Languages That You've Tried To Learn

Poll

What languages have you tried to study?

Well, if you lot are anything like me you've tried a million things and haven't succeeded...(well, it worked sometimes)...
So what languages have you tried to learn? And how far did you get? For how long?

For me, French from y6-y9. Forgotten most of it.
Spanish from y10/11-now. Love it.
Russian - for about 2 weeks.
Norwegian, forever on and off.
Dutch/Polish - when I went to Holland and Poland (i.e. about a week!)

EDIT: NOW WITH POLL.

Reply 1

Epitomessence

12

Portuguese (that was about as successful as my Cambridge application)
Dutch (ditto)
French (I know the basic phrases)
Czech (my current venture :rolleyes:

)

Reply 2

Glutamic Acid

17

French: Year 7 to 9. It was fairly basic, and I've forgotten nearly everything since.
Latin: For about a month last year, but I couldn't really 'get' it so I gave up and I don't intend on trying to learn any languages in the near future.

Reply 3

JayneDoe

Hebrew.. its not easy to say the least but am sticking at it - so far my knowledge is nill. I was hoping it would help with my Judasim A-Level..
Welsh..see signature - I love it!, easy-ish to learn except the pronounciation!
Thought about learning Arabic.. maybe..
Went to spanish evening class. Disaster. Which is worrying as one of my uni courses has spanish as a part of the course and on the visit day there is a 'taster lesson' eeek!

Reply 4

qgujxj39

17

French up to GCSE. But to get an A in GCSE French you don't even need to be any good at it.

Reply 5

A Stranger in Moscow

OP

12

I've forgotten about Welsh! I learn Welsh everytime I see my cousins.

Sorry that the poll doesn't allow multiple options!

Reply 6

kopi, ffs

15

French, I can speak okay and write well but that was with school. Ancient Greek and Latin, those were with school too.

Czech, I got quite far alone but now I do it at uni so it's not like teaching myself any more.
German, it's okay. My grammar sucks because I've never really learnt any on purpose* but I can talk about everyday stuff pretty easily when I meet Germans abroad, and I'm reading a book (a real book! omg) just now.

Finnish, Serbian, Swedish, Norwegian, Yiddish, Elvish, Klingon, C++... mmyeah. Varying stages of getting nowhere.

*I mean, I've never set out to learn any, not that I've set out not to learn any.
edit: Oh and Spanish from primary school.

Reply 7

cabeza_loca

Spanish from age 11-now. Adore it.
French from 11-14, wasn't allowed to do it for GCSE as it clashed in the timetable.. i wud have loved to do it.
Greek - about a fortnight
Romanian - even less than a fortnight.

I'm saying myself up to a german class in uni though, so its great!

Reply 8

A Stranger in Moscow

OP

12

Everyone loves languages!

Reply 9

forpolarbears

17

Arabic- worked on the characters. Gave up because I was taking wayyy too much other class. Want to get back to it at some point.
French- progress! have been studying on/off for the last 2 years. Can read okay, listening to actual French people speak is the massive failure.
Spanish- Need to take a review class to get back at passable work Spanish. But I can read it pretty well & eavesdrop on conversations regularly, lol.
Latin- did not make progress because I used rough Spanish equivalency to avoid learning the actual words.
Russian- starting in June. Hope to take lots.

Reply 10

rip9

Chinese from 4years old to now and i'm doing it for a level :P
French from when I was like 10 to end of year 11
Spanish from year 9 to now, doing it for a level aswell!
Norwegian on and off, I bought a book so I read it sometimes
Dutch which i'm trying to concentrate on now (apart from the a level ones)
Korean - I learned how to read the Hangul symbols but apart from the words that are similar to Chinese I know nothing, sort of gave up on it!
and I think the next one for me is Russian when I'm bored with Dutch...might do it at uni :p:

Reply 11

dani2511

2

I've tried my hand at Zulu, Hebrew, French and German...

Currently studying German, am bilingual in English and Afrikaans...

Edit: I didn't get that far with the others :redface:

Reply 12

generalebriety

16

In rough chronological order:

- French, ages 4 to 18. Stopped after A-level. Attained a relatively high standard for A-level, but not the best; I wasn't impressed with myself and didn't much like the language any more, so stopped. Shame, but I don't much regret it.
- Latin, ages 11 to 17. Stopped being taught after GCSE, stopped self-teaching (and learning altogether) after AS. Hope to pick it up again some time.
- Classical Greek, ages 13 to 16. Stopped after GCSE. Like it, but it's a lot of effort. Would like to pick it back up, but probably won't happen.
- German, ages 16 to 18 and ongoing. Self-taught GCSE in a year, then went on to A-level, going on a couple of language exchanges in the meantime. Then stopped formal teaching, but I still speak and regularly practise it now. Probably the language I'm most competent in right now.
- Spanish, for a few weeks at age 17. Self-taught GCSE. Boring language. Given up, with no intent to return.
- Dutch, started a couple of months ago aged 19 and ongoing, but slow. Very interesting to compare to German, but I find I have little time to learn it.
- Italian, been doing this for a couple of days and again have little time.

