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BOF Grand Master

BOF

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HA! Buy programs? Really? People still do that?

I've got Rosetta Stone, full French. Completely free.

Thanks PirateBay.

Why would you choose French? You can now communicate with France and Northern Africa. Why not German; the business language of Europe, or Spanish, or Chinese, or Hindi. Genuinely useful languages to know. Quite apart from my hatred of the French, looking at it objectively I really can't see the point of learning such a limited language.
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GarethRDR Veteran

GarethRDR

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yep ..I learnt French at school and can muster a few words but I still sound like an Englishman however much I try to speak like a native

This is only a problem with arrogant Belgian border guards:

"Excuse me sir, I speak your language but you are murdering mine".

Stuck up prick.

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mjmooney Grand Master

mjmooney

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HA! Buy programs? Really? People still do that?

I've got Rosetta Stone, full French. Completely free.

Thanks PirateBay.

Why would you choose French? You can now communicate with France and Northern Africa. Why not German; the business language of Europe, or Spanish, or Chinese, or Hindi. Genuinely useful languages to know. Quite apart from my hatred of the French, looking at it objectively I really can't see the point of learning such a limited language.
Must admit, I can't see much use in French for an American resident (unless they have much doing with French Canadians) - Spanish would be more obvious.

For a Brit, though - those of us who DON'T hate the French - France is our nearest neighbour, and a popular holiday destination (it is for me, anyway).

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Danwichmann Enthusiast

Danwichmann

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HA! Buy programs? Really? People still do that?

I've got Rosetta Stone, full French. Completely free.

Thanks PirateBay.

Why would you choose French? You can now communicate with France and Northern Africa. Why not German; the business language of Europe, or Spanish, or Chinese, or Hindi. Genuinely useful languages to know. Quite apart from my hatred of the French, looking at it objectively I really can't see the point of learning such a limited language.

Well, for me it's French because My girlfriend is French and I have quite a few French friends and I really love the country (Paris excepted). Also, for a lot of people it's a language they've perhaps started to learn at school so have a bit more confidence with, it's no where near as hard as Mandarin of Hindi (or German imo). Also, once you've learnt one of the romantic languages (eg French) it's a lot easier to pick up the others (eg, Spanish, Italian) so it can just be a first step.

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mjmooney Grand Master

mjmooney

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Why would you choose French?

IIRC French is actually based on English so in theory it should be one of the easier languages to learn.

:shock:

Don't quite know where to begin with that one.

Except perhaps... YDRC.

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Danwichmann Enthusiast

Danwichmann

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Why would you choose French?

IIRC French is actually based on English so in theory it should be one of the easier languages to learn.

Much of English is based on French, so it's the other way around. English is basically, I think, a mix evolved from Old English (German comes from this as well) and French, with a few other influences thrown in for good measure.

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Skruff Community Regular

Skruff

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Don't know if this is helpful at all but here we go:

I was very poor at English at school, way behind a lot of fellow students.

My grammar, vocabulary and spelling was very poor.

As soon as I knew enough of the basics to read books with some help of a dictionary and watch movies/tv in English with subtitles i had a lot of progress. I ended up reading 100-200 pages of English books a week without any help and watch English movies without subtitles. I also started to speak quite a lot of English while playing computer games on line which also helped me a lot.

Went from being worse then a 12 year old at the age of 16 to being close to "fluent" at the age of 18.

All in all I didn't learn much from being in class listening to teachers talking about English grammar and doing spelling tests, but from using English actively.

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mjmooney Grand Master

mjmooney

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Don't know if this is helpful at all but here we go:

I was very poor at English at school, way behind a lot of fellow students.

My grammar, vocabulary and spelling was very poor.

As soon as I knew enough of the basics to read books with some help of a dictionary and watch movies/tv in English with subtitles i had a lot of progress. I ended up reading 100-200 pages of English books a week without any help and watch English movies without subtitles. I also started to speak quite a lot of English while playing computer games on line which also helped me a lot.

Went from being worse then a 12 year old at the age of 16 to being close to "fluent" at the age of 18.

All in all I didn't learn much from being in class listening to teachers talking about English grammar and doing spelling tests, but from using English actively.

Yeah, I think this is true. Best way to learn something is to do it.

Mind you, I definitely get the impression that Scandinavians are very adept at picking up English for some reason.

