Bilinguals of the world unite

[rockysigman]

My high school Japanese teacher gave me the impression that most people in Japan could read and write English well, but couldn't speak it very well. She said that English is taught early in Japanese schools, but that you don't focus on speaking it much. She later turned out to be a horrible teacher (I had to unlearn so many things once I started taking Japanese in college), so I have no idea if there's any truth to that or not. Is that all true, Ryo?

[Ryosuke]

kmc said:

Portuguese is my first language, and I speak it all the time to my mom and cousins.

Ah, of course. Forgot about that. This is cool that we can speak so many languages between ourselves (French, German, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish, Portugese, Lithuanian). It'll come in handy if we should decide to form a multinational company. We can cover most of the major and emerging markets. Chinese, though. We need someone who speaks Chinese.

And maarts is a trilingual. I submit to thy superior foreign language abilities.

[Ryosuke]

rockysigman said:

My high school Japanese teacher gave me the impression that most people in Japan could read and write English well, but couldn't speak it very well. She said that English is taught early in Japanese schools, but that you don't focus on speaking it much. She later turned out to be a horrible teacher (I had to unlearn so many things once I started taking Japanese in college), so I have no idea if there's any truth to that or not. Is that all true, Ryo?

There's probably some truth to that, at least among the educated. The thing is, the prime motivation for learning English for most people is that it's crucial in taking the college entrance exams, so they're naturally going to focus more on the reading aspect of it rather than the oral aspect. The English writing of most people here is abysmal too IMO - reading is probably the one aspect where we suck least. But then again that might be said for all students of a foreign language.

I'm curious about what kind of things you had to unlearn though...

[phil]

I think Maarts speaks french too ...

That makes four languages !!

[Ryosuke]

maarts is a fucking demigod then.

[rockysigman]

ryosuke said:

I'm curious about what kind of things you had to unlearn though...

I most distinctly remember that we had been completely mislead on the usage of certain particles. There were a few other little grammatical uses that were completely wrong too.

[limitdeditionlayla]

nice idea for a thread Ryo.

I get to speak Spanish quite a bit, mostly with the fam. My parents are both fluent in English, so I guess its really Spanglish a lot of the time. I've noticed all of us tend to use Spanish when we're mad, haha. We speak Colombian Spanish mostly, so theres some diffs in terms etc but its the purest Sth American form of Spanish in terms of pronunciation.

Sean can speak a little Spanish as well (he'd been living in Barcelona for a few months when we met).

I'm very particular about observing language customs in other countries. It pisses me off when I see travellers (anywhere) who do not make an effort to converse in the language of the nation they're visiting. Biggest offenders: Americans (in France). I try not to speak Spanish around people who don't understand it, that seems really rude. Except if I need to swear.

I like learning languages. I can speak a little Russian, though I understand more than I can say, and I want to pursue that, and I'd like to learn more than the basic Finnish I know, just so I can have a conversation with my older relatives there who don't really know English.

[limitdeditionlayla]

Anyone who is fluent in more than two languages has my respect.

I think learning a second language should be mandatory for all children in schools.

[rockysigman]

limitdeditionlayla said:

I think learning a second language should be mandatory for all children in schools.

Most schools here in the U.S. have a language requirement, but it's usually only 2-3 years, and it doesn't start until high school. I wish I had learned more in my language classes, but by high school it's way too late to learn a second language in a classroom setting, especially with the lame-ass teachers I had. The only people I know who were able to successfully learn a language after that age did so by living amongst native speakers and pretty much being forced to learn it. Definately would be better to get a real foreign language program set up in our schools, and start it as early in a kid's schooling as possible.

[Ryosuke]

limitdeditionlayla said:

Anyone who is fluent in more than two languages has my respect.

Same here. That's just too awesome for words.

I actually took a year of French in college because a third language was required, but I was highly unmotivated. I got an A on it, but only because I cheated on the final exam. I had this "hell I'm fluent in two languages, I don't need another one" attitude which I kind of regret, but fuck it I was an unmotivated student in general so what do you expect.

I do think it would be cool to learn a third language, but the thing is, it makes more sense for me to invest the time and effort in improving my English, since I do translating work at my job, and still harbor dreams of being a freelance translator some day. And my Japanese as well (don't get me wrong, I speak and write Japanese as well as you guys speak/write English, but it's going to be my main target language so I need to be good at it as I can possibly be).

