Languages
This journal is slowly turning into a "normal" journal as well, since more people read, and comment, than my "vanilla" journal. So here is an interesting tidbit about me -
I know at least one non-cliche word (ie, Banzai! doesn't count) in 8 different languages. Here is an ordering of my language skills. I'll use vocabulary size as the ranking factor as it's a good indicator in my case.
I know at least one non-cliche word (ie, Banzai! doesn't count) in 8 different languages. Here is an ordering of my language skills. I'll use vocabulary size as the ranking factor as it's a good indicator in my case.
- English - tens of thousands of words. I've seen two reports indicating that a college educated american uses 15-30 thousand words, and recognizes about twice that.
- French - hundreds or thousands of words. I have enough vocabularly to get around and converse, but am clearly at least an order of magnitude below fluency.
- Thai - 30 to 40 words. My trip to Thailand this weekend added 25-30 words to my vocabulary. I can make a few basic comments and count to 9,999 - counting is very simple in Thai.
- Armenian - about 15 words: mostly numbers and greetings.
- Spanish - about 10 words: mostly numbers.
- Mandarin Chinese - about 6 words: "hello", "see you later", "thank you" sort of stuff.
- Norweigan - 2 words: "arm" and "Arc of Triumph"
- Swahili - 1 word: "hello"