Do we have a linguistics thread? Because based on the response to my intro post we need a linguistics thread. I have a surprisingly number of languages I've been exposed to just by taking random classes. I already have more knowledge of Dutch and Frisian than I thought I ever would (thanks Linguistics of Germanic Languages, I wasn't sure what I was expecting). But the only languages I can actually form sentences in are English, Spanish (I need so much review it's not even funny, but I think I can still say "I go to the beach"), and Japanese. I'm currently working on a presentation for my Language and Thought class about categorization of objects (tables, books) vs substances (water, sand). (Shhh I'm doing 45 min on, 15 min off, I can use my breaks here!)
I have a little Japanese and a bunch of Latin, but I dunno much about linguistics outside of, well, Latin.
I can do theoretical bullshitting about languages, but my best one is english. I've got like high school spanish and a semester's worth of sign language. I know "bless you" in like 5 or 6 different languages. The categorization of objects vs substances sounds really interesting. Are you finding any grey areas between the two?
english and french over here, and i took a really neat anglo-saxon class previously and promptly forgot a bunch of it. i do remember a joke we had to translate to modern english, though: what has twenty-one heads, two eyes, two ears, a nose, and a mouth? Spoiler: spoiler a cabbage farmer i've done some linguistic analysis with arabic, but that was more on language structure (word order, forming questions, etc.) than actually learning arabic. it was definitely a lot of fun, though; i worked with a high school classmate of mine and her mother, and had to figure out how to phrase questions to get the information i actually needed. at first the idea of doing a gloss rather than a proper translation caused a lot of confusion. my favourite professor does a class on proto-indo-european, which is a hell of a lot of fun. my university's linguistics program requires me to take courses in two non-english languages, so next year i'll probably take german. sanskrit is tempting, but my partner's mother studied it and assures me that it makes everyone want to burst into tears.
I only speak English fluently. I . . . can probably still sound like a stoned toddler in French, after 10 years of study and 5 years of only using it to sell bikes to Quebecois sailors. I took Japanese for three years and can mostly remember how sentence construction works, and also parse a little of anime. Everything else (Latin, Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin, Carrier) is pretty much just theory and sometimes polite greetings at this point. I'm going to be studying Russian this summer during a study abroad in St. Petersburg. Arabic is the only non-English language I have studied which is equipped with the phonemes for my first name.
As mentioned in my intro, I don't speak more than bare-basic, conversational French, but I can still understand more than I can speak. I took a year of German and Italian - three of Latin - and I still have those textbooks lingering about if I ever got the time to focus on refreshing myself. I can also fingerspell my given name in ASL quite smoothly after far too much practice, but that's about it. Oddly enough, despite my early exposure and immersion in French, I found German clicked a lot easier than other Romantic languages.
Oh, yeah. I should be clearer-- My Spanish is 3 years of it in high school. Unfortunately my grandparents didn't properly teach my mom, so she couldn't properly teach me. My mom can get by in conversation. I can get by... in reading if I have a dictionary handy?? Japanese is two semesters in college, a year and a half ago. I would be working on the third, but I had to learn the hard way that I don't remember enough from that long ago. :P Also: I have about three weeks of Esperanto. Two semesters of student-taught Biblical Hebrew where the goal was to get us to be able to translate chunks of the Bible with the aid of a dictionary and a already translated version. Which we achieved! And then promptly lost. A semester of student-taught ASL which was taught through pop songs and the end project was to do a song, so I did Let It Go. And then random vocab and tiny bits of grammar from this Germanic Languages class. [omg there's a multiple quote feature, I'm pretty sure that wasn't here an hour ago] SO MUCH. So this one study did a thing were they separated it into "complex objects," "simple objects," and "substances." And they found that the simple objects were really ambiguous. Which makes sense to me because they were "solid substances formed into simple shapes," ie, a piece of wax shaped like a kidney bean. Or a styrofoam egg. This bothers me because honestly I'd probably classify it based on material most of the time (so categorizing it as a substance [as opposed to shape, cat object]), but now I'll never know because I know way too much about this type of experiment to be able to get any results out of trying to test it!! xD
I've got small smatterings of German and Japanese, from Duolingo and high school respectively, and given that my old books for the latter are sitting not five feet from me I should probably try picking it up again. Language study is hard.
I'm only able to produce English, but I can sort of fake Spanish and Latin, and with those I tricked a language placement exam into thinking I knew French. I'm more of a theoretical linguist anyway; I like grammars and syntax and semantics, but the actual process of learning about actual languages never really interested me. I'd totally be a Chomskyan linguist if I didn't think that linguistics was supposed to be a science.
I really need to learn more about syntax, but I kind of like it in the love/hate kind of way. I like how it's structured and kind of puzzle-like.
I studied Japanese in high school, and I'd like to pick it back up sometimes. I still remember a lot of the grammar, but my vocabulary is pretty much gone. (which is interesting, because I'm usually really good at memorizing terminology things) My current school does not offer it, alas. I don't know the languages, but I've got a pretty good grasp on a lot of the roots from Latin (thanks, dinosaurs!) and some from Quenya and Sindarin (thanks, Silmarilion!).
The degree I'm pursuing in Brazil, Fine Letters, is a mixture of Linguistics, Literature and pedagogy applied to teaching English and Portuguese (it has an immense workload). I speak Portuguese and English at native levels, some spanish, and I have the faintest basis on French, Japanese, Latin and Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS). I appreciate linguistics, but have never gotten good grades at it and am frankly glad that the whole linguistics part of my graduation is behind me (shush, only literature and teaching high schoolers now!). I love syntax, though, even if I don't remember the exact terms that go on the roots of a syntactic tree anymore.
I speak Polish and I took three semesters of Ancient Greek. I still have the textbook so I should probably continue but I haven't gotten around to it yet. And I guess I was learning French at one point but not at the moment. My criteria for learning a language is "Does this language piss me off?" and if the answer is yes, I probably want to learn it.
Four years of German, one of Mandarin, various bits and pieces of a few other languages... Considering picking something up if/when I ever go back to school. Always been better at speaking than writing for some reason, despite it being the other way 'round for me in English.
Languages: I speak and write and understand and read english. je parle, comprend, and lit le francais. je suis poche en ecriture. ablo y comprendo espanol. comprendo mas que ablo. no puedo escribir. lingua lingua magna est! non cogito satis. im fairly sure "I love you" in klingon is "BanwI'SoH" but don't quote me on that one.
I'm a fluent speaker/writer of Polish, French and English, although I use English most often so my vocabulary tends to defeault to that. I know a little bit of German and some basics of Japanese. I'm actually working on translating a book by a Polish writer I really like into English. I'm at page 125/216. It's taking me some years because procastination.
