Multilingualism
Posted on June 14, 2009 | Categories: Question of the Week, Travel | Tags: languages
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Those who know me know that I love languages; I speak fluent English and Cantonese and am studying French and Mandarin Chinese at university. I’d also love to learn Italian and Swahili in the future, but I want to improve my conversational French and become conversational in Mandarin Chinese before tackling new languages! Russian is also a language I’d like to learn, but the likelihood of that ever happening is practically non-existent.
I’ve always been really jealous of students in Asia and Europe who start studying other languages at a really young age in school1. My cousins in Hong Kong study Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, and English, and my cousins in Shanghai study Shanghainese, Mandarin Chinese, and English. The kids in the French family I stayed with while on my French exchange trip studied French, German, and English, and the German exchange student my family hosted last month studied German, Spanish, and English. In other words, basically everyone I’ve met while on my travels study at least two languages at school, even the young students I met at some of the schools I worked at/visited while in Tanzania, but most of my friends have no real interest in any language, not even English2!
Maybe the reason why I’m so fascinated with languages and jealous of those who are multilingual is not only because of my own bilingual household, but because languages were never really forced upon me in school, unlike the vast majority of schools I’ve encountered overseas. I hate traveling to countries and being perceived as the ignorant American tourist who thinks English is the only language worth knowing; I want to know more about the world around me, both in terms of politics and culture. While I personally received a very good education up to and including my university schooling, there’s still so much I wish I was taught. Multiple languages are definitely one of them.
Question of the Week: How many languages are you fluent in, and what languages are they?
- I don’t know anything about South American or African schooling, but I think it’s safe to assume students in those continents also study multiple languages at school rather than just the official language/mother tongue. [↩]
- These friends I am speaking of are both from Australia and the United States, countries that are not known for multilingualism in their education systems. The exception to this are my friends who have multi-racial/ethnic families. [↩]
Carmen
I absolutely love studying languages too- I had opportunity to study them when I was younger, but found it really tedious and unsatisfying so I stopped! Right now, I’m only fluent in English but I’m learning French, Mandarin and Vietnamese- it’s a lot, but since I understand these languages when they’re spoken to me, it’s really just a matter of consolidating my vocab enough to be able to reply!
In the future, I want to pick up Spanish, Italian and Japanese :)
Michi
I love studying languages as well. I speak both English and Filipino (our official language which a lot of people mistakenly call Tagalog) fluently and since I live in a country that’s made up of 7,107 islands which means a lot of regional languages, I also speak one of those which is Pangasinan. As for other languages, I took up basic German, two semesters ago and I’ll be continuing it next semester. I’d also love to learn French, Spanish, Mandarin, Italian and Japanese. Hopefully, I’ll have the time later on because I’m pretty busy with my majors and too bad, only 12 units of foreign language is allowed in our curriculum and I already chose 12 units of German.
Helly
I have two different feelings towards English-speaking countries: on one hand, I am SO jealous of your perfect English, but on the other, as much as I don’t like living in Italy, I have to admit that I feel quite lucky, because I agree with you that those countries don’t pay enough (enough for me, that isXD) attention to multilingualism, and studying languages being the only thing I can and like to do, it’d be a problem for me :D But that’s obvious though, once you know English you’ve got everything you need to travel the world and stuff!
Apart from Italian (which is possibly the most useless language ever created XD) I’m quite fluent in English and French. I can understand Spanish pretty well and speak some of it too. And then there’s Russian. It’s a beautiful language, but so hard to learn!
Krissy
I always thought we were pretty good in Nova Scotia about trying to make students bilingual (we did French immersion from grade 4 on), but now that I’ve met so many different people from around the world through VegOpt and TFL and such, it makes you realize how appalling our school system (in Canada anyway, I don’t know much about the US or other predominantly English speaking countries) is in terms of teaching students other languages. I think that may have been the main reason why I never really developed a love of languages until later in my life (ie: university) because there never was a reason to learn anything outside of English or French, nor anywhere to learn other languages even if you wanted to!
