Hm, I've been meaning to reply here for a while now (basically since the thread was started
) so I might as well do that now.
First off, to the OP:
@Libervurto:
Quote: "Who here speaks multiple languages?"
I speak german (which is my mother tongue) and english.
I've been learning russian for a few weeks/month now so I got the very basics of that down... wouldn't say I "speak" russian though.
Quote: "I feel ashamed that I can only speak English. "
Even though I do speak more than one language I still feel kinda the same. After all I grew up here in Germany so I sort of speak german "by default"... and english - well a lot of people all over the world speak english and the internet would be pretty boring if I only knew german, same goes for other media like books / movies / TV series (I'm not a fan of translations; I try to avoid them unless necessary) - sooo I don't feel like speaking english is special in any way either.
Quote: "[...]
I feel excluded from so much that is going on in the world and when I do meet a foreigner and they slip effortlessly between English and their native tongue I feel like a small infant or a chimp that has learned to use sign language but is totally lost when the researchers talk amongst themselves."
Well, I'll admit it's pretty neat to know more than one language now that I think about it... even if it's just to confuse non-germans dadurch, dass ich einen Satz auf deutsch beende.
Just kidding.
(translation of the above, just to negate the intended confusion: "...by ending a sentence in german.")
Quote: "This is a very easy ignorance for an English-speaker to fall into. I have never "needed" to speak another language. I don't get to travel that much and when I have it has primarily been to English-speaking countries or countries where everyone speaks English (if you want to observe that subtle difference), although this was not a reason for choosing those destinations.
[...]"
I guess that exactly is the difference here - I am german but use english on the internet because it became such a universal language, but native english speakers don't even have to choose. They already speak the lingua franca of the internet (or the world for that matter) and have no need for another language...
@Quik:
Quote: "I can speak English, and I understand basic German - sadly, that's about it. Would love to learn Russian - as I do find that language to be just amazing. German is beautiful as well.
I do regret not paying more attention to German class back in 6th-9th grade.. ahh >:
"
It's strange how some people say German is beautiful, while otherwise the consensus seems to be that germans always sound angry.
Nah, I know that the latter is just a stereotype but everytime I come across one of those memes (you know, the one with words in other languages compared to long german words like "Schmetterling" or "Krankenwagen" or "Kugelschreiber"... ^^) I think to myself: Surely german isn't the only language the sounds angry if you pronounce everything like Hitler?
Anways, the point was, yeah german isn't all that bad. Sentences might be longer than their equivalent in english and we have stuff like "der/die/das" instead of just "the" for all 3 grammatical genders. Also the endings of words often change depending on the cases etc. so while that's a no-brainer to native speakers foreigners often have a hard time getting that stuff right for example... buuut german can be quite beautiful nontheless in my opinion.
Quote: "edit: And obviously I speak Swedish xD
(and understand Norwegian and Danish, since they're so similar)"
Now that's just cheating. Atleast ou don't understand Finnish and Islandic, now that'd just be unfair.
@The Zoq2:
Quote: "I also learned some German in school but I barley remember anything from that even though it was less than 3 years ago. I feel like in most cases I would be able to just talk english instead of german. Plus I never got to actually use the language so the knowledge went away pretty quickly."
I'm afraid the same might happen to my patchy russian skills... I just don't have any use for them as of yet. Oh well.
Quote: "Since we are sharing stories about languages, we went to ukraine in school [...] One day the TV was on when we got home to the house I lived in and there was a movie that looked very much american but was dubbed to ukrainan, aparently there were no english shows on TV what so ever."
Well, how is that handled in Sweden? Germany has a strong history of dubbing movies and series so most of the time it's actually pretty good, especially for people who can't understand english very well (for example kids).
The downside is that it's not that easy to get the original (english) audio versions. I mostly rent DVDs for that reason and recently also started going to the netherlands to the cinema as that's right across the border from here, so it's not too far, and they often show movies in english (although with dutch subtitles at times).
Quote: "Learning english must have been really tough when the only way to hear the lanaguage is from your friends and teacher (who had a pretty bad pronounciation)."
TV and Internet taught me way more about proper pronounciation than teachers back in school.
German teachers tend to suck at actually speaking without an accent for some reason.
Quote: "I hate watching foreign films. When they are good, you have to read the whole time, so you have to stay transfixed on the subtitles the whole time, rather than, you know, watch the movie or have it playing in the background.
That said, I have seen a few subbed movies I truly enjoyed."
I can fully understand that... listen to gibberish and reading all the time while you want to enjoy a purely
visual piece of media (medium? Would the singular make sense in this context?) pretty much sucks. Hence the dubbing quality here in Germany is pretty cool, even if it has the aforementioned downside.
@Seppuku Arts: (I swear this is the last person I reply to! This post shall end somewhat soon-ish, I promise D: )
Quote: "I am going to make it my mission to improve my German this year, I would like to be able to speak more fluently when I visit again this year so I sound less like a blithering idiot. I always view myself as that English policeman on Allo Allo, only worse."
Good luck with that!
I've read this somewhere before (wasn't that even in the old MLP thread?
) that you attended Wacken festival and I assume you'll be heading there again. That's pretty cool.
Quote: "That said, I know NOT to say "Ich bin heiss" on a hot day, apparently it means I'm horny."
That's true. I assume "I am hot" is just a statement about body temperature in this context? That would indeed translate to "Mir ist heiß". If it means "I am buff/sexy/etc." it could very well translate to "Ich bin heiß" and yes that can also be interpreted as "I'm horny". xD
This reminds me, back in primary school we had a classmate with the surname Horn and his nickname was "horny"... until we started to learn english and became aware of the translation of that.
Turned out to be a rather unfortunate choice in hindsight.
....I don't even wanna know how long this post 'll be with all the quotes and stuff! If you read this all up to here: Kudos and sorry and thanks for reading I guess?
~RedFlames
Edit: hightlighted the "@username" parts to delimit the sections better... this post looks so spaghetti. :I
