Not all of us live in English speaking countries. Therefore, knowing more than one language is a must. Even if English is our mother tongue, there are some who know more than one language.

English is my first language, though I make grammatic mistakes I can carry on a dialog in French and I know some Hebrew phrases.

I want to know about this forum. What languages do you speak and how comfortable are you with them?

Jeanette Isabelle

I foolishly took Latin in high school, and should have taken Spanish... did take a two week summer course for classroom teachers in conversational Spanish... FWIW, IMHO schools should drop all the conjugation and declining nonsense and teach aural and conversational language skills like the military does.... took two years of Russian in college, but very degraded after 40 or so years of non use... spent a year and a half in Japan, can order a beer and find the bathroom...most everyone in the Philippines, however spoke English... worked with Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Thai linguists and remember a couple of phrases...

though I would like to learn languages, my work with reaction times as a function of brain hemisphere dominance with student athletes, and observations of the military linguists I worked with suggest that there is a high correlation between easy language learning and musical ability... I have no music skills...additionally I'm concrete sequential in my thinking, and one most likely should be global to learn languages quickly...I'm sorry JI, but if I had kids, they would not take French YMMV

French is a beautiful language. Being part French, the language was spoken at home before Dad died.

Jeanette Isabelle

French is a beautiful language but there is not enough local usage to keep my tongue from growing tired. The smattering I have of Russian, Japanese, Spanish, and German, along with my French served me well in Southern and Eastern Europe, and North Africa.

Does this mean everyone, who has served in the military, knows more than one language? I guess that shouldn't be too surprising.

Jeanette Isabelle

JI... I was in the USAF Security Service, and we weren't really like most other military units... most enlisted men had at least a year or two of college during the time I was in... I had 4 years, and was missing my language requirement for my BA.... if you were stationed in any country for a period of time picked up idiomatic expressions and phrases just by interaction (typically with bar girls)... I made it a habit to ask a kid (they typically wanted to learn English) to make me a set of flash cards with a few phrases when I got to a new duty station... take me to the hospital, police station etc... written out in the characters of the native language with the phonetic spelling underneath....if you live down town and on the local economy speeds up the process

shortly before closing our intercept site in Japan I was offered a job teaching English phrases and expressions to Japanese business men and women at a cultural center... $15 (4500yen)/hour was a lot of money in 1972, but we worked trick work (3 of 4 flights worked mids, swings, days, and one was off, and hard to schedule my available time)

Stationing in Japan must have been adventurous, especially if you rode a train in Tokyo during rush hour. Where in Japan were you?

Jeanette Isabelle

I speak Spanish poorly and can swear, say please and thank you, or ask for the bathroom in French and German.

Since I live in Finland it is escential to speak finnish.
And I´m of the swedish minority in Finland so my mother tounge is swedish.
Furthermore we have compulsory english in school.
Also i studied german in school for two years but that was too difficult so I do not speak german.
Girlfriend is estonian so for the past decade I have learnt estonian, not perfect but so and so.

To summerize:
#Finnish - very good
#Swedish - very good
#English - very good
#Estonian - not very good but enough to get by in every day life.

Learned Latin in high school, which helped with college French, which was not the best choice, since I should have studied Spanish, living as I do in the Western Hemisphere.

While in the military, I learned to say in Korean, "Stop or I'll shoot" not fluent, but pragmatic....I spent some R&R time in Japan, speaking only elementary phrases, but most Japanese were anxious to practice their English.

An important consideration is how to communicate when knowing nothing of the native language. Working and living with Navajo and Hopi in Arizona, I found that a positive attitude, a smile and receptive attitude, and inventive use of sign language worked surprisingly well.