[Ryosuke]

rocdoc said:

I'm totally Chicago-born and Lithuanian was my first language simply because my folks settled into one of MANY Lithuanian 'colonies' (ghettos, if you like) where so much of life was self-sufficient within a community which made it so you didn't really require English to go to church, schools and to make a living.
Kindergarten at the local Roman Catholic parish which Liths established in 1911...this was where I first began to learn to speak English.
Local Italian and Polish families also sent their kids there because the educational level was condiered to be better than their very own Italian and Polish parishes, which also were within a few blocks of us.

Honestly not wanting to bore you with the details of the 'keeping alive the Lithuanian Dream' with the Russians squatting their asses down hard on Eastern Europe...BUT we went through the motions of cultural preservation while thinking to ourselves

'WTF are we doing this for? The country's LOST. This isn't a widely spoken useful language like perhaps German or French...and we're never going to see our uncles and cousins there, ever. Forget this shit'

And honestly it DID begin to wind down as my generation went to college and began to join 'American Society'.

We quit Scouts. We quit folk-dancing and choirs. We quit most of thepother organizations because we didn't have the time nor much interest amymore.

Then the rumblings of 1987-88 changed ALL of that...

_{More later...gotta go.}

Thanks for sharing this, RocDoc - it's pretty fascinating. I don't think the rest of us ever had to worry about preserving our native language, so this certainly adds a new perception to this whole thing. I mean, the possibility of people ceasing to speak your language is something that most people never even think about. Do you intend to raise your child as a bilingual too? Carry the Lithuanian torch, so to speak?

[phil]

Kids in Québec started learning english in the third grade for a long time now but the new curriculum will have them start right in their first year of school.

Since it's going to be only for one hour each week,
I don't think it will have such an impact on their understanding
of the english language ...

The only way to really learn a second l;anguage
is when you have to use it exclusively for a long period of time ...

[Ryosuke]

One hour a week sounds pretty useless.

[rockysigman]

Better than nothing. Still, third grade isn't too bad a time to start learning. Better than high school.

[luke]

ryosuke said:

rocdoc said:

I'm totally Chicago-born and Lithuanian was my first language simply because my folks settled into one of MANY Lithuanian 'colonies' (ghettos, if you like) where so much of life was self-sufficient within a community which made it so you didn't really require English to go to church, schools and to make a living.
Kindergarten at the local Roman Catholic parish which Liths established in 1911...this was where I first began to learn to speak English.
Local Italian and Polish families also sent their kids there because the educational level was condiered to be better than their very own Italian and Polish parishes, which also were within a few blocks of us.

Honestly not wanting to bore you with the details of the 'keeping alive the Lithuanian Dream' with the Russians squatting their asses down hard on Eastern Europe...BUT we went through the motions of cultural preservation while thinking to ourselves

'WTF are we doing this for? The country's LOST. This isn't a widely spoken useful language like perhaps German or French...and we're never going to see our uncles and cousins there, ever. Forget this shit'

And honestly it DID begin to wind down as my generation went to college and began to join 'American Society'.

We quit Scouts. We quit folk-dancing and choirs. We quit most of thepother organizations because we didn't have the time nor much interest amymore.

Then the rumblings of 1987-88 changed ALL of that...

_{More later...gotta go.}

Thanks for sharing this, RocDoc - it's pretty fascinating. I don't think the rest of us ever had to worry about preserving our native language, so this certainly adds a new perception to this whole thing. I mean, the possibility of people ceasing to speak your language is something that most people never even think about. Do you intend to raise your child as a bilingual too? Carry the Lithuanian torch, so to speak?

There's a lot of that preservation aspect around here with French and Cajun French, to keep the culture from dying out. They still have several French Immersion elementary schools (where the entire curriculum, pre-school to the fifth grade, is taught in French) and the local newstations still read off the weather forecasts in Cajun French for the older people who still can't understand English.

It's an uphill battle, really. The world is too small a place these days to hold onto such a secular culture, and (rightfully so) the school curriculums want to focus more on Spanish than French.

But still, it's hard to get by here without at least a basic understanding of French, being that most everything local has a French name, the streets all have French names and the street signs are all written in French, and Cajun French is still spoken exclusively in some of these relatively excluded small towns. I mean, my wife teaches in a small town where she has 16 year-old farm kids who have never even once travelled outside their town of a few hundred people.