So, languages then

[ChrisJ]

I’ve no right to expect assistance but someone might be interested enough to offer an opinion. Apologies in advance for a longish post.

I've always had an interest in language despite my secondary school's best efforts to kill the subject back in the 70s. I like reading about linguistics and while I have no particular talent, I enjoy studying foreign languages. About 30 years ago I learned Welsh to about intermediate level. In the last 10 years I've learned enough Mandarin to be able to travel independently in Sichuan and revived my school French and German to the point where I could converse with fellow travellers when gadding about Kashmir. I also learned enough Urdu to be able to manage hotels, haircuts, buses, shopping and so on. There's no humble bragging going on here btw. My accomplishment in all these is/was decidedly modest.

There's nothing gives me a buzz like being able to natter with someone or make a joke in their own language. However for all that, I don't speak any of them well, let alone properly. I tend to get excited about some new project, let the current one slide unused for too long and suddenly it's a year without practice and I can't remember how to say kitchen.

Anyway, I've decided it's time to knuckle down and really give it a go at becoming properly bilingual, or at least reasonably fluent.* As I explained in terrible French to a long-suffering group of Belgians, I feel like for the English these days, choosing to speak another language is a political act. Problem is, which one do I choose?

There are arguments for and against for several.

Welsh:
pro - was the nearest I got to mastering a second language, not far to find native speakers and plenty of cheap/free materials.
con - no classes or teachers locally, native speakers usually puzzled and switch to English.

French:
pro - see Welsh; plus local evening class available. The Belgian guys might be grateful.
con - dunno; for some reason I'm not so excited by the prospect, as much as I like French film and culture. The Belgians might be horrified by the thought I might want to practice on them. And come to think of it, they were Flemish.

German:
pro - I speak a little, I have the motivation of liking Germany and having a really good German friend in Berlin. Local class available.
con - fuck those case endings and endless inflections without any logic, rhyme, reason or clue to what the gender might be. Impossible.

Mandarin:
pro - how cool to be able to speak Mandarin? Local class available.
con - fuck me it's hard. I stopped studying before largely because I was mentally exhausted after 3 weeks in China.

Hindi/Urdu:
pro - big emotional connection with India, tend to go there a bit; opens doors to Panjabi and Bengali. Good veggie food.
con - quite hard for native English speakers to get the endless strings of postpositions lined up; different alphabets, no local classes and Indian italki teachers tend to use somewhat, um, traditional? techniques.

Spanish:
pro - supposedly pretty straightforward with gender endings on nouns, regular grammar, latin alphabet; local class available and I like Spain.
con- never studied it before. Why start a whole new language when I'm already some way towards a number of others.

Italian:
See Spanish

etc, etc.

So, multilingual folk of otf, anyone ever made this decision? Anyone want to make a pitch for any of these or other language? What shall I study?

*I'm not planning on teaching philosophy. Being able to listen to the radio, watch tv and talk shit about football or cricket would be great.

[Diable Rouge]

Much like Irish, Welsh is most useful when you've a practical use for it, and seeing as you mentioned the local speakers, I'd say keep it up. The Say Something In Welsh website is excellent, though you then have to pay for further levels. And of course, with TuneIn nowadays, you can try out French/Spanish radio to hear how much you remember of either.

[ad hoc]

If it's a political act, then Welsh doesn't seem the right way to go (given that Wales, like England, voted to turn away from foreigns). How about Arabic? My limited dabbling suggest it's not terribly difficult (you do have to learn the writing but on the plus side it's beautiful). The downside I imagine is that it would put you on some government watch list.

[MsD]

Can't think of any reason not to speak French. Although the accent is hard for Brits, and Parisians roll their eyes and shudder, most French people are more forgiving, and many find our accent cute or sexy.

But French is so prevalent, in art, film, philosophy and food and it's only an hour across or under the Channel for a quick immersion/mortification session.

Downsides - that hardly anyone speaks formal French, it's all slang and stuff, so understanding French people in full conversational flow is really hard. Also there's the whole "don't pronounce the whole word" thing.

[treibeis]

German:
con - fuck those case endings and endless inflections without any logic, rhyme, reason or clue to what the gender might be.

Without any logic? German? No.

