wow, that's an impressive amount of languages. I'd love to know more languages but I've resigned myself to the fact that I'm not very good at learning them. Despite this deficency I'm starting on a Third language (Latin) this semester.
about the silly customer titles- At the place I worked in high school (Target) you weren't allowed to call customers customers, they were "guests" and we had "guest services." It was really lame :)
"Oh my, we are out of milk. Maybe I should go VISIT my grocery store" :). "Customer satisfaction specialist" also sounds like a euphemism for something lewd, in my opinion.
as I may have told you before, I'm learning Russian at the moment. there's just so much to remember, i can't believe it. It's not just the vocab, it's all the cases and verb conjugations. I find that when I'm trying to say a sentance I get halfway through it and realise that what I'm trying to say at the end should have made what I said at the start different, so by the time i fumble my way to the end of the sentence, the whole thing is just blah, WRONGGGG. Is it just me or when speaking russian do you have to REALLY think ahead when you're saying anything? Or is it like that with everything? i don't know.
How did you learn English? I have a tonne of sympathy for people who don't natively speak English and then have to learn it, as it is such an illogical, un-structured language. I have no idea how you would teach it, as there are no rules really, it's all exceptions, and trying to explain it logically seems almost impossible.
Since I'm a native speaker of Russian, I really can't say if you have to think ahead or not :). Native speakers probably don't. Now that I'm learning Czech, I realize how much stuff you guys have to remember! It must be a torture indeed. At some point what happens to me is I get a feel for a language, and then all this grammar I memorized just comes to me. I don't know if that happens to everybody or not. What helps me most is reading in the language (which greatly slows down my Japanese, because my reading is not on the same level with my speaking skills), just taking a books and reading, without looking up every single word in a dictionary.
As I said in my post, I'm lucky -- I learn languages easily. And I really liked English at school. I was fascinated, thought it was the coolest language ever. I started seriously studying it when I was 13, and I just liked the process of learning, not bothering about whether I will ever speak the language or not.
Funny, my boyfriend asked me the same question -- how do you people speak? Seems like you have to construct everything in your head before you even utter a word :).
yeah, that's what i find. I'm having to restart sentences about 5 times before i can get out what i'm actually trying to say. Also, if you're after a GREAT book on the way the English language has changed in recent years, through the media and governmental bureaucracy, read Don Watson's "Death Sentence". He's an Australian (yay) writer, used to write speeches for one of our former PM's, and his insights on how language has changed/devolved is utterly fascinating, I highly recommend.
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about the silly customer titles- At the place I worked in high school (Target) you weren't allowed to call customers customers, they were "guests" and we had "guest services." It was really lame :)
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How did you learn English? I have a tonne of sympathy for people who don't natively speak English and then have to learn it, as it is such an illogical, un-structured language. I have no idea how you would teach it, as there are no rules really, it's all exceptions, and trying to explain it logically seems almost impossible.
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As I said in my post, I'm lucky -- I learn languages easily. And I really liked English at school. I was fascinated, thought it was the coolest language ever. I started seriously studying it when I was 13, and I just liked the process of learning, not bothering about whether I will ever speak the language or not.
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