So what languages do people here speak/which languages are you learning?

Oh, you did more years of latin then me in Italy! :astonished:
I must not have been very impressed by it, considering…er…I can’t even remember if I studied it for 3, 4 or 5 years but definitely not 6. :grimacing:
(the fact is that, unlike almost all of my classmates, I was very good at written translations. So the teachers spent all their time testing the others, and I hardly ever got asked any questions - so I didn’t need to study much, and therefore…I didn’t). :sunglasses:
p.s.

You know I’m in Piedmont - the one and only homeland of Barolo - right? So an improvement of your Italian conversation can be arranged, sooner or later. And I think it would help my Welsh too! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Byd bach
From Mari’s post, based on her career and location, I thought it was worth messaging her to ask whether she might have come across an Aberdonian school and university friend of mine. We went our separate ways in 1967 when he emigrated to Vancouver as a Geologist and we had lost touch until about a decade ago when we started to meet for reunions etc. It turned out that she and her husband did indeed know my friend and his wife very well. :astonished::smile:

This will not be a surprise to @tahl, however, who has long been convinced that I know most people in the world. “Ffrind arall Huw” has become a standing joke between us. :laughing:

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Looks like I will be able to join the club–and a very nice one too–“Ffrind arall Huw” :partying_face:

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Rhy garedig / too kind :blush:

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Thanks for all the replies to this thread, it’s great to hear other peoples’ language learning experiences. Keep it going and keep us all posted on your progress !

I’ve just started work on Italian again actually - I’m going through Paul Noble’s Italian course at the moment and then planning on doing the Michel Thomas Italian courses and some others after that. I did have a go at Italian before, but didn’t stick with it long enough, but I definitely will this time. Grammatically it shares many similarities with Spanish, so for Spanish speakers it’s not that difficult to learn, though of course every language is going to be challenging in some ways.

It’s also a language that I will get a chance to use ‘in the wild’ as there are a couple of Italian places in Inverness I go to every now and then - an Italian coffee shop, and an Italian restaurant. The owners and staff are all Italian, so I’m planning on going in and having a conversation with them/ordering my food in Italian, hopefully in the next few weeks when I feel ready and competent enough.

There are often opportunities to use your languages in your current town or city if you look hard enough, and it’s a great way to boost your confidence too. Plus I think most people seem to appreciate you making an effort to learn their language and talk to them in it. So don’t be afraid to give these sort of things a try!

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I guess that in Inbhir Nis you will also speak Gaelic “in the wild”. It is making a small comeback as you may know and about 1 in 20 now claim to be Gaelic speakers. When I lived in Aberdeen between the 40s and 60s I never heard any Gaelic spoken except when the Mod (Eisteddfod) came to town.

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Yes definitely, you will find a surprising number of Scottish Gaelic speakers in Inverness and the Highlands actually, even among the younger generation, so it’s definitely starting to make a comeback. A lot of money has been invested into Gaelic in recent years, so I’m hopeful the language will thrive in future generations and become a bigger part of Scottish culture. There’s even a Gaelic primary school near where I live, which teaches the children through the medium of Gaelic. And btw yes I have had quite a few opportunities to speak it ‘in the wild’ around here.

Many of my family on my mum’s side speak it fluently too, so I suppose I should practice speaking more with them. There’s also a taxi driver I know here who’s from one the Western Isles and is a native Gaelic speaker. We have chatted in Gaelic during some taxi journeys, and he was very encouraging about the fact I’m learning the language. I’m at the point where I’m now starting to get somewhere with it, but it’s been a hard slog and it would’ve been SO much easier if we had a ‘SSI Scottish Gaelic’ (hint Aran, please make it happen :slight_smile: )

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Good choice. :wink:
If you have curiosities and questions Italian speakers here might be able to answer, I guess it’s ok if you post them in the Other Languages section…might be useful for SSi Italian (!) when it’s ready sooner or later…

p.s. it was quite a long time ago (like…early 90s?) and it’s probably not even there any more, but I’m pretty sure it was in Inverness: an Italian restaurant with the most hilarious menu we had ever seen - with very funny mistakes and long before automatic translators.
The menu was outside and we didn’t go in, but guessed owners were not Italians (or had just lost all hopes to get it printed right by local tipography). :rofl:
I’m sure I still have a photo somewhere!

By the way this also reminds me how my friends and I had been dreaming of a trip to Scotland and Ireland since we were children, 'cause they were present in so many stories and we thought they’d be charming and beautiful, but never thought of Wales.
Hey I’m sorry, but something should be done about it!!

