Job Discussion Forums

[dmb]

Mandarin seems popular
http://education.guardian.co.uk/tefl/story/0,,1727000,00.html

[Pollux]

Maybe a MSL is the ticket?
Is it difficult for an English speaker? Has anyone been able to master it? How long did it take you?

[sonya]

I know a few people who have. I studied a few years of Chinese as part of my linguistics major requirements... I don't know if this had anything to do with anything, but the people who seemed to really have an ear for Chinese were all black.. they did even better than the native Japanese speakers in my class, who had the advantage of already knowing the writing system. I have no idea why it was like that. But anyway, mastering Chinese is very doable.

The syntax of Chinese is pretty easy. It's subject verb object like English, but there is absolutely no inflection.. I think I can say Chinese doesn't have any morphology.. The orthography has a pattern to it, and Mainland China uses a simplified version that I'm told is easy to write and easier to learn. Prepositions and tenses are the bane of most language learners, but they have few of the former and basically none of the latter in Chinese (tense is understood from context). Pronunciation really isn't that hard either. People say the tones are insanely difficult, but it's really a matter of exposure, and there are patterns to the tones.

tangent: I knew one black guy who spoke Armenian, Cantonese, and Spanish as well. He was speaking in Armenian with an Armenian Persian friend of mine when I showed up. He asked, "Do you speak Mandarin or Cantonese?" "Guoyu," I replied, and he started speaking to me in Mandarin. It was amazing. He did all the small talk Mainland Chinese people do when they meet each other -- where's your family from, oh! you're a shandong guniang, etc. --I normally find this sort of small talk pretty inane, but he pulled it off like it was his culture, like these were the sort of things he genuinely concerned himself about. It was amazing. Apparently his Armenian was really good too. He started speaking in Cantonese to another guy we knew, just to show off I guess, and we all shat our pants. He was going to demonstrate his Spanish, but our Hispanic friend was lame and monolingual... I asked how he learned all this, and he replied (in Mandarin) along the lines of, "I took classes at Pasadena City College and I talk to people a lot. I find when you speak, or show interest in learning, a person's language in a foreign country, they really open up to you, like you have a lot in common." I was really impressed. (side note: They don't teach Cantonese at schools, but this genius basically figured it out).

[peder]

Hello,
I am just starting to learn Italian (my first real attempt and language no. 2) becuase my girlfriend is Italian and I plan on moving there soon. I want to learn spanish as well. I know that the two are quite similar, do you think that learning Italian could actually make it harder for me to learn Spanish? Maybe a stupid question, but I don't know.

[sonya]

[JZer]

I am a little disappointed that no one is trying to learn Quecha. What a great language to learn! As for now, I am trying to learn Korean but sometimes I feel that it is useless since only two countries in the world speak Korean.

[Nomad Dan]

I will count Spanish as one additional language that I already have, though that is debatable, and my mother taught me to be humble...

As a third, I would love to learn Arabic and running a close fourth would be Portuguese. Brazil has lots that calls to this Nomad....( I would need to speak it well for my future wife...)

Having said that, when I was in Brazil a few years back, I was often lost as to what people were saying and as I tried and tried to make Portuguese come out of my boca, it was all Spanish...
Stands to reason I guess....Speak Spanish with a weird accent and call it Braziliano..

Ciao,

Nomadic Dan

[bootsy]

peder---

I speak Spanish and Italian, while they are similar in some ways they are not as similar as some people think. Yes, some words are the same (or almost, ex. dove/donde, or siempre/sempre) but the grammar is quite different.) I feel that having Spanish as a second language has helped in my learning Italian as a third language (as a native English speaker ie. masculine/ feminine) but in some ways it has made it more difficult. Sometimes I think a word is Italian when it is really Spanish and vice versa. My first few months here I was convinced that if I spoke Spanish people would understand me but I was quite mistaken. I'm still not fluent in Italian, although I'm quite functional---social situations, irony, film...

[Cdaniels]

[dmb]

[Cdaniels]

For anyone interested, here's a Quecha page: www.quechua.org.uk/Eng/Main/
He was a professor of history in a world history class I took. He had spent several years in Iraq many years ago, and knew some Arabic. (I'm not sure what dialect.) Of course difficulty is relative, and I'm sure there's obscure languages that are more complicated than the three mentioned.
I'm actually really bad at learning language I find all languages really difficult, including English, the one I supposedly fluent in!

[travelingirl68]

Since languages are a big interest of mine as well, I thought I would get this thread rolling again! I can get by in Russian, am studying Hindi right now and would like to learn Spanish as well.

[lollercauster]

Albanian!

[guangho]

Spanish for now. Mandarin in the long run, and maybe Hindi.

[JZer]

To add to the discussion that I started, has anyone started learning a language that they were not that interested to begin with? I moved to Korea and thought that I would not waste my time learning Korean but now I am starting to get into it. I think I will probably try to learn it well since I am planning to spend some time in Korea for financial reasons.

I would eventually like to pick up Spanish.