There are rules as regards gender. And as for the exceptions - they have to be memorised. Same as in many other languages.

[ursus arctos]

Genau

But for me this really cones down to which one you think you would use the most

[Amor de Cosmos]

I did two years of Mandarin way back as a non-English language was a degree requirement. I chose it because I wanted to understand a language with a non-Roman character set. Once I got the four tones sorted I found it relatively easy to speak, certainly compared to French and Latin, the only other languages which I had any comprehension. I tended to do better than the rest of the class who were mostly native Cantonese, but reading and writing was a whole other thing...

[tee rex]

This used to be my (secondary) research area, but I don't really have any stunning insights to offer. Motivation is obviously a key driver of learning (i.e. continuing to learn, past the initial buzz of getting to phrase book level), probably more important than how difficult a language is. There's your personal learning style to consider: in my case I found I was very much an auditory learner, so I picked up Chinese (elementary) with little or no written reinforcement, even Pinyin didn't help, the sounds registered more than the page (like musical earworms). Others prefer a book in their hands, and so would choose e.g. Vietnamese over Thai, because of the script.

Then there's the essential question of how much free food and drink and general adulation you want, when you open your mouth and reveal the first Anglophone they've ever met who had bothered to speak their language. So obviously not French: Japanese for booze, Arabic for food.

But FWIW, I'd definitely choose something that comes from within than without - so, not (primarily) because of possible resources that might be available, and not the 'functional' aspect. That's like reading literature for an exam instead of pleasure. Anyway, good luck.

[Patrick Thistle]

When I was growing up in Shrewsbury a chap I knew started going to the Welsh speaking Methodist Chapel on Sunday nights to help him learn Welsh. (I imagine that chapel has closed now.)

I studied New Testament Greek at university and although I never learned more than I needed to pass exams, I can still read the letters. Don't know about modern Greek but the old version was very logical and easy to pick up. The letters are nice to write as well. Theta is one of my favourite shapes ever.

[MsD]

The guy from the corner shop seems to have left so thankfully I have a reprieve from the 1am Turkish lessons. He may just be on holiday, though, so I will have to keep my thank you and goodnight up to speed.

I have (or had) an aptitude for languages, which is why I cockily said I would learn it, but it's harder than I thought and I'm not planning to go to Turkey, so it would be just for Hackney.

[Ginger Yellow]

pro - how cool to be able to speak Mandarin? Local class available.
con - fuck me it's hard. I stopped studying before largely because I was mentally exhausted after 3 weeks in China.

Really? I mean, learning the characters sure, and I guess if you're like me the tones are tricky, but syntactically it's pretty simple.

[johnr]

Spanish is really easy. Especially if you buy the Michel Thomas tutorials.

[Moonlight Shadow]

French is a devious language, a lot of native speakers do not speak it very well actually, there are lots of exceptions to grammar rules, spelling, etc

Italian is a lot more straightforward.

That's my opinion on two languages I can speak native level/fluent...

[Flynnie]

I ended up giving up on French after years of sucking wind and going to Dutch.

It's been rewarding. I've found some use for it. Despite what they tell you, most Dutch people aren't effortlessly fluent in English (especially outside Amsterdam) and they appreciate the effort (again, especially outside Amsterdam). I have a few Dutch friends who have been pretty helpful, which is good when you're on the shy side about this (I could never use italki). I also have family there, which is why I bothered learning - I was picking up so many words my uncle suggested I could probably learn the language.

Although the national football scene is a source of depression rather than joy now, it's still true that good content (so not Dutch masters stereotypes and how everybody loves Total Football) about the Oranje and the Eredivisie in English is difficult to find. So knowing Dutch has been very useful for that.

Cons are it can be so similar to English that it seems hard to get your brain to remember the words with more obviously German roots. Also, there's just less resources than other languages. I'm getting closer than I'd like to exhausting the available resources, yet I don't feel like I've reached B1 level.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

I always learn just enough to say 'a(nother) beer, please' and 'where are the bogs?'. Arabic this week, where confusingly they shake their heads to indicate yes. Not going to get the hang of that.

