Any more bilingual people on the forum?

I speak very little Spanish. I found learning the basics so interesting was how many of these languages make words masculine or feminine.

I am not. One of my few regrets. :expressionless:

Where do you live Bob I mean like city I am assuming like here in Seattle you are near a Tech meca :slight_smile:

Never to late my friend and with so many vids on YouTube its fairly easy to find

Spanish, but California Spanish. I know enough to be dangerous and have a basic conversation.

I tried taking my Spanish to Spain… hahaha yeah that didn’t work very well.

They don’t have they fancy accent in Spain as they do down south, maybe fancy isn’t the right word. It’s more passionate sounding in the countries south of us imho.

I probably should’ve learned how to speak Spanish I picked up German just because that’s where my families from so naturally I grew up listening to that I would’ve never learned Russian on my own that’s like almost torture in terms of difficulty with the all new alphabet and they have so many words that you need to twist your tongue a certain way. It is the biggest thing holding me back to being fluent.

My fiancé understands pretty much everything I say in Russian because she has been with me and taught me back when I go and visit her family they struggle to understand me I would say last year around this time when I was there they understood 50% of what I was saying, I was hoping it would have been around 60% this year :slight_smile: but it’s not looking like it’s gonna happen because of the virus.

I live in NJ, many of the Indians work in NYC.

1 Like

I took a year of Russian in college years ago, and I have started to study again to get basic fluency in the language. I have found the Easy Russian videos to be helpful to get up to the speed with spoken Russian. Here is an example:

I have limited fluency in French and Spanish and can understand some Italian, but those languages are much easier to learn than Russian.

It was in Texas in the late seventies that I learned it, but I don’t work with as many Spanish speakers here in Florida, though there are more here even than Texas is sometimes seems.

Here is a song about the Spanish language you might like;

1 Like

Russian is still the dominate language in much of Ukraine, especially in eastern and southern parts of the country. The exception is western Ukraine (such as Lviv), which did not come part of the Soviet Union until after the Second World War.

After numerous exposures to various aspects of Chinese culture—traditional Chinese medicine; qigong; and finally getting to experience Shen Yun—I got interested in learning some Mandarin & got the Hello Chinese app.

It’s one of the top rated ones. What makes languages in this family difficult isn’t the characters—I can identify about two right now—but the tonal nature of them. One word may have several meanings, depending on what tone of voice the speaker says it.

I’m sure nobody would want to address his mother as a horse, or say “I want to kiss you” when instead they have in mind “I want to ask you something”. I’m glad I chose Mandarin.

It has four tones to learn, while Cantonese has nine :astonished:

I tried to learn some Manderin a few years back when I was traveling to China on business. I learned some basic phrases, but it was slow going.

The written language is just random squiggles for me. I concluded that was a waste of time for me to spend much effort on it. There are phone and computer apps that will automatically translate text from Chinese to English; it would take many years of intense study to get close to that level of performance manually.

The most confusing thing about the “tones” is that English uses similar intonations to ask questions or to provide emphasis. If you ask a question in Manderin and put an English intonation on it, you may change the meaning of the sentence. The same is true for an emphatic intonation.

Russian Linguist, Defense Language Institute, contaminated by 6 month immersion speaking Serbo-Croation daily, Basic German, Bavarian dialect, 6 years in Southern Germany, Basic Spanish Latin America dialect, 3 years in SOUTHCOM, 25 years in Texas, Survival Arabic Northern Arabian Peninsula dialect, North American dialect English and a touch of Texan.

1 Like

Mandarin is literally the toughest language in the world to learn from what I have read although I would imagine a highly desirable skill to have if one could speak it.

I feel that way about Russian or any other Slavic language.

I wouldn’t even know where to start.

Nyet. That is the extent of my Russian haha.

Ibdodbtbabyrarvlesrninh turkish… grammar, vocabulary, etc. Verb conjugation brought back memories of high school Latin.

The Turkish syntax is flexible but seems to be properly spoken the way Yoda speaks. I found it fun and interesting. I know next to nothing now.

1 Like

Russian isn’t as hard as Chinese to learn. You got no down I bet you could get the majority of simple conservation down in under six months if you wanted. Writing however is a different story I don’t even try no more.

Since I am married to one and she spends at least two hours a day on the phone talking to her family I kinda wanted to get and idea if she was talking good or bad about me to her family, a motivator :slight_smile:

1 Like

Reading is easier than listening, which is easier than speaking. When I started having dreams involving conversations in Russian it became easier to listen and speak because I was now thinking in Russian. Writing isn’t that hard once you memorize the word and it’s spelling. I did have problems at DLI with writing in English because I was doing so much writing in the Cyrillic alphabet in class and after class on homework written translations from English to Russian.

1 Like

How well can you understand other Slavic languages with your knowledge of Russian and Serbo-Croatian?

If found can understand a lot of Italian after studying Spanish and French.