Trapy wrote:vijayjohn wrote:Trapy wrote:Indo euro, semetic, japonnic, ancient and modern standardized? This is quite a list, but i am very interested in reading how you take it on!
I guess you haven't seen dEhiN's and my lists yet.
dEHIN s list was impressive as well, but yours caused my brain to malfunction. How?!?!!?!???!!!!??!!! This upcoming year will definately be fun with all these
Mega lists!
Thanks!
Short answer: I've been learning languages (at least bits and pieces of them) for longer than I can remember, apparently.
Long answer: English is undoubtedly the language I speak most fluently. I've been living with my parents my whole life so far, so I hear Malayalam every day and have come to speak it well enough by now that I can get my parents (or at least my dad) to stop using English with me and even try to trip me up with hard words. French was the first foreign language I remember seriously learning, then German and Spanish came right after that, and I took classes for all three starting in middle school as well (even though our counselor really tried not let me at first!). I studied Latin on my own starting from when I was in elementary school, but I think it was only in middle school that I really got serious about studying it. Then I took an AP Latin course in high school after passing a test
(I took AP exams for French language, French literature, Spanish language, Spanish literature, German language, and Latin language. They don't have German/Latin literature tests really ). I started learning Russian when I was in like kindergarten, then learned a little more in elementary school, but I think it was only when I was a teenager that I got serious about that, too. I started Turkish as a teenager as well. I started going through TY Thai when I was in elementary school and got serious about it when we started going to this Thai barber, lol. So then I finished it when I was like...eleven? Or something. I started learning Mandarin semi-seriously in middle school (7th grade, I think?) and
really seriously in high school, then took Chinese classes starting with the first-year second-semester course and minored in Chinese. I went through TY Urdu and TY Swahili (in that order, although I'd started TY Swahili when I was in elementary school because it was one of the first TY books I ever bought) when I was in college. Then when I was in grad school, one of my cousins was going to get married to a Croatian lady in Croatia, and we were invited, so I learned some Croatian and used it with everyone I could starting as soon as we got on the plane to Zagreb. Towards the end of grad school, I took a seminar taught by my advisor, who has done groundbreaking research on Krio and taught us some in his seminar. And when I was growing up, I used to learn bits of Indonesian (and various other languages) sometimes just because I felt like it.
I started trying to learn Tagalog sooort of seriously maybe five years ago or something because I've ended up meeting my fair share of people who speak it. Everything else is pretty much in there just for diversity because why the fuck not?