IT and Linguistics

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I used to speak fluent french many moons ago, even won a trophy at school for french speaking. I could even speak fluent latin at one point as well.

 

As we all live or work with IT and as said before it is Multi-national, I propse we all learn 1 language to effectivley communicate with. No more, unable to understand due to not speaking a language, we would all speak the same one. And as its IT We would all use BINARY as the language. The only problem i can see is that it might take an age even just to get across the basics of hello, miss a BIT and the word could mean something else entirely!

On a serious note, i have thought about learning another language many times, but find i'm Krapp at it. I just dont have what it takes. In my work it would actually be more important to be able to read languages anyway rather than speak them, (work in subtitles) so i could see that the characters on screen were correct. And to do it effectivley i would have to learn too many languages.

 

You got off lightly mate.

You will, next year you'll be learning American.


I live in Switzerland and I speak german. I came here 11 years ago and it took me about 3-4 months to learn. As pointed out somewhere above, the best way to learn is to just jump in but it also helps when you have no other choice and need to communicate on a daily basis.

I think these days it's very important that you know a second (on more) language. For example in Switzerland we have 4 national languages, yes 4. German, French, Italian and Rätoromantsch (a mix of Italian, French, and maybe Latin). The kids learn French from the 5th class on and Italian from the 8th. Now that English is becoming the major business language the kids have to learn this too, as the first priority and from the 2nd class.

Later in their advanced studies they have to go abroad and study at least 1 language in a language school. Most of them choose English for obvious reasons.

It's a pity that other schooling systems don't do the same, at least for their neighboring countries. I wonder how many problems that would solve if most of the people could speak the language of the country next door?

 

Italian is my first lang.That is not helping me much.
Ciao

 

My native language is Dutch, but my English is not to bad (I think). Reading and speaking: no problem at all. Writing sometimes gives some problems.
Apart from these two I speak German and I can make myself understandable in Polish. The same goes for Frensh. I started Russian, but due to lack off time I stopped that. Started Gaelic, but find the language very difficult. Now working on Japanese. Next on the list would be Swahili or Punjabi. I understand Danish and a bit Swedish, but that is more because these languages resemble Dutch.
I speak Basic and C and am starting with C# in a few months. I can understand Fortran and algol as well as Cobol, but can not write in these.
I also speak a bit assembler.

 

I already know American
I take the English word, drop half the letters, **** up the pronunciation and there i have it

I learnt french at school, was never that good at it, but then again I don't really thing my brain is geared to learn in that sort of environment 'copy this off the board, translate this, blah blah blah'

I can pick things up quick when I have to and have a little support, I was in Germany for just over a week and I was pretty comfortable ordering beer/food and other general stuff after that

I've always fancied Japanese but omg just looking at that confuses the hell out of me
I think Chinese would be a GREAT language to learn in this day and age, but alas i need to find the way that 'clicks' for me...

 

I would love to lean Gaelic and Sign language. Use to know some of the basics for sign. I have a deaf cousin and as a child it is not hard to pick these things up. But it has been years since i've used it so have lost what little I did know.

 

Try this site for a start www.daltai.com

 

When I was young my family and I would go to Spain, I would always get a Spanish comic in Malaga airport to read on the way to the hotel, I can't speak spanish but the comic book helped me understand it and the pictures also helped me understand what the words would be saying.

If Spanish had been available when I was in Secondary school then I would have done that, but it wasn't and I havent been to Spain since I was 10 so I couldn't speak it now.

As with the English being Lazy, I don't think we are. Most of the World speaks English, most of the world has better education than us and kids are taught English from a very early age, kids in England only start to learn another language when they are in their teens and by that time most are not bothered.

It would probably be a different story if we were taught from a younger age like in the Netherlands or France.

 

Maybe a slight exageration but I do believe that foreign language study should start earlier, I was introduced to French at 11 why not earlier?

In places like France and the Netherlands its 7 sometimes earlier why not here?

Yes we have good facilities but in this day and age our teenagers are not interested in learning how to order a baguette for example but they might be if they were taught from an earlier age.

 

You're joking. I got my first intro to English and Frensh when I was 12, German at 13. I dropped Frensh after one year. I was not into languages at that time. I dropped German as soon as possible (two years).
Still I speak German good enough to fool a non-native German speaker in believing I'm German (which I'm not)
I kept English, because it was mandatory, but began to like languages. At the university we had no language lessons.
Nowadays introduction to English is at 10.
Question: why don't we train our children IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet There would be no problem anymore how to pronounce a word.

 

My Neice has French Pen friend who has been learning English from 7, they are both 11 and from what I have seen the French girls written English is almost as good as my Nieces.

I would have loved to speak a foreign language now, but when I was at school in my teens I wasn't bothered. As you you say Arro who gives a crap about saying how many sugars you want, how about something a bit more exciting.

 

If I had the time now, I would like to learn Japanese or Cantonese as I like watching Japanese horror films and sometime the translation into English subtitles does not work, especially when they add swearing as the Japanese have no swear words instead they have 3 alphabets

 

Thank you Tinus!

 

Actually they have 4. Kanji, Katakana, Hiragana and Romaji.
Japanese is almost mathematical (if you can say that of a language) Speaking it is not the biggest problem. Understanding also is fairly simple. Writing however...