Languages, learning, speaking, anecdotes, what you will

[Bored Of Education]

Our kid is trilingual at least which doesn't mean he's any kind of genius but the advantages this will gėve in the future are tremendous.

Another thing I want to study, at some point, is the ease of learning a third, fourth etc. languages after a second. Obviously, there are connections to be had between, say, Spanish, French and Italian but where someone like my Mum goes to Russian from Welsh, it is less obvious. Obviously, it has a lot to do with an interest in languages anyway but there may be other factors.

[Bored Of Education]

We had friends here in Spain. He was Hungarian, she from Ecuador. They had a daughter. When they emigrated to Ireland - the kid was around 6 or so - the mum stopped speaking Spanish to her. The father had never even started with Hungarian. Such a waste, is my opinion.

Spanish, perhaps so but Hungarian is a notoriously hard language to learn with it being closer to Finnish than any other European language.

[JVL]

Mrs Bored's father ... had a stroke. He recovered from this in the end but, during its effects, he lost the ability to speak English ... he was still thinking in English but it just didn't come out as that. That indicated, to me, that there is a part of the brain - affected by his stroke - that is specifically engaged in translation of languages.

This is something I've given some thought to on occasions as well - when I sustained concussion playing football back in 2013, I lost the ability to understand or speak German for about 12 hours. Couldn't make head nor tail of what the doctor was saying to me, then woke up and answered all the 'Do you know what day it is?' questions in German the next morning. All very odd, but they said it happens sometimes and I haven't suffered any noticeable after-effects since...

Another thing I want to study, at some point, is the ease of learning a third, fourth etc. languages after a second.

It's going to be interesting for us to observe how VL jnr. deals with learning French here - he's used to hearing English and German as part of everyday life but another language in a classroom setting could be a different kettle of fish.

Your Mum seems to have a great aptitude for languages, especially if she can totally immerse herself in Italian almost instantly when she returns to that environment. Adding Welsh and Russian to the mix is not something that everyone would be capable of!

[ad hoc]

My younger daughter, despite being bilingual in English and Hungarian really struggles with Romanian. So while I imagine it helps it's not universally true that people who have more than one language will necessarily be successful at learning another.

BTW Hungarian is to Finnish as English is to Farsi They belong to the same language root but are mutually unintelligible (Finnish and Estonian, the other European finno-ugric language, are, I believe, quite close)

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

I hated having to attend a Welsh-language secondary school in the '70s, as I thought it backwards-looking and insular. I much preferred speaking as Scouse as I could. When I found myself working further and further afield my yearning to speak and be Welsh grew, and I relearned, to the extent that I could hold a decent conversation again. I was one of only two Welsh speakers in Nairobi - me and Lowri with our secret language in bars....

My daughter felt rootless after a decade of overseas living (Albamia, Dubai and Kenya), so we stuck her in my old secondary to get a bit of culture into her. She found it backwards-looking and insular - and moved out to an English speaking school after two years. She can speak Welsh alright; she just chooses not to. The youngest is learning Chinese and Latin at school.

I ran a football team in Tirana for three years (90% of the team were Albanian), and learned fairly good Albanian, which I'm still able to speak. I worked in Karachi and Khartoum for a while and learned basic Urdu and Arabic, but that left me soon after I left them. I'm currently working in Tanzania - it's much less Anglophone than Kenya - so learning Kiswahili is a must.

I love languages.