lushlala

I once had an Italian boyfriend whose English wasn't very good. I was all too happy to learn Italian to meet him halfway. Of course there's also that thing where people believe that a language's best learnt in bed LOL Apparently you learn a foreign language faster if you date a native speaker of that language. I agree it's great motivation.

It is weird! I know two people who really struggle with the letter r, they just can't roll their r's! My English husband and a fellow Motswana friend. What makes it worse is that in my language (Setswana) the r is more of a harsher, rolling sound compared to the softer English r. I'd liken it to how Italians pronounce their r. I just laugh when I hear them attempt to say it

I would take anything that was available, providing money weren't an object. I'd love to attend classes for French and Italian, especially. I'd want to know beforehand that the teacher was a native speaker though. I'm most interested in the spoken language, not the ins and out of the grammatical text speak.

I think I'm in the same boat as Sidney I've spoken English most of my life from very young, and my language is very complex. It goes round the houses to say something simple, it's just tiresome sometimes. We also tend to borrow words from English, especially to explain things that we never historically had in our lives. I think that's why a lot of the younger generation in my country prefer to speak English.

In an ideal world, I'd love to speak three to four international languages fluently I think that's a nice number of languages to see you through the big, wide global village. Those languages would be French, Italian, Spanish, Swahili (for the sheer beauty of the language) and maybe German. These days it pays to have linguistic skills. Prospective employers see you as being versatile and an asset, and you can do so much more!

This so true! In school, you're not really taught the spoken version, but rather the stiff and rigid text book language that many natives don't speak! Like most people, when I went to live in the UK I often struggled to understand what the locals were saying and vice versa. The one thing I liked though, I was told I speak outstanding if a little posh English....not the accent, but mainly my choice of words. Sometimes people would ask me to define English words as apparently I use big, posh words LOL But after living there for thirteen years, I soon became "one of them" in terms of dropping a few words out of my vocabulary and picking up more vernacular/regional language. American English can leave me scratching my head! I recently took a test for an online job and I'm not joking, I wasted a lot of time trying to understand sections of the test! It was like an altogether different version of the English language. Needless to say, I didn't do very well.

I'm a little embarrassed to say even though my country is landlocked and surrounded by a few countries, I've never even tried to learn their languages. So I wouldn't be able to answer the question. It's made worse by the fact that there are a lot of people coming to work and live in my country, who seem to pick up my language without much trouble! -and let me just say, it's a very difficult language to learn!

I'm the same, I took French as a Minor at university for four years and was really rather good at it (ahem, even if I say so myself!) When I went on to do my Post Grad in Education, it wasn't offered so I paid a small fee to take lessons with an organisation called Alliance Francaise. That was only for a term, though. I was always better at writing it than speaking it. I suppose it was confidence thing