Linguists Check In Thread

[Thalionwen Hunigfolm]

Inspired by the beautiful Lore thread on Sindarin, yesterday I started Duolingo's Welsh track. And I thought it might be nice to have a Language Learners thread here on the Plaza, for folks to talk about languages they speak or are learning, and how they're working towards or maintaining a grasp of languages outside their mother tongue.

[Thalionwen Hunigfolm]

To start with, I'm Laura, I'm a native English speaker but I also speak a little French (I had 8 years of compulsory French classes in the Canadian school system), a very very small amount of German and Plautdietsch, and I used to read Latin but have forgotten almost everything I knew. Am currently juggling Duolingo tracks in French, Spanish and Welsh.

[Zôrzimril]

Oh heeyyyyyy! @Thalionwen Hunigfolm I love duolingo! I've largely given it up but it is 100% the way I learned the basics of the Korean alphabet, hangul.

Native English speaker here. In college I did a bit of Old English translation (with @Lord of the Rings!) which I've now forgotten all of. I speak Spanish fluently, know a bit of everyday Catalán from a semester studying in Barcelona, and I'm now learning Korean partially in an attempt to reclaim the linguistic element of my Korean identity, and partially to better communicate with friends there. The Korean classes I'm taking are very much "learn everyday phrases to survive in Korea" so far but I would really like to learn grammar more systematically at some point. There are some books I want to order but they are $$$$. Someday!

[Moriel]

Native English speaker! I am not fluent in any other languages but have at least a few words in quite a few. And I'm a far better read/writer than speaker in any of them The first language I studied was Latin, then Irish when I did a year abroad in high school, where I also started on Italian and French. I began a Masters in Celtic Studies but decided not to finish it at that time (they say I can come back whenever though!), which is where the last five entries on the following list come from.

Languages I have studied:
Latin
Gaeilge (Irish/Irish Gaelic)
French
Italian
Norwegian
Old & Middle Irish
Middle Welsh
Welsh
Gàidhlig (Gaelic/Scottish Gaelic)
Scots

My best languages by far (not counting English) are modern Welsh and Irish. Despite having numerous other hard copy study materials at my disposal I have been mainly using Duolingo lately to keep up on those two because it's just... easier, time and motivation wise, than sitting down to "study," particularly when I don't have access to classes or other learners. Duo isn't perfect, but a bit of gamification really helps to keep a lot of people (myself included) engaged. SaySomethingIn is also a great tool! It's an entirely aural learning scheme, where you listen and repeat and the grammar builds in naturally. I have the Welsh version, but they have several other languages also I believe.

I have a copy of Harri Potter a Maen yr Athronydd and ambitions to be able to read it easily My vocabulary is not huge. I'm also (slowly) working on an English translation of the Saunders Lewis play Blodeuwedd.

I've been thinking about posting some of my translations in the Cottage! Would anyone be interested in reading them?

[Thalionwen Hunigfolm]

Tarawen--I'm so jealous that you've made it to fluency in Spanish, and Korean seems like such a lovely language to learn. Plus knowing it would open a whole world of television and music possibilities

Moriel--Ugh your language list is the coolest and as for translations I WOULD BE INTERESTED IN READING THEM, I VOLUNTEER AS TRIBUTE!

[Almarëa Mordollwen]

Yay a languages thread! So, with varying degrees of ability, here's my list:

English - native
French - fluent (studied since c. age five)
Latin - good reading knowledge (also started c. age five)
Old English - good reading knowledge
Middle English - good reading knowledge
Old Norse-Icelandic - good reading knowledge

Those are the main ones, then ...
German - passable reading knowledge, basic speaking
Spanish - passable reading knowledge, basic speaking
Old French - passable reading knowledge
Icelandic - passable reading knowledge
Russian - very basic speaking

I have dabbled in various others (Finnish, Welsh, Gothic, Old Saxon, Italian, Arabic, Mandarin) but never got past the absolute basics. Did some Ancient Greek as a child (5-13, ish) and have completely forgotten it, aside from alphabet/word roots.


