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Old 03-20-2011, 05:22 AM   #2 (permalink)
MoonlitSunshine
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Ireland
Posts: 1,088
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Well, depending on how you define Foreign languages, I speak english pretty well :P

of the languages I speak:

Mo Theanga DĂșchasach - go LĂ­ofa, nuair a chleachtaim (Irish, fairly fluently when I practice it)
English - fluently
Spanish - passably, to the level of random conversation when I've practiced it; it's been a while but if I were thrown into a few conversations it'd come back pretty quickly
German - I did three years of it in school, picked it up fairly well but my spoken german is pretty atrocious atm from total lack of practice, I can still read it alright though, and understand a fair bit in conversation.

Other than that, my mother speaks French and sends me texts/speaks it at me every now and then so I have a VERY rudimentary understanding of it, though I can pronounce it pretty well from singing it a fair bit in choral music, same with Latin.

Languages I plan on learning: Mandarin/Cantonese/Japanese (two of the three), because I think it will be important, and because I know very little about asian culture and one of the best ways to learn about a people it to learn the language - it's my personal view that the language you speak has a great impact on your personality and the way you view life, certainly it's very easy to show that different languages have different temperaments. Japanese I'm more interested in because I watch a lot of anime, so it would be nice to be able to forego the need for subtitles, and also cause I'd like to go out there when they're not in the middle of a crisis :P

Improving my german and spanish (and my irish!) and maintaining a more fluent standard - this is important to me, as I know I can do this quite easily, and because it's good practice to be able to speak multiple languages. I also want to have the ability to pass on things like that to my chilren when I have them, and to be able to help them when (yes, when!) they're learning other languages.

I've been told Italian is a great language to learn, because it's totally phonetic. makes it a lot easier to speak if you don't have to think about how different letters in the words are going to change the sounds!

However, all of this is definitely waiting until after I'm finished my finals in two months :s
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