss German (which is quite something for us flatlanders); I wish I'd have used my time in Switzerland to also learn to speak it - maybe half a year more and it could have worked. For those who don't know: Swiss German is at the same time some kind of German and quite different. People from the north of Germany don't usually understand it. Many Swiss people are not that keen on helping Germans to learn it, because I think they see it as something essential for their identity and it creates a border between them and the Germans that some of them cherish. I worked in Zuerich for two years and was lucky to meet a number of Swiss people who talked to me in Swiss German, although there wasn't much of an incentive to actively learn it because everybody would understand my "normal" German, and Zuerich is full of people who speak German but not Swiss German.

 

Edited by Lewian - October 14 2020 at 17:37

Cool question for sure. 

My native language is English (the American variety). I took French in high school and college and I'm not fluent in it. I work in a library and for many years had to translate and transliterate non-English texts for the online catalog just enough to assign subjects to them. I recall doing this for books in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Danish, Welsh, Polish, Czech, Italian, Romanian, Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, Church Slavic, and Korean (Hangul characters only). Even had a book in the Alsatian dialect that looked like a hybrid of French and German. I can't fluently read or speak any of these languages, but I know enough to be able to get a rough idea of what they are about in a bibliographical sense.