Quad-lingual?
Okay, so Rosetta Stone was offering a Memorial day special on levels 1-5 of their language courses for only $275. I'm doing very well with Spanish. I teach English to Latinos two nights a week and I learn a lot of Spanish from my students. Now my students can no longer talk in front of my back without me knowing what they're saying. Oh sure, I might not understand every word they're saying, but I now know enough to know what the conversation is about; they can no longer talk in front of my back. I didn't really want to start another foreign language until I have Spanish down a lot better. But this offer was too good to refuse. And a friend of mine just married a woman who is from France and, of course, is a native French speaker. So he wants to be able to communicate with his in-laws when he's in France, so he's going to split the cost with me. The software can be downloaded to two computers, so it's perfect for us. So if I start learning French I will be on my way to becoming quad-lingual. English, of course, being my first language. Then I'm becoming petty damn proficient in Spanish. I know enough Khmer to order food and ask for directions, and now I'll be studying French. If I become fluent in them all I guess I'll be quad-lingual.
It was always my plan to learn French, but only after I learned Spanish very well first. I know I'm in Louisiana, home of the French quarter and Cajun country, and all that, but the truth is there is a lot more Spanish being spoken around here than French. I have multiple Spanish speaking tv and radio channels to help me keep learning, and in the cab I'm constantly picking up Spanish speakers, whom I can now have full conversations in Spanish with in my cab. So the Spanish stimulation around here is fantastico, but the French....not so much. But now that my friend wants to learn French and his wife can help us, I think I will be able to learn French almost as well as I've been learning Spanish.
I can now see that, instead of waiting until I am more fluent in Spanish before I learn to speak French, I should just jump right in and try to learn French, even as I am still acquiring an education in Spanish. It's very much like dancing: there are a lot of different styles of dance, each is its own non-verbal language, but the more of them you learn the more you realize that they're not all that different from each other and that somehow they're all interconnected anyway. And maybe, just maybe, they're all a part of a larger, non verbal, international communication system. I don't know if that makes sense or not, but let me put it this way: the more I learn about different styles (languages) of dance, the more I realize it's all just part of a larger, dancing language. And maybe that means that all spoken languages are just a part of a larger, universal language.
But then again I could be totally, fucking, wrong.
It was always my plan to learn French, but only after I learned Spanish very well first. I know I'm in Louisiana, home of the French quarter and Cajun country, and all that, but the truth is there is a lot more Spanish being spoken around here than French. I have multiple Spanish speaking tv and radio channels to help me keep learning, and in the cab I'm constantly picking up Spanish speakers, whom I can now have full conversations in Spanish with in my cab. So the Spanish stimulation around here is fantastico, but the French....not so much. But now that my friend wants to learn French and his wife can help us, I think I will be able to learn French almost as well as I've been learning Spanish.
I can now see that, instead of waiting until I am more fluent in Spanish before I learn to speak French, I should just jump right in and try to learn French, even as I am still acquiring an education in Spanish. It's very much like dancing: there are a lot of different styles of dance, each is its own non-verbal language, but the more of them you learn the more you realize that they're not all that different from each other and that somehow they're all interconnected anyway. And maybe, just maybe, they're all a part of a larger, non verbal, international communication system. I don't know if that makes sense or not, but let me put it this way: the more I learn about different styles (languages) of dance, the more I realize it's all just part of a larger, dancing language. And maybe that means that all spoken languages are just a part of a larger, universal language.
But then again I could be totally, fucking, wrong.