Lingvoj
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It's interesting to hear people learn english. It gives me some kind of perspective on what I must sound like.
Example, today I was walking down the hall at school and I was behind two people speaking some other language. I'm not sure what language it was, but it sounded really foreign to me. Not quite western, not quite eastern. Mystery language. Anyways, there were talking to each other, but I could tell that one was explaining to the other english word order. It was something like "John speaks to Jane," and how that means something completely different than "Jane speaks to John". At least that's how I understood it.
On that note, as of Monday I will have completed a semester of Russian language. Let me just say that Russian is the hardest language I've ever tried. Maybe it's because I don't have anyone to practice with, but it's probably because it seems so foreign. I am fluent in English, I can speak German well, I've taken Spanish and French, I've dabbled in Latin and Greek, and I'm teaching myself Esperanto, and something they all have in common is that I can find something familiar in all of them. There is some small aspect of those languages that I relate to English or something similar in the other languages I've tried that makes it alot easier to understand. Not so in Russian. When I hear native speakers, they have a rhythm and a kind of liquidity that is rather pretty. But since everything sounds so long and complex when you try to learn it, and things aren't always pronounced how they are spelled, it becomes so foreign and distant from English. This in mind, I'm not going to continue it formally. I still have the books, so I may pursue it again later, but for now I'm going to switch back to French.
And maybe Spanish, Latin, and Greek too...
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It's interesting to hear people learn english. It gives me some kind of perspective on what I must sound like.
Example, today I was walking down the hall at school and I was behind two people speaking some other language. I'm not sure what language it was, but it sounded really foreign to me. Not quite western, not quite eastern. Mystery language. Anyways, there were talking to each other, but I could tell that one was explaining to the other english word order. It was something like "John speaks to Jane," and how that means something completely different than "Jane speaks to John". At least that's how I understood it.
On that note, as of Monday I will have completed a semester of Russian language. Let me just say that Russian is the hardest language I've ever tried. Maybe it's because I don't have anyone to practice with, but it's probably because it seems so foreign. I am fluent in English, I can speak German well, I've taken Spanish and French, I've dabbled in Latin and Greek, and I'm teaching myself Esperanto, and something they all have in common is that I can find something familiar in all of them. There is some small aspect of those languages that I relate to English or something similar in the other languages I've tried that makes it alot easier to understand. Not so in Russian. When I hear native speakers, they have a rhythm and a kind of liquidity that is rather pretty. But since everything sounds so long and complex when you try to learn it, and things aren't always pronounced how they are spelled, it becomes so foreign and distant from English. This in mind, I'm not going to continue it formally. I still have the books, so I may pursue it again later, but for now I'm going to switch back to French.
And maybe Spanish, Latin, and Greek too...
.