On Apr 13, 2006, at 9:46 PM, Kenneth Porter wrote:
On Thursday, April 13, 2006 10:32 PM -0600 "Paul R. Ganci"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Unfortunately I am still a linguistic idiot and only speak English
... a
Buffalo, NY version at that! My grand parents came over from Italy in
1920 and promptly stopped speaking Italian around my parents. It
forced
my parents to learn English at the cost of never learning Italian.
There
is plently of room to accomodate two languages but neither the US
education system or home life is set up to do it.
Same here. I took a couple years of high school Spanish in California
and the classes dragged so incredibly slowly that I learned just a
little vocabulary and the most basic of grammar, and still led the
class. I usually finished my physics homework in that class while
waiting for everyone to catch up.
As a programmer I envy my professional peers who can speak Japanese
and other non-European languages. My interest in programming languages
extends to natural languages, and I find their differences
fascinating.
To those of you who've successfully learned 2nd and 3rd languages as
an adult, what do you recommend for accomplishing that?
I wish I had stuck with German in HS. And I wish I had taken the time
to learn Latin and/or Greek back when I had all of that free time on my
hands in HS. These days, it seems like everyone* ought to know (in
addition to English) Spanish, and then a choice of French, Chinese, or
Japanese.
(* in the US, I don't mean globally; globally, I'd probably say that we
should all know 3 out of those 5, but that's just me making
wild-a*s-suggestions for a world that doesn't care about my opinion ;-)
)
And, reiterating Kenneth's question: Anyone have advice for an almost
middle-aged person who wants to go about expanding his natural language
capabilities?
(Hmm.. that's probably a dumb question for me.. I think all of those
are taught at the university where I work... and can take free classes;
could add Italian, Latin, and Greek too...; still for everyone who
doesn't work for a University, but who has a similar thought, it's a
good question to ponder)
