Voinjama Posted July 20, 2014 Author Share Posted July 20, 2014 8pints is the Arjen Robben of the VT forum. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spoony Posted July 20, 2014 Share Posted July 20, 2014 Norwegian. Because Norwegian girls. /thread 8pints is the Arjen Robben of the VT forum. Bit harsh to call 8pints a dirty cheating whiney balding bastard. He's just trying to talk about languages. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
villaajax Posted July 20, 2014 Share Posted July 20, 2014 8pints is the Arjen Robben of the VT forum. Utterly, utterly brilliant? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Voinjama Posted July 20, 2014 Author Share Posted July 20, 2014 Master of 8 languages just like Robben. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
villaajax Posted July 20, 2014 Share Posted July 20, 2014 8pints is the Arjen Robben of the VT forum. Bit harsh to call 8pints a dirty cheating whiney balding bastard. He's just trying to talk about languages. Spoony, this one is for you 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Voinjama Posted July 20, 2014 Author Share Posted July 20, 2014 Just checked Robben speaks 6 languages. Still impressive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
villaajax Posted July 20, 2014 Share Posted July 20, 2014 Just checked Robben speaks 6 languages. Still impressive. And unlike English footballers, he speaks fluent English. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
8pints Posted July 20, 2014 Share Posted July 20, 2014 (edited) Out of those you are fluent in, which would you say was the easiest to learn? I grew up with English as my first language obviously but I think English seems to be one of the hardest languages to learn, many words that mean the same thing, the tenses and sentence structures, so I always have a lot of respect for anyone who has English as a second or third (And so on) Language. A lot learn English from American sources as I said and it's became quite the international language. Irish and Jamaican Patois were taught to me as soon as I was born too as well as learning Spanish at school, so they all felt quite organic as I was able to learn them over a long period. I'd say, apart from those, French was the easiest, it flowed the most for me. I spent a while in the Netherlands too, which is a multilingual country anyway but I was surrounded by a lot of multilingual people so that made learning languages quite conversational and relaxed, so that was a good way to pick things up rather than from a book. Edited July 20, 2014 by 8pints Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The_Rev Posted July 20, 2014 Share Posted July 20, 2014 Just checked Robben speaks 6 languages. Still impressive. I'm just guessing here, but based on who he has played for then those languages would be Dutch, English, Spanish & German. If he can speak Spanish then he can probably get by in French and Italian too? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
villaajax Posted July 20, 2014 Share Posted July 20, 2014 Just checked Robben speaks 6 languages. Still impressive. I'm just guessing here, but based on who he has played for then those languages would be Dutch, English, Spanish & German. If he can speak Spanish then he can probably get by in French and Italian too? As far as I know, German is taught almost as a second/third language (behind English) in Dutch schools and French is also taught from an early age. I'm sure Robben was speaking German before he was playing professionally and picked up French in school. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarewsEyebrowDesigner Posted July 21, 2014 Share Posted July 21, 2014 Wingdings. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
legov Posted July 21, 2014 Share Posted July 21, 2014 Even though you have all those languages in Bangladesh, the truth is that 95% of the population who are literate speak Sylhet and Bengali. They may speak some of those others as an addition but Sylhet and Bengali are the main ones. I caught one guy out at work a few years ago who claimed he spoke German, I asked him ''wie alt bist du'' which is very basic German, he could not respond. Now I'm not accusing you of this, but a lot of people claim to speak a certain language but in reality can only speak about 10% of it. My ultimate aim is to be fluent in Spanish (90% competency) and get my German up to intermediate level again. That for me will be enough. That's more like 0.000001%. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
legov Posted July 21, 2014 Share Posted July 21, 2014 (edited) Am now genuinely interested to know how much Mandarin 8pints knows Edit: Chinese, Mandarin, So which one is it? Edited July 21, 2014 by legov Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
8pints Posted July 21, 2014 Share Posted July 21, 2014 (edited) Am now genuinely interested to know how much Mandarin 8pints knows Edit: Chinese, Mandarin, So which one is it? I've spent some time in both the rural areas of China and Mainland, so I've picked up a little from a few of the dialects. I'm looking in to a lot of the Asian languages currently, I find them interesting. From what I understand, there are nine 'families' of languages across China? And there are many different versions of Hànyǔ, which can be very different to each other? Again with the wikipedia but it lays things out all in one place - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China China has 292 living languages and 1 extinct language (Jurchen) according to Ethnologue, which is a web-based publication that contains statistics for 7,106 languages and dialects in the 17th edition, released in 2013 Edited July 21, 2014 by 8pints Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
legov Posted July 21, 2014 Share Posted July 21, 2014 (edited) You've been all over the world - </envious> I'm just confused, because you put "Chinese" and "Mandarin" side-by-side with each other, which suggests that they are at the same level of the language hierarchy - they are not. Linguistically, Mandarin is merely one of many, many Chinese languages (albeit by far the most widely spoken one) - Chinese is more like a language family (wiki article here). In colloquial speech, however, we often use the word "Chinese" (中文/汉语/华语）to refer to Mandarin (the Chinese world's lingua franca). (indeed, the Chinese often treat Chinese languages as variants of the same language - hence why the word "dialect" is often used misleadingly to refer to non-Mandarin Sinitic languages like Cantonese. Linguistically, however, they are separate languages.) There is written Chinese though - that's where it gets a bit blurry. Edited July 21, 2014 by legov 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
8pints Posted July 21, 2014 Share Posted July 21, 2014 (edited) Oh sorry, Mandarin is just the one I've learnt the most about, what you've written is what I meant. Edited July 21, 2014 by 8pints Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
legov Posted July 21, 2014 Share Posted July 21, 2014 几乎像姚明一样高的巨人，更何况是皮肤深褐色的非裔人，这种人在内地乡村地区走来走去，真的是难以想象 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
8pints Posted July 21, 2014 Share Posted July 21, 2014 几乎像姚明一样高的巨人，更何况是皮肤深褐色的非裔人，这种人在内地乡村地区走来走去，真的是难以想象 I was a bit of a novelty, yes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
legov Posted July 21, 2014 Share Posted July 21, 2014 Wonder how many people on here have heard of Singlish before. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amsterdam_Neil_D Posted July 21, 2014 Share Posted July 21, 2014 My Dutch has improved a lot in the last year or so. Not many meeting in English these days and I rarely need to ask what is going on. (Been here 14 years though ) I think a lot of people in the world speak Dutch but not so many that it is super useful, it does not transfer to South Africa for eg, it has too many differences. I have learnt it as I have gone along so no lessons but that means I cannot write or read it that well so I am going to college after the summer to learn it proper. My mrs who is Dutch can speak English so well I would be surprised if anybody can actually tell anymore she is not English. (I don't allow Dutch TV in my house if I am there as I do not allow adverts on my TV at any time). She also is 100% fluent in German, pretty good at French also. It seems that most Dutch people "Can just do it" when it comes to language, most say that the TV helped a lot in the early years as most of the TV programs are English with subtitles. They don't overdub the speech like the Germans do as it's a pathetic thing to do IMO. What I don't understand is how she can translate on the fly so to speak, so a translator but a lot better and faster from ENG to NED or vica versa. So not translating word for word, but will add a bit to make it more efficient. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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