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As someone with a passionate interest in languages, I guess I’d better jump in here :slight_smile:

I have had an interest in languages ever since I can remember, growing up in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and mixing Maori words into my English as a child in primary school. I was aware of other languages, and I knew that people in our village spoke Dutch and Dalmatian as we had a reasonable migration from those areas, so I couldn’t wait to start learning another language in school. Finally, in Intermediate School, so aged about 11, I was part of an experiment introducing French into the class. I was over the moon, but not so thrilled when the following year, we were told “Oh sorry, there are pupils in your class that weren’t part of the French experiment, so you’ll have to do first year French again”, and you can imagine what happened the year after that when we started in secondary school! Great foresight on the part of those setting up the French experiment, and most of my classmates swore they never wanted to hear a word of French again, but not me! As long as I was using French, I didn’t care … oh, and I was told on my first day at secondary school that my “optional” subjects would be French and Latin, which was fine with me :slight_smile:

Not one with much interest in sports, I was also delighted when German was offered as an activity for those wanting to avoid the sports afternoon, and I dived into that as well. I’d learnt a little from a book earlier when my mother got tired of me complaining that I wanted to learn another language and gave me a little German book to keep me quiet!

But, the system of teaching languages was pretty hopeless. I was great at dictation and written translation, but no clues really about speaking.

After school, I spent some time learning a bit more Maori while I was at college, then I did a bit more German in night classes, but I really wanted to learn Spanish, so when it was offered as a BA course at a university where I was living in Australia, I jumped in and I was in the first cohort that went through. We didn’t have the opportunity to go to a Spanish-speaking country, but we did spend time socialising with a lot of South and Central American migrants, so I REALLY enjoyed my Spanish and become pretty fluent.

Shortly afterwards I got a chance to learn Esperanto and to attend the only major international Esperanto gathering in Australia, where I fell in love with the wonderful outward-looking and welcoming international culture that goes with the language. Since then I’ve used it a lot more to travel and to attend other international events - last year in Lisbon, then a fantastic New Year celebration in Germany, and soon I’ll be spending a week in Barcelona with Esperanto-speakers from all over the world.

When my son, aged about 5, decided he wanted to learn Japanese I took the chance to learn with him and when he lost interest a few years later, I carried on and studied it at college for a year. It’s rusty, but starts to come back if I’m exposed to it again.

But I had a fascination for minority languages, like Maori, which drew me to Welsh. I had visited Wales when I was in my 20s and loved the country and the people, so I decided to move to Wales to live in 2008 and dived into learning Welsh. I moved to Llandysul, in Ceredigion, so that I could be in an area where I would be able to use Welsh all the time.

I’ve always tried to learn a little of other languages before visiting another country, so I’ve dabbled in Vietnamese, Dutch, Italian and Turkish, but mostly forgotten them.

My latest passion is Basque. I love the challenge of a completely different grammatical system and there are some really good YouTube videos for people that are learning.

So that’s me - I’ve come to realise that I’m totally addicted to learning languages, but I’m happy with that :slight_smile:

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I think you can fairly call yourself a polyglot: :smile:
I’ve not often heard you speaking English, but what I have heard seems pretty sound to me. :wink:

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I’m just a language dabbler. I do speak Spanish and English at native level (but that’s cheating because I was born in a Spanish speaking country with English speaking parents). I did learn a bit of German due to family connections but I’m extremely rusty and only about a B1 level (if you can believe the tests). I have a level of Japanese (through study at school for a couple of years - enough to get into trouble; not enough to get out of it). I can fake my way in Portuguese (although I find the Brazilian variant easier to understand than European). Then, I’ve got a few useful travel phrases in a few languages but not enough to say I speak them to any useful degree (Russian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi, French, Italian, Norsk) - it does help to break the ice sometimes (esp Hindi with taxi drivers here in Australia) :blush:

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Oh and I forgot to say I’m studying welsh and already feel more confident with it than my German.

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I only speak English at this moment, but I’m working on Manx and I am truly loving it! My mother still speaks fluent French despite no exposure to native speakers in over 40 years, so perhaps I’m finally taking after her. My wife speaks German pretty well from having lived in Berlin, she speaks decent Spanish as she grew up in Dallas tx, and we are slowly learning Manx together. It’s taken me a long time to find a language I really enjoy, and I found Manx sorta accidentally, and thus far it’s been one of the best “accidents” of my life.