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leviramsey Enthusiast

leviramsey

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The Michel Thomas courses are good for conversational level stuff.

I'm always surprised when people say German is easier than French. I found the opposite; German grammar a nightmare is. Not to mention all those unpronounceablecompoundwords.

Agreed on that.

Old English is reasonably close to the other Low German languages. In the intervening centuries, though:

* English has been essentially remade by a combination of North Germanic/Viking and French/Norman invasions (French itself being somewhat Low Saxon influenced via Frankish)

* modern Standard German is pretty much High German (or, I suppose Slightly Less High German)

Reinhard Hahn"]

I believe there has never been a time when I took language for granted, when I was not fascinated by language and all that it touches, moves, conveys and determines. Already at a very young age I was aware that language comes in numerous varieties and modes, that the variety and mode you use allows people to categorize you. What particularly intrigued me was that more than one language variety was being used in my own neighborhood, even in my own family, that one person can use more than one, switching from one variety to another.

I had figured out that, because of the type of German I spoke, people were treating me in a certain way, especially people in other, “better” parts of town. I didn’t know then that what we were speaking at home and in the neighborhood most of the time was a somewhat “cleaned-up” type of “Missingsch,” a German dialect with a “Platt” (Low Saxon or “Low German”) substrate, a dialect that gave away our working-class background. (It was only through years of schooling and media exposure that I learned to use “proper,” “high” German.)

My parents both spoke Missingsch-derived German, my dad a much more “extreme” version, full of Low-Saxon-derived expressions and without distinction or with faulty distinction between the dative and accusative cases (a distinction not made in most of today’s Low Saxon dialects). My parents were first-generation Hamburg natives. Attracted by job and seafaring opportunities and perhaps also guided by hopes of emigrating overseas, their parents and grandparents had moved there from the east. My maternal grandfather (who was killed when the Allies carpet-bombed the working-class neighborhoods of Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg) had moved to Hamburg from a small town in Western Pomerania in order to become a sailor, and he got to visit the Americas. Our ancestors had left behind regions in which Germanic, Slavonic and Baltic people, languages and cultures had intermingled for centuries. Although this sort of thing was never talked about directly, I had begun educating myself and “connecting the dots.” My awareness of linguistic and cultural hierarchies and contacts gradually took shape, and even before I left my native area I had been pretty much sensitized to issues that loom large in the lives of minorities, immigrants and colonized aboriginals.

My dad had worked as a farmhand when he was young, and he worked in shipbuilding when I was growing up. So he spoke Low Saxon (“Low German”), the earlier language of our area and of our ancestors. I was sometimes allowed to accompany him on his manly leisure-time pursuits in mostly Low-Saxon-speaking environments. I remember soaking up the language. I was learning it mostly passively, virtually secretly, later to be reinforced by reading stacks of Low Saxon literature. I ended up knowing the language well enough to speak and write it just fine when decades later I decided to reclaim and promote my ancestral heritage.

I had no problems whatsoever when, in the context of Heimatkunde (local history and culture), we had learned some token “Low German” stories and ditties in school. Most teachers seemed to go along with it grudgingly. The language was foreign to all but one of them, also to some of the kids in my class who did not understand it and considered it a waste of time, most likely because their elders at home had said so. These token “Low German” contents fell by the wayside at the first sign of budgetary problems. They were regarded as being even less important than art and music.

I remember months of excited anticipation before my first English class. I couldn’t wait to get started on this supposedly exotic language, the key to the door to the rest of the world. After our first lesson I arrived home with a long face, telling my parents that English wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, that I could understand most of it already, that it was a bit like a far-out dialect of “Platt.” Later I was to learn that my hasty assessment hadn’t been all that far off the mark, that in the olden days the Saxons from my home area had been in great part responsible for making Celtic-speaking Britain Germanic-speaking. Also my hunch that knowing Low Saxon was helpful in learning English proved to be well-founded. Most German kids without this knowledge seemed to have a harder time. It even turned out that it was very helpful in reading Middle English. I was able to understand most of the original version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales at first reading, while most native English speakers need weeks and copious glossary notes just to get through the first few verses. My knowledge of Low Saxon and English later facilitated my reading comprehension of Frisian and Scandinavian.

The translations of a Low Saxon folktale into various other languages are particularly enlightening in this regard

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