One of my biggest language life goals is to learn German and Czech. German simply because I find it really fascinating, and Czech because my family is from there and I would love to go there someday and be fully immersed in that culture like my great-great-grandparents would have been. I took a few courses in German this year at university, and while I’m far from fluent, I’m proud of myself that I can understand the language well, and speak/write it okay. :)
Setsanto
Hi there,
I’m fluent in English and German, though I used to be fluent in Vlaams (a dialect of Dutch) as well…My mom is German, so I learned how to speak it from her, though my written German is quite shabby, and I lived in Belgium, which is where I learned how to speak Vlaams. Sadly, I haven’t really spoken it very much in the past 6 years or so, so I am far from fluent now. I live in Canada now and I can honestly say the language teaching here isn’t great. I’ve lived in England, Belgium, the USA, South Africa and Canada so far, and the North American countries are by far the worst for languages, though I can’t really speak for England since I left when I was 5.
All students at public schools in South Africa learn English, Afrikaans and whatever the tribal language from their province is, in my case it was Xhosa. In Belgium, I know kids that are taking Vlaams, French, German and English all at the same time. In the US on the other hand, I took English and Spanish for one year, though Spanish was quickly axed the next year due to funding issues, while in Canada I managed to catch up to everybody else in French in only 6 months after starting to learn it in Grade 8. By the end of the year, I was helping other people with their French work. If this isn’t an indication of how sad Core French (Immersion is quite good) is, I don’t know what is.
In terms of languages I want to learn, French and Mandarin are currently at the top of my list. I would like to perfect my German someday, especially my writing. Lastly, I hope to someday learn Spanish and a Scandinavian language, perhaps Swedish and I would also like to relearn Vlaams. Yes, I am ambitious =D. Spetilingualism ftw!
Anouska
I love languages too and am lucky enough to live in The Netherlands, which really emphasises languages in school. (If you’re no good at math, you can take the easier course, but if you’re no good at languages, you’re screwed.) I’ve always loved languages and had no problem with having to study four of them. I grew up with Dutch, started learning English around age 9 or 10, started learning French at age 12/13, and German at age 13/14. They also taught Spanish at my school but I’d picked too many subjects already and couldn’t choose more XD
Then there was the exchange at age 15/16. I went to France but others went to Russia, Poland and Italy and got a small course in the language of the country they went to.
I’m really only fluent in Dutch and English though. I can still read German and French pretty well, and could probably even have some sort of a conversation in German but both German and French are in a dusty corner in the back of my mind. I’m sure if I’d needed to talk in either language, I’d be okay within an hour though. I just never use them anymore, which is too bad :(
Emsz
I am fluent in English and Dutch, and my German is good enough to make myself understandable to German people. My French, however, is terrible. I blame this on my teachers, because they were all idiots. :P I speak the tiniest, tiniest bit of Spanish and Italian, mostly because they are so much alike, and because I had Latin in school for three years.
I can read ancient Greek quite well too :)
In the future I would really love to learn Japanese (it seems the easiest of Asian languages) and I would love to improve my Italian.
Ashley
I so wish the US would do more with languages in school – I can only speak English, and wasn’t required to learn a language until French in 7th and 8th grade. I can read little bits of French, and speak some halting Spanish from my high school classes. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to fit languages in with my college courses, but I’m hoping to eventually learn fluent Spanish; I might take some classes after college.
Also, I’m absolutely dying to learn Gaelic, as it’s my ancestral language and I always love learning more about my roots.
Rosier
I don’t think I could imagine my life without being able to speak languages apart from Hungarian. English has always played an important role in my life, since I was young, so I can safely assume that I’m fluent at it.
While I was living abroad, I could only watch Slovenian or German channels, and the interesting animes could always be found on RTL 2, so, the German one, and step by step I came to understand German, without being able to speak in it. Not many people believe this, but I wonder, how can they prove, then, this: they have learnt German for 10 years, I’ve learnt it for 3, and we’re at the same level.
Right now I can speak English and German fluently apart from Hungarian, and I’m starting to learn Japanese this summer. I also plan to learn Korean and Spanish after this one.
Clem
I’m fluent in English (der) and I can hold a conversation in (Quebecois) French with my (Quebecoise) aunts. I would LOVE to be completely fluent in French. I know it’s not important for a lot of people I know, but I actually have reason to be bilingual – a lot of my family speaks French, and I plan on living in Montreal someday in the not-so-distant future, so being fluent in French is a good idea.
Unfortunately, I don’t think I ever will be. I had planned on taking French all through high school, but the French program at my school is terrible. I learned only one thing all this year – my teacher taught a lot of stuff I’d learned up to three years earlier, or things that I’d taught myself, so there’s really no point in continuing if I’m not learning. I’ll have to teach myself or take classes outside of school, I guess.
