thekernel

The first five were exactly what I'd thought would be, though not in that order. I saw Portuguese, was surprised, but then remembered Brazil and it made sense. Bengali was the most unexpected of all.

I consider the "y" sound at the beginning of "union" and "unicorn" to qualify as a consonant sound. The letter "y" is a vowel in words like "myriad" and "syllable", but in words like "youth" and "yarn" it is not. You can't say "an union" because the pronunciation of letter "u" in those words sounds like "yu". The rules on a/an are actually very direct, because it is all about flowing one word into the next. If it doesn't flow, then you're not saying it right. There's really no two ways about it, don't let the appearance fool you. It is about the sound.

Lost In Translation deals with these notions very well. Tons of misinterpretation, barriers, missed connections. The overarching theme of "communication" is present in all corners of the script. Beautiful, well done movie.

I don't think I can spend very long without talking. If I have the house to myself completely, which is very rare with my family, I'm usually singing

Shakespeare was present through all my high school years. The earlier grades got simpler ones like Midsummer Night's Dream, while the later grades dealt with harder ones like Macbeth. Most of the Shakespeare books had helpful notations for words that have since changed or died off. I also took some acting classes in high school, which also heavily featured the playwright. What a lot of people don't realize (or just don't care to recognize) is that he actually is responsible for thousands of common words in our lexicon. So he was the catalyst to the obsoleting of his own era's language. I thought that was pretty interesting. His capacity to express the motives and emotions of several unique characters was inspiring for me. I was deeply entranced by the loquacious nature of his descriptions.

A/an is based on pronunciation, not appearance. "An hour" "An F" "A Ouija board"

Boy, rusty can't even begin to describe my Spanish-speaking abilities. Yet, at the same time there is a lot that I have retained over the years despite no practice. For example, I can still construct simple sentences and conjugate regular verbs in most basic tenses. I think you just have to re-integrate yourself with the rules of the language. The vocabulary might be faint but you will probably find a lot of it coming back to you naturally if your sentence structure is sound.

Rosetta Stone, if I recall correctly, has many different teaching variations if one isn't working very well. You might be better off with independent learning if their curriculum gives you troubles. There are metric tonnes of online resources that will help you (and your kids) learn any language.

A friend I knew just recently returned after an elongated stay in France, where she says she began thinking in French. I know that's a common occurrence when you become fluent, but what she told me next was pretty surprising; she had a lot of gaps in English where her brain would substitute the French word and she'd find herself temporarily unable to speak the correct English term. She is a native English speaker, which left me surprised that spending about 6 months immersed away from your home tongue could affect it so profoundly. Do you feel you are affected similarly when you are immersed in another language?

Absolutely, it wouldn't make much sense if Canada didn't teach it . I find it funny that we have two national languages, but only one is mandated throughout every year of education while the other is sort of a sidebar.

This answer will sound silly compared to the tougher languages so far, but mine is French. I couldn't understand the pronunciations for the life of me. Sometimes there would be 5 letters in a word that you weren't supposed to pronounce, which made no sense. The accents were way too confusing. Verb conjugation was a mess. Overall, I stumbled miserably until I switched to Spanish. It felt like several chains were lifted and replaced with rational grammar rules.

I can't speak for Americans, living in Canada and all. I know in Canada, you will not need to know any French unless you are east of Ontario. That being said, I live in Vancouver, where the greater metropolitan area has several large ethnic communities where a person could theoretically live their entire life there without learning the national languages. Chinatown is a good example. I know it is popular opinion of many Canadian citizens that learning English should be mandatory, but I don't find that arrogant. It would make the lives of the immigrants a lot easier, and they can function beyond their ethnic niches in society. Personally I don't think it should be a requirement, there are many immigrants who needed to escape their situation and didn't have time to learn a whole language. However, once they get to a new country, they would be narrowing their opportunities at success if they didn't at least consider it.

Well, I suppose it isn't really, it's one of those words that English has adopted unchanged from other languages, like "mosquito" or "schnitzel". Which are also pretty funny words themselves.

I never chose French. Growing up in Canada, public schooling mandated French classes as early as grade 5 or 6. Not that I minded at the time; there were things about the language that did interest me, but in the end I found a lot of the rules and words were too hard to memorize and recall.

I'm a native English speaker. "Strengths" is the longest one-syllable word in the English language. Trying to say it in one beat is a bit of a challenge I find. Auxiliary is a word that I have various pronunciations for I never seem to remember the correct way to say it.

Scissoring Quixotic Loquacious Couscous Hullabaloo Brouhaha Sequester I can probably think of lots more, too.

Mine was a great, big relief. My teacher was a funny middle-aged man with an endless army of one-liner jokes. I had just switched over from French, and heard from my older brothers that the Spanish teacher had a very simple course. Naturally, the first day he tells us all "You're probably all here because you heard this class was easy. You heard correctly. This class is very easy." I managed to absorb way more about Spanish in one year than I did with French in several. I didn't have to work as hard to understand Spanish. On day one we learned the enunciation comes on the second to last syllable, unless there was an accent found somewhere in the word. And that there was no other function for the accent. Coming from years of French, where the accents are frequent and confusing, this was a humongous load off my shoulders, and set the tone for my learning.

"Virtue is what makes us uniform; sin is what makes us unique" It's an interesting little comment, I don't know where I heard it from. People strive towards what they think is the norm and stigmatize what they think isn't, only to find that they are hiding their true selves.

Me too. I'm getting back into Spanish now, but I wish I had at least practiced it since high school. Hopefully it will be easy to re-learn. I remember having some trouble with "haber", though.

Spanish has a lot of accessibility as a language, as well as one of the largest the numbers of native speakers in the world (estimated to be greater than English!). It's practical to know in several nations of the Western hemisphere and some in the Eastern.

Before I started taking Spanish in high school, students were required to take a certain number of years of French. I was oaky at the French language, but I disliked it very much and I switched to Spanish as soon as I could. It felt like Spanish was a lot simpler; way less accents, every letter in the word is heard as it is written, and the enunciation rules just made way more sense. Perhaps what made me so able to learn Spanish was through a tougher language.

My mother said that my first word wasn't a word, but the letter "K". They had an alphabet block with the letter "K" on it, and were trying to get me to say it. Apparently Wheel of Fortune also taught me how to read! Which makes sense when you think about it. They pronounce all the letters and phrases with plenty of repetition.