fluffyducky

Cheesy pick up lines don't sound so cheesy in foreign languages somehow, they sound pretty cool or exotic instead. Of course, only the ones I can understand. The ones I don't understand just make me go ??? and question the dude who would use a german joke to flirt with.

I tried to learn the alien language from futurama, so I could read all the grafitti and other stuff written in the alien language, and while I can remember which symbol corresponds to which letter or punctuation mark, I can't process them fast enough before the scene changes and the words are off screen. There's the more complicated version too, which translates into numbers which become alphabets, which is more like a code and pretty impossible for me.

German sounds rough to me, in comparison to a lot of other european languages. It's like how everything said in Hokkien sounds like a swearword, and best korean newsreaders seem to be constantly scolding people.

I like slang when it's spoken, but not much when it's typed. The words are really kinda charming when you hear them spoken with the accent and all, but I can't stand it when people type out the words and they make no sense.

My mom says my first word was bird. Which is kinda cool, cause my family are bird people and not dog or cat people.

It's like riding a bicycle, if you don't use it for too long, you can still get on the bike and go in a wobbly straight line, but have no idea how to turn/brake/balance well. Likewise, you'll lose your language skills, but retain some words and basic sentence structure, and you just have to practice or use it more often to get back the skills.

I think that they've become more English friendly, even in the Asian countries where a lot of people only speak their mother tongue, a lot of the younger people and those who work in touristy places tend to be able to understand and speak English. Of course, the old folks won't understand a word of all the guai lou angmoh speak.

Well, I think they can be effective, but mostly learning relies on the student, if they don't want to learn then the tutorials, online or not, are going to be useless. If they really want to learn, some beat up 10 years out of date book would do just as well.

I think you should start as early as possible, and you need to maintain an enviroment of speaking in Spanish or German, depending on where you are the natural school enviroment will teach them English (or whatever is the prominent language), then they'll speak to their friends at school in English. So you gotta have a home enviroment in the 2nd language, so they'll use that at home. That's how a lot of ABC kids can speak in cantonese/hokkien/mandarin to their parents and still speak English with an American accent.

Yes I do, not only my native language but in all my languages. I go "blahblah that word that means this-and-this", pause for a bit, remember the word, then spout it out and continue speaking. I think I'm getting old.

If I don't actually need it urgently, my wordbank is endless and full of vocab. When I need to tell someone something, woosh everything is gone.

I think Malay/Bahasa Melayu/Bahasa Indonesia is one of the easiest to learn, especially for someone who already knows English, the sentence structure and grammer are easy as hell. And everything is spelled exactly like how it's pronounced.

egs:

Close the windows = tutup jendela (lit close window(s))

My mother is a teacher = saya ibu cikgu (lit. my mother teacher)

I think a gradual transition should be in place, like at first they teach you with your language, then a mixture, then finally once everyone has a pretty decent grasp of reading and writing teach the language only in that language. Or have the teacher able to talk in whatever language, and the students are only allowed to answer in the language they're learning.

I kind of went the other way, I started learning Japanese because I play a lot of JRPGs and other Japanese-only games, and I wanted to be able to play them even if there was no translation or localization available, or at release because I didn't want to wait for the chance of there being a translation. Even just being able to read the menus and skills make a lot of games playable, from not knowing what the hell to do.

Strangely, I've found Japanese hardest for me to learn, even though my mother tongue is Chinese and I'm decent at it. The squigglies of hiragana just aren't easily memorizable to me, maybe it's just because I'm too old and I don't learn stuff that easily anymore, like all the other languages I learned since I was a kid. :C Sentence structure and vocab are pretty easy to pick up and store in the word bank, and I can speak passably, but I just can't write the words.

Huh, thats odd. I just realized that none of my teachers ever imposed a word limit. Word minimums, on the other hand, yeesh. It's like they want us to spew a few paragraphs worth of bull instead of writing concise, straight-to-the-point essays with meaninful content. Ahh, the wonders of my school system.

I have some experience similar to yours but in my native tongue. Where I'm from we get a lot of Korean tourists and it just so happens I bear a striking resemblance to my Asian brethren. Thanks to that, and my painfully silent personality, I often overhear hushed whispers of stuff obviously about me.

Ahhh when you get those narrative type essays where you can write a fantastic story set in a fantasy world, a minimum word limit is fine. Heck, it's fine to heave a reasonable word limit even for proper research papers, you want to have a minimum amount of content and not "because that's why the end". But I spend forever tearing out my hair and trying to compress something that easily crosses the 5k mark into 3500 words because they want super concise versions and count headers and tables and charts into the word count. It's hell man.

I tend to feel nothing before an exam, regardless of whether I am confident or utterly unprepared. It doesn't matter to me, I go into a room, sit down like everyone else, and start writing. Or drawing. Or whatever. When it's over, it's over. It's just another event in life to me, I don't understand why people even feel anything..

"We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it." -Sovereign, ME1

"You wish to finish this war with your honor intact? Stand among the ashes of a trillion dead souls and ask the ghosts if honor matters... The silence will be your answer."- Javik, ME3

"There’s no use crying over every mistake, you just keep on trying until you run out of cake." -GLADoS, Portal

"Ahh you think you're different? That you can handle it? Yes, I remember that feeling. For I was the same." -Some merchant guy, Dark Souls.

"My Rattata is in the top 10% of Rattata" -Youngster, Pokemon

""A man chooses and a slave obeys" -Andrew Ryan, Bioshock

Quotes that stick in my memories tend to be from videogames.

I can totally extend a sentence to a mega ultra long paragraph just by beating around the bush too. It's awesome! (Not so awesome when you have a max word limit.)

Knowing a few languges helps me eavesdrop on people and understand what they're saying, so when random people talk about me thinking I can't understand I can tell them off in their own language and feel like an evil genius. Muahahaha.

I'm from Singapore, and the school environment is English, and everyone except the a-lot-older generation can speak it. It's a little funny, because our actual national language is Bahasa Melayu, and most of the population is Chinese.

The phrase "toblerone rollo combo" has given me an unreasonable love of the Geordie accent.

The "u wot m8 u star'in" of the chavs is also endlessly entertaining to me.

In my "perfect oral examination voice" I somehow have a British-like accent, but otherwise in normal speech I'm a total Singaporean when I'm just talking normally. People still somehow assume I'm from overseas so maybe my accent isn't that bad though? Until I add all the slang terms and start spouting all the lahs.

I find writing the hardest actually, with reading even though you may not know some words you can guess at their meanings, listening somehow has always been easy for me, and speaking is really easy too once I understand enough stuff to form a sentence. My brain just can't remember all the characters to write though.

I started learning Chinese when I was 5 or so, when I first started school. It was forced upon all of us (everyone had to learn their race's mother tongue) and a lot of it was pure memorization so sadly most of us ended up being utter shit at it, failing all the exams and weekly spelling tests, and hating the language. I'm glad I learned though, it's really useful nowadays.

I've only managed to get the meaning of a couple of words when it comes to listening to music. I kinda can sing along with the songs even though I can't understand what I'm saying though, haha.

Just because the most people speak it won't mean that Chinese would become the international language. You have to start young for languages to be learned well, and I don't see people or schools going to do that for their kids. (plus people like me who had it drilled into my brains since the age of 5 can barely remember how to write half of what I was taught through memorization.) Chinese isn't an alphabetic language like English or Spanish, so it makes it a lot harder to pick up.