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Linguaholic

宇崎ちゃん

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Posts posted by 宇崎ちゃん

  1. Ah, you also like the videos from LangFocus? :)

    Do you code switch a lot when you speak to people who know the same languages as you?
    Depends.
    When I talk to my little sister, I speak Dutch all the time, when I talk to my mother, I speak Polish all the time.
    There are certainly people (mostly Polish guests who live in the Netherlands for a long time) to which I code switch with, depending on what they say.
    And there's a guy on the chat app called "LINE" to which we often code switch between English and Japanese.

    And what would you say your internal matrix language is?  The dominant language you think in and use to associate the other languages you know?  Is yours Polish?
    Honestly, I don't have one.
    I think in the 4 languages all the time, just not at the same time.
    I occasionally need to think in English when I want to say something in Japanese, but for the most of the time, I use languages directly without any translation.

    Just curious about your experience if you're alternating between Polish, English, and Japanese often depending on who you're talking to?
    See question 1.

  2. How many high fluency level languages can your brain handle?
    I know 4 language fluently plus a few more languages I can only understand (not speak).
    I've been considering to expand my linguistic knowledge to 3 more languages, but I think I'll make sure I polish my current languages more.
    How much you can handle really depends on what YOU can handle, there's no set rule to how many languages you can learn.
    Some learn only 1, some learn as much as 50 languages.

    How many languages have you studied and how many of them does your brain maintain at a time?
    Excluding my native languages, I have at least attempted to learn English, Japanese, German, Spanish, Mandarin, and Russian.
    I can maintain English and Japanese really well, but German faded away rather quick, and I've never learnt the remaining 3 languages beyond the very basics.
    This is all because I use English and Japanese every day, both in my free time and at work.
    Meanwhile, I only need German once in a long time, meaning I don't read or hear any German for many months long, which resulted in me losing my German fluency and it's now a language I can understand only.

    Also, in your experience, have their been certain languages that seem to choose you and draw you in more than other languages you've attempted to learn?
    Yes, Spanish and Mandarin never really interested me as much, it was more like I wanted to learn them because of their usefulness rather than having a passion with them.

    For instance, do you go for certain families of languages over others?
    No, I never liked to learn similar languages.
    If a given language is similar, you tend to skip a certain vocabulary you need to learn, because 'you already know it based on what you've learnt in the other language'.
    As a result, you lose that word once you need to use it and either start mixing languages in a single sentence, or feel too awkward to say anything at all.

  3. @Wanda

    Depends on where you live really.
    Of course over here, Dutch is the most common language.
    However, Dutch isn't nearly as widely use outside our national borders, though it does expand itself all the way to Suriname, Belgium, and perhaps some of the Caribbean islands.

    I was raised to be a native speaker in Dutch and Polish, so I know this private conversations in public thing is a very great asset, until you realise my city consists of lots of Polish people too.

  4. I've never learnt Arabic myself before, but I know some people who did.
    Based on their opinions, it's a good idea to start off with standard Arabic and then focus on the dialect that is the most relevant to you.
    And if you can't decide the dialect you want to learn, your safest bet would be Egyptian Arabic, due to the influence in movies and such (just like how American English is the most commonly used variety of English in movies and such).

  5. So basically, you say "if you don't speak French, just STFU and stick with your own language instead".

    All learners of any language start off with bad pronunciation (unless they exclusively learn the written half of the language, then they will never come to pronunciation at all), so you can't expect anyone who just studies a language to magically sound like a native speaker, it's not how language learning works.
    In fact, people just need to mirror native speakers to perfect their pronunciation, which always starts off with bad pronunciation.

  6. Welcome to the forum, you seem very enthusiastic about languages. :D

    As for your question, you can learn German while in Italy, as long as you have the right materials, resources, and people to communicate with (either online or offline).
    I've also learnt Japanese without even setting a foot in Japan, and I've also learnt English far before I even met a native English speaker in real life.

    Another thing I want to note is that out of French, Spanish, Italian, and German, German is not a Romance language unlike the other 3.
    Therefore, you might notice how much German differs from the other 3 languages.

  7. There are 3 issues actually.

    1. Wrong section indeed (no need to open a new topic elsewhere, I can move it to where it's supposed to go to).
    2. The lack of using any breaks makes it extremely difficult to read your post and get your question at all. Please use the "enter" key more often.
    3. If I understand the wall of text good enough, your question is about Hebrew, right? I can't recall any Hebrew members here.

  8. This forum has grown very inactive since last summer, meaning it can take a long time to answer a question these days.
    It's not the way we treat all members, it's simply the way any kind of forum works these days sadly.

    I know a bit of German, but not as much.
    However, since Dutch grammar is nearly identical (except that there are no cases in Dutch and genders are almost unnecessary), I would be able to answer your question too, but with Dutch examples.

    The most basic word order is SVO, but as you said, longer sentences tend to be SOV.
    For example (red = subject, green = verb, gold = object, blue = adjective, anything else = black):
    Ik vind forums leuk.
    Ik vind forums leuk, omdat ik daar veel aan heb.
    Ik vind forums leuk, omdat ik daar veel aan heb, want er zijn veel leden.

    So as you can see, there is no 1 answer for everything, but at the same time, these are the standard rules.
    I hope this helps you a bit.

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