Would like to learn:
- Norwegian.
- Arabic.
- West / North Germanic languages in general.
- Russian, maybe.
- Chinese, maybe.
- Romanian, maybe.

Would not like to learn:
- Portuguese, Spanish to any reasonable level, and the rest of the Gallo-Iberian languages. Boring as hell. Wouldn't mind knowing them, but learning them is effort.

Reply 13

Adam83

12

german and spanish at school. japanese during a levels, latin at uni.
japanese got me a good job. you need to live in a country to really the language.

Reply 14

taliasuri

French. German. Spanish. Mandarin. Spanish. Japanese. Hindi. Spanish. Sanskrit. Croatian. Spanish. Korean. Spanish. Latin. Russian. Dutch. Spanish. Punjabi. Did I mention Spanish?

I have the dubious merit of failing at a lot of languages. Go me!

Reply 15

teily

1

spanish for about a yr back in 2000, i still remember some of it.
latin for 2yrs, i'm horrible at it, but i still love it.
(i want to learn greek and irish gaelic and french and italian... i think that's all. lol.)

Reply 16

Ang|ophi|e

12

I had tried to learn Hindi because I am Indian, but its just too complicated. The one language I've really tried in is Spanish. I've had 4 years of Spanish year after year then I had a three year break and I've been learning it back for almost 2 years now.

I can read Spanish but speaking it is another issue. :s-smilie:

Reply 17

hobnob

14

generalebriety

Would like to learn:
- Norwegian.
- Arabic.
- West / North Germanic languages in general.
- Russian, maybe.
- Chinese, maybe.
- Romanian, maybe.

You definitely should. :biggrin:

Norwegian isn't particularly complicated, but it's a very cool language with lots of variety. For getting started, there's a simple but very good self-teaching program for Norwegian (Bokmål, that is), which I can only recommend: http://www.norwegisch-aktiv.de/
The only two down-sides are that a) it isn't exactly cheap (but it's worth it, and there's nothing comparable as far as I know) and b) it's German-Norwegian (which won't be a problem for you, though).
Once you've got a good enough grounding in Bokmål, you can move on to Nynorsk, if you wish. There's an excellent - and free - online course on the Norwegian language council website that'll teach you all about the grammatical differences, etc.: http://www.sprakrad.no/Skole/Nynorsk.nett.no/

And another great thing about knowing Norwegian is that it enables you to fudge your way through Danish texts as well, so it's like picking up one and a half languages for the price of one. :wink:

Hmm, sorry, got a bit carried away there... Bottom line: Norwegian rocks.

Reply 18

generalebriety

16

hobnob

You definitely should. :biggrin:

Norwegian isn't particularly complicated, but it's a very cool language with lots of variety. For getting started, there's a simple but very good self-teaching program for Norwegian (Bokmål, that is), which I can only recommend: http://www.norwegisch-aktiv.de/
The only two down-sides are that a) it isn't exactly cheap (but it's worth it, and there's nothing comparable as far as I know) and b) it's German-Norwegian (which won't be a problem for you, though).
Once you've got a good enough grounding in Bokmål, you can move on to Nynorsk, if you wish. There's an excellent - and free - online course on the Norwegian language council website that'll teach you all about the grammatical differences, etc.: http://www.sprakrad.no/Skole/Nynorsk.nett.no/

And another great thing about knowing Norwegian is that it enables you to fudge your way through Danish texts as well, so it's like picking up one and a half languages for the price of one. :wink:

Hmm, sorry, got a bit carried away there... Bottom line: Norwegian rocks.

Is it worth €59 + postage to the UK? :p:

Might order it if so.

Reply 19

hobnob

14

generalebriety

Is it worth €59 + postage to the UK? :p:

Might order it if so.

It depends on what you expect from self-teaching software, I suppose... It's a no-frills type program (very much a low budget production), so you won't get any fancy stuff, like videos or amazing graphics, but I'd say it does the trick and contains all the essential stuff you need to learn a language properly: sound grammar sections* with a couple of exercises to practise, the option to listen not only to the lessons but also every single word spoken by a native speaker (there's even a simple "speech lab" function, that will allow you to compare it to your own pronunciation) and a simple vocabulary trainer that can be expanded with your own vocabulary. It probably isn't the sort of program that's going to keep you constantly entertained, but I'd say it's quite good for picking up the basics of the language fairly quickly.

So basically, I'd say it's worth the money, but depending on how much our learning styles differ, you might not agree with me. :dontknow:

*Obviously it's not as thorough as the information you'd get from a proper grammar book, but it tells you all you need to get started (and you can always turn to a grammar book or the sprakrad.no website for the details).

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