Every so often something will come up that I need to work out even though I haven't studied it much ... e.g. am currently reading/translating-parts-of an article from Norwegian. (You will note that Norwegian did not appear on the list.) Because thesis.

[Elvheimdros]

Oooh, languages.

Native English speaker.

Others:
Latin, can read, sometimes with a dictionary or grammar
Greek, can read with a dictionary (modern sometimes trickier)
Spanish, can generally read (thanks Duolingo, not that I've logged on for a year)
German, can mostly read, can speak some in theory (studied in school and college)
Korean, can read phonetically but generally not for comprehension, know some useful phrases (1 year teaching ESL in S. Korea)
Cyrillic alphabet (Russian usage), can usually read phonetically but not for comprehension
additionally can usually work my way through reading French or Portuguese texts with a dictionary or word lookup, but it takes forever (yay Romance languages! - although Italian baffles me for some reason)

[Zôrzimril]

@Thalionwen Hunigfolm studying it formally for over a decade + living in a Spanish-speaking country for half a year helped a lot with fluency. :)

Also meant to mention I was what essentially amounted to a Linguistics minor in college (my weird liberal arts school didn't have minors per se, just things it calls "concentrations") - went to Barcelona in large part to study the sociopolitical linguistics of bilingual education there

Also ALL of you are so accomplished holy shire

[Lirimaer]

It's alright, Tarawen, I am here to bring the average down. Native English speaker here ... can order drinks in a few other languages.

[Nia]

I will join @Lirimaer in helping bring the average down. Another native English speaker, could probably just about get by with the French and German I learnt at school. I am trying (incredibly slowly) to self-teach myself Spanish with a combo of duo-lingo and my two obliging Gibraltarian flatmates.

I also did Latin at school, but pretty much the only thing I remember is the ridiculous one-line song I made up for a vocab test we had one day which went "always remember that semper means always". To give credit where credit is due, the song clearly worked.

Edit: I have just remembered that I can actually also say "I am English" in Cantonese (& the friend who taught me says it's passable c. 50% of the time). Ground-breaking stuff here.

[Arnyn]

Weee!

My list:

Dutch - native
French - good
English - fluent
Spanish - good (used to be better than simply 'good', but not maintaining a language is deadly; now I'm good at comprehension but my productive skills have becoming lacking)

and the "sad" list:
Latin - could read and translate rather well but have forgotten most if not all of what I used to know... sad
German - used to be basic but enough to get around, never used it again after high school so that's all gone now... again, sad

[Balfur]

Ooo, languages! I prefer studying the 'useless' versions:

• Dutch - native

• English - used to be fluent, not so sure nowadays

• French - basic. I can read the literature most of the time, but the active skills and listening are just abbysmal

• German - basic. I understand most of it, but have not practised it a whole lot since secondary school

• Latin - Like, adequate, I think. Have studied it for a couple of years and had a bit of resurgence because of studying theology the past few years.

• Greek - The ancient one. Have been following courses concerning ancient Greek the past two decades.

• Frysian - Frysk is myn heits taal. Cannot really speak it without sounding English, but listening to, reading and (occasionally) writing it I cope.

Now that I have stopped my theological studies, I feel like I could maybe start learning a couple of the languages I have been neglecting/waiting to start with: Welsh, Gàidhlig, Scots, biblical Hebrew.

[Vorondir]

Contemporary Greek - native
English - fluent, fostering ambitions to be indistinguishable from a native.
French - basic. I can deal with bureaucracy and I can understand speech and text, but I cannot easily compose text, socialize effortlessly, or enjoy literature.

I have also studied Greek (ancient) and German, but they remain arcane to me.

