Foreign Language Meme

Meredith over at Amanita.net passed along this foreign language meme, so I thought I'd respond:

What's your native language? Do you speak any foreign languages? If so, how did you come to learn them?

My native language is English (apparently 60% general American English, 25% Yankee, 10% Dixie, and 5% Upper Midwestern).

I have studied a bunch of languages to one extent or another, so I'll list them one by one in chronological order:

1. Hebrew:  I took this language in Hebrew school from I don't know, maybe 9 or 10 years old?  Unfortunately, I seem to recall that we weren't really taught how to speak or understand it, it was only in order read prayers in preparation for my bat mitzvah.  Of course I picked up a few words here and there, but I would have never been able to actually construct even the simplest of sentences.  Since having my bar mitzvah I've lost even most of what I did learn, although I still can pick out some letters.
2. Spanish: I took this for at least one year in elementary school and two years in high school.  At the time I was not very interested in foreign language and got pretty horrible grades.  I can understand some Spanish still, on a very basic level, and can say some words and phrases, but not much else.
3. Russian:  I took Russian in college and got so into it I ended up changing my major.  I took a summer program at Norwhich University, spent a semester in Leningrad, and went onto grad school to study it some more.  During that time, I could speak it fairly well, although still probably not quite "fluently."  I would call myself "proficient."  Since then, (for about 10 years now), I haven't really used it at all except for listening to a Russian friend try to tell me some joke or trying to make sense of some Russian spam email.  If I attempted to speak now, I probably would have a tough time saying a whole lot, but I studied it so much that I think I could regain at least 50-75% of my proficiency if I dedicated a couple weeks to a month of constant review.
4. Polish:  one semester in grad school, I remember some fellow students telling me about a course in Polish that was fun and relatively easy.  I thought it sounded like a fun course considering all the other very demanding courses, so I signed up for the second semester and proceeded to study the book towards the end of the semester and during the entire winter break.  I felt like I was really understanding it well considering it was all on my own, and then enrolled in the second semester course.  At that time the professor who was teaching it along with a native speaker decided that the course had been too easy, and so he doubled or tripled the amount of work.  This meant attempting to memorize upwards of 100-200 vocabulary words a week, and this, as just one of several courses I was taking, was just too much at the time.  What I had thought would be a fun and easy way to pick up a new language became the opposite and so I had to drop it.
5. Italian: five years ago, my family decided to take a trip to Italy and I got the idea in my head that I wanted to try to pick up some Italian before going, especially since we were going to be renting a car and traveling ourselves and not in some big tour group.  So I picked up a tape and a book and did a bunch of studying.  I was not able to speak at all fluently, of course, and my command of the language was basic at best, but I did feel like I could construct some basic sentences enough to make myself understood.  Some of this was helped by a pocket electronic translator for vocabulary words that I didn't know how to say, but knowing how to conjugate verbs and construct sentences along with that translator made it feasible to try to communicate at least basically.  Since leaving, unfortunately, I haven't kept up studying or reviewing, so while I still remember a few phrases and words, I would have to do a lot of review to get back to where I was.  I found Italian a lot more fun to learn than Spanish, but of course I was doing it in a very different way.  I even found that many of the Italian words I learned seemed to make some kind of "sense."  I'm not sure how to explain that, but maybe my nascent study of Spanish all those years ago was still hanging out in some corner of my brain and so the Italian, which is not all that far off from Spanish linguistically, didn't seem all that unfamiliar.
6. (Swiss) German:  A couple of years ago we went to Switzerland to visit friends and so I thought I'd again try what I did with Italian.  Unfortunately, though, German just was not as easy for me to get into and then ¾ of the way through the lessons I found out that they didn't speak German per se in Switzerland but a variant called Swiss German, and I could find no instructional tapes or books on Swiss German at local stores.
7. French:  On the same trip to Switzerland, we were also to stay for a very brief period in Paris and so we also bought French tapes.  I had actually tried to learn French in grad school ten years earlier, because there was a requirement that we would have to translate French in order to graduate.  Somehow I managed to pass that test, but of course forgot whatever little I had learned because there really was no reason for me to use it – some research is written in French, so that apparently was their justification, but since I was not going for a Ph.D., I did not have to really do any formal research.  Anyway, back to our trip, I simply didn't have enough time to pick up anything of much use, but I was really surprised at my ability to speak and understand the words on the tape.  French was a language that always seemed impenetrable to me – mainly it's pronunciation.  But when listening to the tapes, it didn't seem all that bad.  
   

Alas, with really all these other languages, I have not had the motivation to keep studying when there is no real reason to other than the mere enjoyment of the studying and perhaps the notion that at some distant time I might be able to use it on a trip.  In some ways I envy Europeans because they are so close together that they end up having to use other languages whenever they go on even a small trip to the country next door, which very often could be just a couple of hours.  The closest thing to that here is the many Latino communities that exist here, and while I'd love to learn Spanish again, their just isn't a huge reason to.  Just about anyone in many of the Latino communities learns enough English to communicate with you.  I suppose even in Europe, from what I've heard, and this probably goes for many other places around the world, English, more and more, is becoming the Lingua Franca - yet another fact that makes one unmotivated about learning other languages.  Americans have been accused of linguistic arrogance and not wanting to be bothered with learning foreign tongues, but I think it's an unfair accusation because except for areas that are very linguistically mixed (Florida, Texas, California), or areas which are just very close to the border with Mexico or French-speaking Canada, nothing but English is spoken for thousands of square miles.  Certainly there are communities that speak their native tongue, be it Spanish, Russian, Polish, or whatever, in the street, in businesses, etc.  But most of those people also speak English and so unless you have a specific inherent desire to immerse yourself in a new language (or you intend to use it in your career), there's no big practical reason to learn another for every day use.

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