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I did French and Latin at school to A level, and because we moved house I had to repeat first year A level, making that 8 years in all. I was in school til I was 19! At uni I did a year of Old Icelandic :thinking: for my Honours. Because I only needed 2 A levels to get into uni I gave up French for the last 3 months of study. I was disheartened at my inability to improve and started to dislike the language. However when I eventually travelled to France I found I loved it with a passion. I began to like Latin at about 15 years old when I made the startling discovery that sitting and working at a problem will solve it! I began getting good marks in it, and always a glutton for praise, I was off and running. I was the only Latin student in my first year 6th class which was a bonus. Anyway, I always tried to learn a few phrases of the native language when we holidayed abroad, but it never stuck. Fast forward 45 years and my Italian teacher English friend and I were on a road trip and she started teaching me Italian. She practically begged me take an evening class locally as I would brighten some poor Italian teacher’s day :wink: The grammar and vocab come easily to me because of the Latin and French. So I did, and fell in love with Italian, and eventually had a wonderful 2 weeks on my own in Venice attending a language school. and living with a local schoolteacher in a tiny apartment, getting to know the people around the place. I forgot, the same friend and I did a year of German many years previously because she had to teach it at school (yep, that’s schoolteaching apparently) but our night class was not very good and neither of us enjoyed it. Then my grown up son moved to GErmany and I reluctantly gave up Italian and started to learn German when he fell in love with a German Fraulein and they had a lovely little girl. I like German, but what can you say apart from 'it’s not Italian" . I miss Italian so much. Then I realisied that I always start speaking Welsh ( I lived there as a child without learning the language) when I encountered a new language, and because I was using DuoLingo to help with German and saw Welsh on it, I investigated. It was like a new world had opened up to me. I found out that I knew an awful lot of Welsh for a ‘non Welsh speaker’. I met someone on the DuoLingo facebook page who encouraged me to look at SSIW which I had already abandoned as too slow for me (the free app). So when the offer of the six month course came up, I mulled over it for some weeks before broaching it to my husband because I already spend a lot on languages. But he laughed at me and shrugged off the10 pounds a month so here I am. I am now totally obsessed with Welsh and the memories it’s bringing back to me. I don’t love it in the same way I love Italian - I think I love it because it is a very deep part of my identity that I wasn’t aware of before. And I"m in my mid sixties. After all those years of battling against Welsh to learn other languages it is a pleasure, almost and indulgence, to go with the flow as each new drop of knowledge settles into place.

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Dylet ti credu Iestyn … Ti’n siarad Cymraeg yn dda iawn, felly …

You would go along with my son regarding interests very well.

Dalmatian, huh? A very poetical and melodical Croatian dialect with a lot of Italian words in its mix. I love it.

Here’s something for you

OK. When we start Slovene? :slight_smile:

And, yes! You are the star to me.

I love this one!

Croeso nôl ngatref. one would say…

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Cymraeg (to pretty much everyone except my wife, who knows “Tisho panad” but struggles with learning other stuff due to her disabilities). English (with my wife Anita, and the few other people I encounter who cannot speak Cymraeg). Very rusty French and Spanish from school which I need to re-learn properly, this time ideally through the medium of Welsh because I have made this my default language for daily living and moved to a community of 88% Welsh speakers.

Despite growing up in English, I have now (thanks to SSiW and the chat groups at the Saith Seren in Wrecsam, the Halcyon Quest in Prestatyn and elsewhere and loads of lovely people in the Bro Gymraeg communities of North Wales) made myself at home in Welsh as my main “go to” daily language, with English playing second fiddle. So anything else I learn (other languages or non-language subjects), I wish to do so in my new primary (if not chronologically first) tongue.

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French, German, Italian - fluently. Spanish, can get by in. I used to love the BBC "Get By In… "series, of a short book, cassettes and about 6 topics for Holiday use of the language, and learnt Norweigian and

Oops - pressed too soon … French, German, Italian - fluently. Spanish, fairly good though rusty. I used to love the BBC "Get By In… "series, of a short book, cassettes containing about 6 topics for quick learn of Holiday use of the language, and learnt Norwegian and Portuguese using those.
Hungarian was the hardest of the lot, and best Language Moment of all was ordering (and getting) a glass of dry white wine on a plane, ordered in Hungarian. As for Welsh - I had a Welsh Nain, so on annual holidays heard Welsh throughout childhood, but never learnt much. Studied French/German/Italian at Bangor University, and used to go to a pub for a year for “conversational Welsh” by friendly Welsh students. Nothing stuck though. Went to a FE College evening class in England for couple of years, but that was… typical evening course kind of stuff - pleasant people, but learnt little. Heard Aran on Radio 2 Jeremy Vine show by chance, and from that I am now a total convert to the SSi… way. Seems crazy to learn any other way; I taught languages in schools for 5 years (now ages ago) and was dismayed then and now at how s-l-o-w it is to really make progress to any degree of fluency, it seems, apart from taking a degree in it and living in the relevant country. It doesn’t make sense, whereas the SSi way does - and fast!

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Just for reminder to al (not just you) - You could always go back to your already posted post, click on the little pencile there bgelow the post and edit your post or add what you still wanted to add. But you’ve posted now the second post and there’s no point of deleting the first one since it is in practice never deleted despite it says so when you “delete” it.

And further on, I’m really glad you’ve found SSi as I’m glad and thrilled for everyone who did and still will find it.

Dal ati!
Hwyl!
Tatjana :slight_smile:

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Ha pyth a-dro dhe Gernewek (And what about Cornish)??? :pleading_face: :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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