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In reply to the discussion: What forgeign language would you like to learn? Why? [View all]DFW
(54,465 posts)Tagalog because I encounter Filipinos everywhere I go. They have taught me some of their language, enough to surprise the hell out of them, but not enough to hold a real conversation. The same goes for Albanian and Farsi.
I know some Turkish, as I had some Turkish friends in college, and there are Turks everywhere here in Germany. But I'd love to be conversational.
I have Polish colleagues, and would like to be able to converse with them in their own language.
I run into Arabs everywhere in Europe, especially in France and Belgium.
Mandarin just because one encounters people from China everywhere, and while not all of them speak Mandarin as a native language by any means, Mandarin remains their lingua franca.
My sister-in-law is from Japan, and I would like to be able to converse with her in her own language.
As for languages in which I CAN hold a conversation with either little or no difficulty--those would be English (mother tongue), Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, Dutch (Nederlands), Swedish, German, Schwyzerdütsch and Russian. I'm no genius, but rather lazy, instead. I'm in a different country virtually every day for work. I don't have the energy or the time to ask everybody along the way, "Do you speak English?" It's just a LOT easier if I know the language of the people I interact with. Knowing the languages I do covers me about 95% of the time. Close enough. Besides, having learned German early on made it possible for me to meet and marry an incredibly beautiful, smart, kind and well-adjusted woman that would never even have talked to me if I hadn't spoken her language, which is German. She had taken some English in school, of course, but didn't speak it well, as she never figured she would ever have any use for it later on in life. She eventually turned out to be wrong about that, but she didn't know it at the time.
I think I fried my brain neurons long ago.