Languages

[ila]

Transladyboy is a site in which the language of communication is in English. Yet there are several members whose mother tongue is not English. I have always admired people who can speak, read, and write a second, third, fourth, etc. language in addition to their mother tongue. It is even more admirable when that person also has to learn a new alphabet.

My mother tongue is English. The only other language I could ever speak with any degree of fluency is German. That's not such a great leap though as English is a Germanic language. English after all is named after the Angles, a Germanic tribe that migrated to the area of southern England from the North Sea area between present day Holland and Denmark. In fact if one listens to the dialect of the Frisians, another North Sea tribe, one would almost think he is listening to English. I only learned to speak German because I lived there for seven years. I am rapidly losing fluency in German though as I haven't spoken it in a number of years. I get the German news channel through my cable tv and as I listen to it I realize just how much I have forgotten.

I took French in school for several years and still don't know how to speak it beyond a few phrases. I did find out though that the French in France is easier to understand than the French spoken in Canada. I have been through several countries in Europe, but I don't speak any of the languages. At best I can get out a few words and phrases in the Romance languages, which are all related by their common root in Latin.

I did know some words and phrases in Greek and I still know the Greek alphabet (capital letters only). At one time I could carry on a conversation in Ukrainian although I tended to throw in a lot of Russian words. I can no longer converse in Ukrainian though and I don't remember very many words. I did manage to figure out most of the Cyrillic alphabet (again only capital letters) and that was all self taught from reading signs. That is the extent of my knowledge of Slavic languages.

I know none of the Arabic or Oriental languages. I am making a broad sweep here with oriental languages by including Turkish, Pashtu, Urdu, Chinese, Japanese, etc. I also cannot read any of these languages (except Turkish which now uses an alphabet based on the Latin alphabet, but I still don't understand the words).

So forum members share with the rest of us your experiences learning languages other than your mother tongue. This includes those whose mother tongue is English as well as all our friends who learned English, as a second language, and are comfortable enough using it to communicate with us on an English site. I find the topic of languages very fascinating and look forward to your responses.