[WOM]

I agreed; it's a thrill to surprise someone by speaking their language. Through my years in the restaurant business, I learned to say the usual 'hello/how are you / please / thank you' in Tamil because most kitchen workers are recent Sri Lankan immigrants. It's great when I can casually trot that out to one of the ladies working in the accounting department, or to one of my kids' friends' grandmothers. The reaction is priceless.

But which to choose? Whichever you're most likely to actually use. Otherwise you're just singing in the shower, and you'll forget what you've learned with lack of use.

[Duncan Gardner]

дункан гарднр говорит- на финляHдском вокзалом!

[MsD]

I know it well. Sigh.

[Stumpy Pepys]

There are rules as regards gender. And as for the exceptions - they have to be memorised. Same as in many other languages.

Just too many exceptions for my liking. Pieces of bread for example — die Semmel, das Brot, der Bagel. Gah!

[MsD]

Russian draws you in with its lack of articles and simple sentence construction (the alphabet is the easy part, or was for me). It's "there, table" or "table, there" "this, table" "my brother, engineer". By the time you're in Year 2 the game's changed and you have all three genders, mad declensions, tenses, and "to go" depends on whether you're going by foot, in a vehicle, and several other variables. The honorific also seems more complicated than in other languages, you call everyone vwee and they tii you back, then look huffy if you do the same. (I suspect that the St Petersburgers are like the Parisians here, and elsewhere is more forgiving.)

It's a language that's rewarding in the early stages, and quite attractive on the ear; very hard work to get near native fluency.

[Stumpy Pepys]

I discovered recently there were categories based on difficulty for English native speakers.

Category I's basically Romance and Germanic languages (although not German itself, because the fiddly grammar makes it Category II). Russian's Category IV. Arabic and Cantonese are Category V.

[Link]

[Ginger Yellow]

The honorific also seems more complicated than in other languages, you call everyone vwee and they tii you back, then look huffy if you do the same.

Nowhere near as bad (or rather, inscrutable to learners) as Japanese on that front. On the other hand, mastering the perfective/imperfective aspect distinction is really tricky, especially since familiarity with perfect/imperfect tenses in other languages is as much of a hindrance as anything.

[anton pulisov]

English is my native language and I am near-native / bilingual in Dutch. I am also fluent in Swedish now.

In the beginning, I never bother learning the various genders and/or prepositions that go with certain words. Why bother, if you use the wrong gender for a word like 'table' or 'car', they'll still know that you are talking about a 'table' or a 'car'. And language is about communication, not rules. You slowly learn all the gender stuff just by using the language over the years, until after about five or six years you suddenly you realise that you get it right about 95% of the time. Too many hours of language lessons are wasted by forcing people to learn pointless rules, which only turns off the students. The most important thing to learn is vocabulary and to practice speaking and reading... the rules will come with practice.

[Capybara]

English is my native language and I am near-native / bilingual in Dutch. I am also fluent in Swedish now.

In the beginning, I never bother learning the various genders and/or prepositions that go with certain words. Why bother, if you use the wrong gender for a word like 'table' or 'car', they'll still know that you are talking about a 'table' or a 'car'. And language is about communication, not rules. You slowly learn all the gender stuff just by using the language over the years, until after about five or six years you suddenly you realise that you get it right about 95% of the time. Too many hours of language lessons are wasted by forcing people to learn pointless rules, which only turns off the students. The most important thing to learn is vocabulary and to practice speaking and reading... the rules will come with practice.

Pretty much this. I've been learning German for a while now by taking lessons. In my second year we were joined by a new student who, to my ears at least, was fluent. He'd lived for a while in Germany. Then he confessed to not knowing the grammar points we were learning, or even that they existed. It doesn't stop me wanting to get things right, mind. And I find grammar easier to learn (and more interesting) than vocabulary anyway.

[Duncan Gardner]

Adding to MsD above: I started school Russian aged 12 in 1974. It probably helped having a smattering of French and Latin from school, plus Arabic, Hebrew, Chichewa, Sinhala and Polish from my primary school travels defending the Empire.

So anyway my brother says, "Why don't you do a refresher, you can be the courier if we qualify"...

PS note to Mynheer AP: if visiting Norn Iron in the near future you'll need a fourth language, as that crazy witch Michelle P O'Neill (aka Provi in Pink) wants to make everyone learn Irish