Oakster

I do because I know my spoken English isn't as great as my written English, so sometimes it's a bit awkward when I for example spend some time exchanging emails with someone and then when we meet in person, I feel like I can't communicate as well as the person is used to.

Era uma vez uma jovem menina chamada Ana Maria que gostava muito de comer gelados

I have a few people like that where I work as well, they try to speak Portuguese if we are having a casual conversation, but if it's work-related then they default back to English, they are probably just afraid of making some language mistake that leads to a big work problem

I'm Portuguese and I'm working my way up Europe language-wise, I think it's a fun way to learn I'm pretty happy with my Spanish so it's time to jump to the next country, once I'm finished with French I will have a few options available, but right now I can only go to French

hoy me metí en el trabajo un poco tarde, pero no había problema porque el sistema informático no funcionaba

"Era uma vez uma jovem menina

http://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among-languages-of-europe/ I know this is a 2008 study but since I just found it, it's new to me I think it's really interesting how central Greek is, yet only Albanian is relatively close to it.

Not sure how video posts are liked in the forum, but I found the perfect video for this thread

Welcome to the forum Chris! Curious to see that you want to learn a super useful language and a useless one One for practicality and another for enjoyment, balance in all things

I would say Açoreano is even harder to understand than Brazilian Portuguese or even Spanish

I'm fluent in both Portuguese (native language) and in English, I can also speak Spanish at about a 75% level I'd say. Knowing English is pretty crucial in today's world if you want to connect with other cultures, most have at least a little grasp on English.

Learning Spanish is very important, second only to English in my opinion in terms of usefulness. The are SO many countries you can travel to and need Spanish to make yourself understood, that it's imperative if you want to do any traveling.

The first books I read in English I think was the Harry Potter series, I already had a good understanding of the language from watching many movies, but the first book was The Philosopher's Stone.

I'm happy to say I've stopped using it completely! When something is funny I just write "hahaha", it gets the point across

Welcome to Linguaholic Joan! Hope you get some useful tips for learning French here on the forums, everyone is super helpful.