[Akhenanat]

Native: English
Fluent (to one degree or another): Spanish
Learning: Nahuatl (Aztec), German, Dutch, French, Norwegian, Finnish, Tewa and Kewa (both Puebloan Indigenous), Diné (Navajo), Icelandic, and Irish

I wouldn't call myself a linguist just yet, despite all that I am trying to learn because I've yet to master as many of the languages I want to learn but I'm getting there slowly

[Merewyn]

Wait, can I join in as a native English speaker who speaks no other language and is actually really terrible at English because his sense of grammar and use of slang is terrible?

[Flame Fried Ent]

Native tongue is English.

Decent in French....used to be fluent, but I don’t get to use it much so it’s rusted.

Plugging away at German and Dutch; still beginner level...A1 in Dutch, maybe a high A2 in German?

I do a whole bunch of other languages on Duolingo (Irish, Gaelic, Finnish, Polish, Russian, Arabic. Hebrew, Japanese, Mandarin, Hindi), all of which I know between some letters and how to introduce myself.

I’m also enrolled in a university course to learn Cree, which is the Indigenous/Aboriginal language in my area, that’ll start in September.

[Zôrzimril]

I repeat: you're all so accomplished holy shire

Also yay I just took a placement test for my Korean class this fall and have reached the milestone of scoring 33% instead of 10% like the first time I took it. I am solidly falling into their definition of level 2 now!

[FireroseArien]

Hey everyone! I'm @firerosearien on Duolingo, and I've been using it since 2012, when Duolingo itself was in beta!

Currently I speak English as my native language and am conversational in Spanish. I can read French fairly well, but spoken French is a bit harder. I also have bits and pieces of Hebrew (I can read it pretty well, and know a bunch of words, but am not so good at forming sentences), and some exposure to Japanese (can read hirgana and some kanji; katakana gives me a lot of fits, can say about three sentences), and I'm almost finished with the Duolingo Finnish tree which I am *really* enjoying.

My goal is to eventually do EVERY skill tree on Duolingo, some languages I'm more serious about than others. But I have no idea if I'll ever actually finish the Japanese tree because it is HARD.

Hola. Puedo hablar español!
Bonjour. Je peut parler un petite peu de français.
שלום! אני מדברת קצת עברית
こんにちは！日本語はなせません。。。
Minä osaan puhu vähän suomea

[Amhran]

Hey cool! Me too!

I'm a native speaker of American English and I have a love affair with unusual words. I would have loved to be a philologist but that program doesn't exist in American colleges and Tolkien kind of covered all the interesting bases anyway.

My linguistic resume isn't nearly as impressive as most of y'all's, but I got my degree in Classics, which means time was I could read both Latin and Ancient Greek. Both are exceedingly rusty now but I'm picking them back up again as I teach my children. I also took two semesters of German back in the day, which was disappointing because I wanted to learn to read the German Bibles I inherited from my great-grandparents, but what I got was instructions on how to check into a hotel with a poodle, and say "Ich fuhle hundsmiserable". Oh well.

I see several of you have mentioned Duolingo. Do you find that it's actually helpful?

[FireroseArien]

I really like Duolingo, but the key is to not use it alone. It's good for basic grammar and vocabulary, but you can really only get to the B1 level with it. I usually like to supplement with textbooks aimed at high school students, news articles (when I am comfortable enough with a language, right now only SPanish and French are there for me) and videos with subtitles.

[Zôrzimril]

Agree on the benefits and limitations of Duolingo, @FireroseArien! It was also very helpful for me in learning a non-Latin alphabet.

[Flame Fried Ent]

That's why I'm also using Rosetta Stone, reading newpapers etc. in other languages and reading translations of my favourite books--like LOTR, or Harry Potter, etc. If I can have the English original and the translation open at the same time,it helps me see how it was translated.

BTW...anybody know Yiddish, or know someone who knows Yiddish and who would be interested in doing some tutoring?

