qyeasat

I tend to zone out while listening to the audiobook, but if I read along with the recording, I pay much closer attention to the words. It helps when I need to do some really close reading, but not really helpful when I need to power through a book or read something quickly for a course. I'm definitely not a great aural learner, so reading is my preferred method of accessing books.

I always thought Ayn Rand's works to be quite difficult. But then again, I tried to read it when I was quite young (and ambitious). A novel I found very challenging was actually The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. It's definitely worth the challenge, but there are 4 narrators, and the first two first-person narrators are considered two of the hardest to follow narrators in English. One has no sense of time or chronology due to a mental handicap, and the other is going insane. The latter is essentially a mind trying to communicate as it breaks down and it is a very difficult chapter to get through, but when you do, you find that the language is beautiful and wonderful, some of the best I've read.

This is an interesting prospect, but it's not too far off, to be honest. I mean, we're reaching the point where English is a near universal language. Of course, not everyone speaks it, but it's widely understood and probably the most widely used language for business. That said, there's always the cultural and historic ties to a language that we have to consider. It's not just a way of communicating. For some, its a way of identifying themselves to their culture and cultural identity is something very important to many.

In my experience, African French is rather easy to understand. Some people roll their r's, but I think that might be a regional thing. French is spoken widely in Africa so I think that it might be different depending which country specifically the speaker is from. Then again, I'm a learner of Quebecois French so my view of what constitutes a "difficult" may be a bit skewed. The Quebecois accent is really difficult sometimes, especially when the accent is very strong. It doesn't even sound like French sometimes!

I have terrible spelling! Thank goodness for spell check, otherwise I would be basically unintelligible. But words that trip me up often are ones that have double letters such as "necessary" or words that have the strange "i before e rule" such as beige or feisty.

Even back in my online gaming days, I usually typed out full sentences. It just became a habit and it sort of carried into my texting days. I mean, I'm a pretty fast typist so it doesn't really slow me down that much. I just type the way I think, which tends to be in full, coherent sentences.

I mostly dream in English, but I've had numerous dreams in Japanese, which I've also spoken somewhat decently since childhood. I do recall having a few dreams in French, or at least partly in French, especially when I spent a summer in Quebec. Granted, my dream was half-English, half-French since that's how many of the people I was around in Montreal spoke.

All of my French learning has been in Canada, so whenever I mess up on pronunciation or what not, it usually gets a little giggle and then a correction. I've actually been pretty fortunate in my language learning experience in that most of my experiences have been at least a somewhat pleasant one. I did meet a few nasty people, but I'm sure they exist in every culture. The downside to this is that I've developed a pretty cool (in my opinion) accent, but no one from France can really understand me. It's not that thick, but the Quebecois accent is still pretty strong nonetheless.