Language!

[christopher575]

Did you study a language in school? I did two years of German in high school and two more in college, and nearly majored in it. I decided not to when I realized I didn't want to teach or interpret for a living. I am very rusty, with that last class being in 1994. But I still think about it a lot.

There are some things I really like about German. I like that there aren't silent letters and that pronunciation is consistent. I also like that adjectives aren't capitalized, even when it's one that we would, like "German". If we were German, we'd write "german". 

I don't like that they capitalize all nouns, though. That seems silly. 

I'm ambivalent about the gendered nouns. I like that they usually make sense. If something is phallic, it'll be masculine. But it's hella weird to call your sword "he".

I'd like to go back to Germany. It's nice there.

Comments

[njbearcub1.livejournal.com]

Four years of High school French, and 1 semester in college, between 1982-87. (I didn't take the course in college until my 2nd year.) I enjoyed it, but not enough to go any further with it.

When we went to Disneyland Paris in 2000, I took a quick refresh and bought a book, and was able to be conversational with people. We talk about going back some day, but I'd definitely have to brush up at this point.

[badrobot68.livejournal.com]

Four years of high school Spanish, but that ended in 1986. I should have kept studying it. I can read Spanish ok, but speaking still moves too fast and all the words blur together.

[crushdmb.livejournal.com]

Studying American Sign Language now. It's a beautiful, expressive language, and a hard one to master. I LOVE the meetups. The Deaf community is so friendly.

[scunnerred.livejournal.com]

Five years of high school French. I still remember a lot as I have to speak it on a regular basis at work.

[omero-hassan.livejournal.com]

First year French, a couple of times. A year of Italian and a year of Arabic. A try at ASL. And Spanish, which I probably speak best of these. Plus, I tried to teach myself Russian as a kid, but it didn't work out.

[wring.livejournal.com]

when did you go to Germany?
I took 12 units of French and showed nothing for it. I understand the basics, vaguely.

[christopher575.livejournal.com]

I went for a month on an exchange program the summer after my senior year in high school, 1992.

[myrrhmade.livejournal.com]

I have family in Bayern.

[dawnzerly.livejournal.com]

3 years high school french, but we're required to take that much, or at least we were required to back when I was in school. I can't speak it much, I can read it better than I can speak it. And the french I leaned in school is totally useless in France given that it's a totally different dialect.

I would love to go back to Germany, it really is quite beautiful.

[misterkickass.livejournal.com]

I love German, took it in HS, university and then a couple of years of continuing ed classes at BCC to refresh it. When frogger414 and I when to Germany in '07 I enjoyed finally being able to use it and felt comfortable getting around. We love Germany and definitely will go back once we're done cranking out fresh kids.

I like that all nouns are capitalized myself since you can glance at a sentence and quickly pick out what's involved. Also the fixed verb placement makes the language easier to pick apart even if it makes sentences less understandable while they're being delivered.

[cattycritic.livejournal.com]

3 years of French in HS but I have forgotten much of it. We were translating books 3rd year and it was just 2 of us in the class :/ I'm marginally conversant.

1 year of Latin from mom in HS. It was a way for her to make us some money; she taught it through the local community college and I got 5-6 of my friends to take it in the evening after school.

In college I took 1 semester each of Russian and Mandarin Chinese, but at 2nd semester it was requiring too much of my time to study and I dropped them both so I could get my physics/engineering homework done. I can still at least read Cyrillic quite well, especially after going to Bulgaria.

However, I did wind up taking 3 semesters of Sanskrit anyway in grad school I hardly remember any of it though. Not many opportunities to practice this, so it's kinda lost.