[FireroseArien]

Despite being a member of the Tribe @Flame Fried Ent I speak exactly 0 Yiddish. However, since I can read Hebrew I can certainly help you *read* Yiddish...I just cant tell you what any of it means, outside of words that have worked their way into the American vernacular. Such as:

"You have some schmutz on your schnozz" or "Oy this heat makes me such a schvitzzer" (it's about 35 C in NYC today so yeah)

[Almarëa Mordollwen]

Interesting to see all the different resources people have found! Anyone have any websites/software they like other than Duolingo?

My latest discovery was that Disney+ includes dubs in many, many languages (unlike the films on DVD or iTunes which usually only include English/French in Canada), so I've been watching a lot of animation recently.

[FireroseArien]

Memrise for vocabulary is decent, and I've been enjoying the Drops app, too. I do miss mindsnacks, though.

[Zôrzimril]

I really like the app Quizlet. You can create study sets of words, and then it offers a number of different styles of quizzes. It also automatically detects words you need more practice with and gives feedback on progress with them.

[Flame Fried Ent]

Despite being a member of the Tribe @Flame Fried Ent I speak exactly 0 Yiddish. However, since I can read Hebrew I can certainly help you *read* Yiddish...I just cant tell you what any of it means, outside of words that have worked their way into the American vernacular. Such as:

"You have some schmutz on your schnozz" or "Oy this heat makes me such a schvitzzer" (it's about 35 C in NYC today so yeah)

LOL. Same with me, though I’m not fully a member of the Tribe. I’d like to learn though, got some family stuff that’s in Yiddish etc.

[FireroseArien]

[mention]Flame Fried Ent[/mention] I so wish I could help! Unfortunately my great grandparents and grandparents only spoke it when they didn't want their kids to kno what they are saying...

I do recommend getting the book "the joys of Yiddish" for sure though

[Moriel]

@Almarëa Mordollwen I mentioned SaySomethingIn further up the thread, the language selection is limited but it's a super cool aurally based learning app! Welsh, Spanish, Manx, Dutch, Cornish, and Latin; I've been using the Welsh

[Flame Fried Ent]

@FireroseArien , I'm pretty sure my great-grandparents did the same, and some of their kids.

I'll look for that book. Thanks!

[Olme]

This is great! Nice to have a thread to gather around our language nerdiness.

I'm a native English speaker from the U.S. I did an M.A. in Scandinavian Linguistics and am fluent in Norwegian (noen andre her?). I also studied all of the main "dead" Germanic languages, but am especially fond of Old English and Gothic.

Otherwise, I enjoy geeking out with Dutch and Frisian, but most of that is reading and listening knowledge.

I also need to use Spanish more and more at work, so that's a work-in-progress.

[Androthelm]

Hey all! The introductions have sort of given way to discussion, but I'll throw my credentials on the pile --

English -- Native.
Russian -- Minoring currently, so I'm passably conversational? Working on getting myself to easier reading (rather than slow translation).
French -- Uh... Uh... I've been meaning to keep this up? Took a couple of years in high school but have since FALLEN OFF.
Italian -- Similar, only when I was younger / around the house and not in school (we love Italian-Americans getting in touch with their roots). I was passably fluent there but have since lost almost all of it, much to my chagrin.

I've also poked around with Latin and German to almost no success. I'm hoping to do an MDiv postgrad, which will probably involve some Latin at least if not Bib. Greek and Hebrew.

[Nessa Saelind]

Pele's remark on translation in the I Have Never thread reminded me of this thread so I'm dusting the cobwebs here, as you do...

A native speaker of Croatian here! ^_^ I can also speak most languages of former Yugoslavia like my native language, except Slovenian and Macedonian.

Fluent in English, and I'm average in Spanish and Italian - I understand a lot, but I can't string a sentence to save my life

The languages I can read and have a basic understanding of are medieval Latin and Turkish - mostly because I used sources in those languages for my master's thesis but realistically I could probably order two cups of tea in Turkish on a good day

[Pele Alarion]

*follows Nessa around*

I can't believe I haven't posted in this thread; apparently have somehow overlooked it.

