What foreign languages does CAF know?

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I only know Aussie. I think Russian, Polish and Spanish would be cool languages to learn, in that order 🙂
 
English (foreign language to me) and French, almost same level with a slight tilt towards English because I practiced it more. But I still remember it French including the grammar. But it’s harder to practice French writing without a French keyboard because… yeah the internet is the absolute measure of everything i.r.l.
I speak very basic Italian but I can understand more of it than I can speak. it’s very close to my natural tongue Romanian, not just that they are both Latin languages but are also very similar in rules - phonetical reading of what you write most of the times, the order of words in a phrase, many words etc. Spanish is harder to understand but I do know a tiny bit. I understand it more than just to know it.
Latin is easy to understand for me, especially to pronounce since I know some rules. Never studied it but I was supposed to, I had one year of Latin in school that our teacher decided to skip and do more grammar exercises in our native language so we can be better prepared for the high school admission test. Anyway… I don’t blame her, it is practically easy to understand it for me and with some interest learn it. I did learn Pater Noster, Anima Cristi and half of the Rosary prayers in Latin.
I know the Russian characters but very little to no actual Russian or Bulgarian. Mostly I know religious words here and there randomly remembered.
I tried to learn Japanese once but I was not passionate enough. When it got to learning kanji they just lost. I didn’t have much motivation either, it was just something to do plus our Japanese teacher was Japanese and she used to make us great tea (the real green tea) and sometimes real home made sushi and other stuff like that.
 
I have met 5 latin teachers throughout my life (it is a mandatory 2 year course at my high school), one of them with an ‘everything but dissertation’ phd and none of them are conversationally fluent…
 
I’m not sure if my teacher was. She was a nun who was born around the turn of the century and was probably from an era when people studied Latin in a much more intense way than they do today, so I wouldn’t be surprised if she could speak it some. But mine never got good enough to find out.

I would have loved to just take nothing but languages and learn to speak and read in all different ones. But unfortunately, math and science pay the bills. Not that there’s anything wrong with math, I like it too, but never have enough time to concentrate on it in the way I would like to do. (Science was always sort of a necessary evil…I find a lot of it to be something I can take or leave.)
 
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ratio1 said:
I like linguistics so I just know basic grammar of a few languages (just enough to know how to use dictionary)

Cantonese Mandarin Japanese Korean Latin Spanish Arabic Hebrew
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If you know how to read the Chinese, the Korean, the Arabic and the Hebrew dictionaries, then you know a lot. BTW, is there any difference between the Cantonese and the Mandarin dictionaries (assuming they are written in Chinese characters)?
 
I guess by dictionary I mean vocabulary. These days one can easily use google translate to look up words. So what I try to do is learn the alphabet and the basic grammar rules and phonology and then off I go!! Vocabulary I can always look up. But if you don’t learn the grammar then you can’t really be looking grammatical endings or recognise grammatical articles etc. even if you have google translate by your side.

Cantonese is a diglossia language so the written language is the same as Mandarin albeit with some usage differences. Hence there is no proper spoken Cantonese dictionary I guess. Same situation with the different Arabic dialects.
 
Yep, my Chinese teacher was a native Wu speaker (Shanghai area) and she once read me a passage from our textbook in her native Wu after I just read it to her as part of an oral exam in Mandarin. Same characters, totally different language - pretty cool actually!
 
Their single written language helped them maintain cohesiveness as a multilingual country.
 
Italian, Spanish, French. Plus 8 years of Latin…
 
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English (I’m American) Korean, German, French, Polish fairly fluent. I also understand most Romance langauges, Slavic Languages, and Germanic Languages, I studied Latin, Greek and Hebrew in undergrad (I teach Latin every week), and I can conversate in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Hindi, Vietnamese, and about 30 others languages.

Some people don’t believe me until I start speaking with native speakers.
 
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Which Arabic do you know? Or do you know all of them?
Do you know both modern and Biblical Hebrew?
In any case, wow!!!
 
Lebanese Arabic only. A little modern, but mostly Biblical Hebrew as it was a Classics course, so also Koine Greek.
 
What sounds do you find hardest to pronounce amongst all the different languages?
Can you do the Arabic “3in” (letter and word for “eye”) and ghayin well? I simply can’t do it no matter how long I practice.
Some Korean sounds are hard to pronounce too.
 
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ratio1 said:
Can you do the Arabic “3in” (letter and word for “eye”) and ghayin well? I simply can’t do it no matter how long I practice
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It took me awhile to get the pronunciation down, for me the guttural a in arabi was a bit difficult.

In Korean I still have trouble at times with double consonants like ㅃ ㅉ ㄸ ㄲ
 
That’s an impressive list! If you don’t mind me asking, how did you come to learn so many? Was it for fun, travel, a job…?
 
All of the above but I just love languages, I’ve lived in Europe and Asia and traveled a lot as an English teacher.
 
I remember meeting, many years ago, an American couple who had lived in Korea for three years. The husband was posted there by a multinational. When I said something like, “After three years you must be pretty fluent in Korean, then?” they replied, “Oh, no, nobody ever learns Korean!”

In fact I’ve heard something similar from British people who have been posted to Saudi Arabia or other Middle Eastern countries. They make a point – or some of them do, at least – of not learning Arabic, “because if you do, you’ll be stuck there for the rest of your life until you retire!”
 
BartholomewB said:
I remember meeting, many years ago, an American couple who had lived in Korea for three years. The husband was posted there by a multinational. When I said something like, “After three years you must be pretty fluent in Korean, then?” they replied, “Oh, no, nobody ever learns Korean!”
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Pretty common to hear, most of my coworkers lived there for much longer than I had, and barely knew thank you and hello. I was dumbfounded that they never made the effort to learn the language and integrate into the culture just a bit.

Anyhow, that means I was more of a novelty since I was the only one who spoke. It is becoming more common that people learn Korean these days though. 10 years ago hardly anyone spoke.
 
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