Speaky de Foreign Speak?

[Kei]

[font="Tahoma"][color="#000080"]I speak English, mostly, but I also have a certificate in Japanese (though I need to start studying again to make a higher rank). I took French in high school, but it was many moons ago, so I've forgotten most of it. Though that was mostly from forcing myself to forget it because any language that just adds letters to a word to make it sound appealing is just plain goofy.
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[Lady Asphyxia]

[size="2"][font="Arial Narrow"]English and French. I learnt German in high school but dropped it once I graduated, on account of being royally screwed over by the teacher, who taught us nothing and then expected us to do well. I nearly had a nervous breakdown.

So then I took french. I'm now considered to be Advanced III, at a C1 level (which might make sense to some of you). I read french books for leisure, etc, although I still have some difficulty speaking it...but you know the facebook group: after three drinks I'm bilingual. [/font][/size]

[Solayo]

Well, Tagalog is my first language, and I got exposed to English via the media and school. And since I am in the Philippines, Spanish is a bit of a necessity when it comes to money and time.

I also took Japanese classes, because foreign language was a requirement in my first course, which was Linguistics. I can write somewhat, but my speaking skills are way below par.

Languages I am interested in learning:
- Bicolano/Bikolano (because my mother speaks it and I can only understand it somewhat and not able to speak it)
- Mandarin (because many people speak it...?)
- Korean (because there are a lot of Koreans here in the Philippines, and I really would like to be able to read those signboards)
- Italian (because I am doing this comic which concerns the Mafia, and I am sort of curious as to how some of the characters will say some of their lines)

[Dagger]

I majored in Japanese, so hopefully I'm somewhat decent at it by now. Passed the Japanese Language Proficiency Test Level 1 in 2008, which sometimes sounds impressive, but it happened to be perfectly tailored to my main strength (reading comprehension). I've just about given up on writing kanji by hand... I can barely remember any, and it's just way too easy to type them into a computer or cell phone.

I read more Japanese novels than English novels nowadays, because I can't blow through them quite as fast, which makes it feel like I'm getting more reading time for my money, haha. Recently finished 1Q84 Book 3 by Haruki Murakami.

Unfortunately I only seem to be capable of retaining one foreign language in my head at a time. Japanese has by now thoroughly overwritten my four years of studying French.

ETA: I'd like to learn Korean someday. Ideally, knowing Japanese will help facilitate that somewhat....

[Solayo]

[quote name='Dagger' date='17 June 2010 - 09:52 AM' timestamp='1276739569' post='695439']
ETA: I'd like to learn Korean someday. Ideally, knowing Japanese will help facilitate that somewhat....
[/quote]
I guess it will help somewhat, since their sentence structure is similar and there are some words with the same meaning that have almost the same pronunciation.

Knowing Chinese helps with learning Japanese, I've found. Doesn't apply to me, though, since I don't know Chinese.