Latvian - native
English - fluent (second working language for translation purposes)
Russian - very good (third working language)

Basic level: Spanish, Swedish, German

Can read: Lithuanian and Polish

[Ercassie]

Allow me to join the chorus of “oh my stars, when do you people ever find the time to become so accomplished ?!” I am very suitably impressed and intimidated at once. Modest little entry from me, nothing to write home about but, hey, why not join the excitement ?

English - Native

Cornish - embarrassingly not fluent, despite having been raised up in Cornwall. They simply don’t teach our own language in our own schools, which is a huge shame. Still myself and some friends made it our business to hunt down some local learning from local bards and the like who have made it their business and as such I am possibly just ‘conversational’ in ‘revivalist’ Cornish. And I don’t mean simply saying ‘dreckly’ when asked when the buses will turn up ! I mean more like Mar es yw dyski Kernewek avel dyski ken yeth. A wodhowgh hwi konvedhes ?

I would be very interested to learn if that makes sense to any other Celtic language speakers as I am not familiar with any of the rest of them, but have heard they’re very similar ?

French
and Spanish - both learnt at school. Again, I would count myself as basic ‘conversationalist’. I can possibly just about survive a short holiday in French/Spanish speaking countries but not much beyond that I suspect !

German - my sister learnt this one at school, and I know only two sentences which she taught me: neither of which are true any more and I thus have no use for. I never pursued it any further for my own sake.

Latin - have forgotten all but a few choice words and phrases. This was another one learnt at school but classes started far later on into that schooling as an optional extra class so I didn’t study it for more than like a year. Occasionally it helps me to make sense of some of the medical terminology I have to decipher in my job but otherwise, i think it’s a push to say I know any of it at all really.

BSL (British Sign Language) - Not sure if this one counts in this thread ? Anyway I used to have a friend whose sibling was deaf and she taught some of us some pieces. I can really only remember the alphabet now though.

[Androthelm]

@Ercassie BSL definitely counts! It's still linguistics -- just not auditory linguistics.

[Nessa Saelind]

I second that! BSL is a language so you totally get a cookie for that Ercassie!

By the by when I was scrolling through everyone's replies I noticed that a lot of folks know German and most of you learnt Germanic languages! I am seriously impressed! I find German very difficult and frankly I'd rather do Latin than German

[Moriel]

@Ercassie My experience is that Cornish is grammatically and frequently vocabularically (there has to be a real word for that but I can't think of it) very similar to Welsh- they're both Brythonic languages (as opposed to Gaeilge and Gàidhlig for instance which are Goidelic/Gaelic languages, but all fall under the Celtic umbrella) and so fairly close cousins, as is Breton. That said my study of Cornish is basically nil, but I do follow Kowethas: The Cornish Language Fellowship and Bleujennow yn Kernewek on facebook

@Feanedhell is Breton and there's a similar story of language loss in that area!

[Androthelm]

Do any of the German-speaking folks have advice for a beginning learner? Maybe I'm just confused after spending so long with Russian, but... good lord, basic grammar is slaughtering me. Gender especially? Why does Mädchen use ein? Is gender in German just super irregular or...?

[Mattie]

Native tongue is English.

I've studied German and Latin at school and university. Passible German but I've forgotten most of the Latin I learned.

I've also studied Scots Gaelic, Scots, Old English, Old Norse/Icelandic, Finnish, Cherokee, Juggera (local Indigenous Australian dialect), and other Indigenous Australian dialects for fun and for writing projects. I'm not fluent in any of these, just a few words or a phase here and there.

At the moment I'm writing a non-fiction book and am studying Hebrew, (Ancient) Greek, and Arabic for it. I might delve into Aramaic and Yiddish too at some point.

I know a little bit of Thai too. My nanna taught me many years ago but I have forgotten much of it.