Thursday, 16 April 2015

prepare4trouble: (edgar)
[Error: unknown template qotd]I've always been fascinated by languages. At primary school I read a reading book about a man who spoke a hundred languages. I also watched the Man from UNCLE and fell in love with Ilya's language prowess. I wanted to be like that. Unfortunately, I don't have enough of a knack to learn a hundred languages!

My dad taught me to count in French when I was maybe six or so, but apart from that I didn't really learn anything until I was 10 and going to a taster day at secondary school I wound up in a German class. After that I really wanted to learn German. I knew that when I went to secondary school, I'd be allocated French or German, and I was thrilled to find out I got German.

I did that all the way through secondary school. I got to do French for a year, but the teacher was always changing and I never got on with it. But I continued German through A Level and then did European studies at university, which involved a year in Austria. While at Uni, I also studied Spanish, which I do okay at, and Dutch, which I don't so much. While I was in Austria I also tried out Russian and Serbo-Croat,

Since then I've taken classes in Russian (again), in Chinese, in French (again), but apart from German and Spanish I don;t have a particularly good level of fluency. I've also tried on my own to learn Japanese and Greek. Also, not too successfully, though I've retained a few useful words of each. And that's about it, I think.

However, in my job at the moment, I think Polish, Czech or Romanian might be more useful. Or maybe Arabic, which I have always wanted to study, actually. Maybe I'll look into it.

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prepare4trouble

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