Alfons
Way of the future
Which languages do you speak? Which do you want to learn? How do they affect your thought?
My mother tongue is Icelandic, think its wonderful and beautiful and am saddened and delighted at the same time that only about 300.000 people speak it.
Speak English and Danish fluently. I guess English is beautiful in its omnipresence and its huuuuge vocabulary but I think its status as lingua franca of the world is impoverishing it. Learned Danish as a kid when I lived in Denmark for a couple of years, am glad to know a Nordic language (enables me to understand and read Swedish and Norwegian kind of). Danish evolves and changes really quickly I think, it gets so many words raw from other languages that its kind of scary.
Know some German and a tiny bit of Spanish. Think German can be beautiful in its hardness, good for philosophizing and writing poetry in!
Currently living in the Netherlands, but my financial situation prohibited me from taking any Dutch courses and as I'm mostly doing my work from home (girlfriend is doing exchange studies here) I'm not learning much at all. Sadly. Think once I go back home my ten months here will have taught me how to order a beer in Dutch and not much else. My Danish and German kind of allow me to read Dutch tho, but the pronounciation is killer!
Have set myself the goal of learning a new language for every decade of my life, German is the one for my twenties (25 at the mo), thinking Spanish for my 30s. Other languages I'd like to learn are Arabic, Russian, Portuguese and Japanese. My efforts untill now have really cemented how hard it is to properly become a native speaker, i.e. getting the nuances and nooks of a language, understanding jokes and so on. It takes years doesn't it?
My mother tongue is Icelandic, think its wonderful and beautiful and am saddened and delighted at the same time that only about 300.000 people speak it.
Speak English and Danish fluently. I guess English is beautiful in its omnipresence and its huuuuge vocabulary but I think its status as lingua franca of the world is impoverishing it. Learned Danish as a kid when I lived in Denmark for a couple of years, am glad to know a Nordic language (enables me to understand and read Swedish and Norwegian kind of). Danish evolves and changes really quickly I think, it gets so many words raw from other languages that its kind of scary.
Know some German and a tiny bit of Spanish. Think German can be beautiful in its hardness, good for philosophizing and writing poetry in!
Currently living in the Netherlands, but my financial situation prohibited me from taking any Dutch courses and as I'm mostly doing my work from home (girlfriend is doing exchange studies here) I'm not learning much at all. Sadly. Think once I go back home my ten months here will have taught me how to order a beer in Dutch and not much else. My Danish and German kind of allow me to read Dutch tho, but the pronounciation is killer!
Have set myself the goal of learning a new language for every decade of my life, German is the one for my twenties (25 at the mo), thinking Spanish for my 30s. Other languages I'd like to learn are Arabic, Russian, Portuguese and Japanese. My efforts untill now have really cemented how hard it is to properly become a native speaker, i.e. getting the nuances and nooks of a language, understanding jokes and so on. It takes years doesn't it?