Alejandra
i understand what you feel, i would wish that school taught me lots of things like various languages. I think its kinda funny that you meet people that know many languages, so why not start now learning a new language? the earliest,the better. I also want to learn more languages, specially chinese/mandarin, german and russian. Good luck then!
Alice
I am with you there, I wish I had learnt another language at five and not when I was older and too stubborn to pay attention.
I am only fluent in English, and I hate that I can’t speak or even understand another language. I could survive if I suddenly found myself in France (city France not rural) but I just never got the opportunity or encouragement to study more. Now I just feel like I am too old to understand any language properly.
Regina
I am fluent in English, Mandarin, and Shanghainese. I started learning French when I was about 9 years old and I’m *almost* fluent in French now. Right now I’m trying to learn German, although it’s really difficult and very different from the other languages that I know… we’ll see how that goes.:P I also really want to learn Latin, just because it would help me with vocab if I ever decide to tackle another language. :P
Meg
I’m fluent in English and Mandarin Chinese since I learned both of those languages natively, and I’m mostly fluent in Spanish, which I plan to continue studying in college. I agree with everything you’ve said regarding wanting to learn languages; in fact, I agree with the last paragraph so much that I feel like I could’ve written it :p Cantonese, Shanghainese, French, Japanese, German, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, etc. are all languages I’d like to learn, but it probably wouldn’t be practical for me to spend a lot of time learning all of that :(
Trish
Well, I’m only fluent in English. :( I can speak conversational french and maybe a little bit more than that and I’m teaching myself Japanese. I’ve been fascinated by languages for a long time, though I don’t know why. I’d like to become fluent in French and Japanese (since I want to live in one of those countries to work) and maybe learn conversational Mandarin Chinese and Filipino. I’m so jealous of you! I hope to study abroad in college, especially in Japan or Australia.
Ruby
I’m definitely fascinated by the languages as well. Like in Africa, there’s supposedly a number of over 500 dialects of a certain language spoken? Unbelievable. And the fact that people today are trying to decipher languages from thousands of years ago that are extinct today? Crazy!!
I speak only English and Spanish fluently. I suppose Spanish was a given when both of my parents are from Mexico, but my dad actually didn’t want me to learn Spanish first. It technically is my first language, seeing how I call my grandma “Mama” and how I can easily understand Spanish and sometimes think it! But my dad didn’t want me to have an accent, like a lot of the “children of immigrants” do in the city I live in. So they taught me English first, and then introduced Spanish.
The greatest challenge, atleast for me, is the transition from English to Spanish, vice versa. Because, I know people in school who basically speak Spanglish, and to be quite honest it’s really looked down upon in my family (I mean my ENTIRE family ergo: grandparents, aunts, uncles, great-aunts/uncles, third cousins, etc.) when you do that, so I never did. If I’m in Mexico, I’ll speak fluent spanish.. However if I’m back home, and someone who doesn’t speak a word of English needs help, I’ll get confused with my own thinking and mess up sentences.
This also happens when I spend too much time in Mexico and when I come back I’ll accidentally do the “greet-and-kiss” to some of my friends. :D
Aisling
I’m fluent in English and Quebecois French. I can also understand most Spanish and Italian, because of my French education. :)
Charlie
I’m fluent in English and can understand some Hindi and Mandarin (both written and spoken, I’m teaching myself those two). I know enough Hindi to understand basis introductory conversations.
I think the reason why so many people whose first language is English don’t care about other languages is that so many people in the world speak English, in a way learning another seems obselete. I remember going to France, speaking French and being replied to in English. It made all the learning seem a waste of time.
Kathleen
I grew up in a country with three official languages, even though we are one of the smallest countries in the world. Our official languages are Dutch, French and German. Dutch is my mother language which I speak fluently. I had French at school since the age of ten which makes me fairly fluent as well. German is not my strongest point. I’ve only had it for one year in school and I forgot most of it afterwards. But since German and Dutch are quite similar, I do understand German. I just can’t speak it.
Of course English has played a major part in my life as well. I used to watch a lot of English shows on the television and when I started getting English classes at school at the age of thirteen I already knew quite a lot about the language. Now I speak it quite fluently.
On top of that I had two year Spanish at school. I could get around with the basics I know, but I’m not fluent at all. And I also can speak some Icelandic because I lived for a year in Iceland. Once again, enough to get around, but not fluent. I forgot a lot about this language though. Maybe if I’d be back in Iceland, hearing Icelandic all the time, I’d get more fluent again.
Stephanie
For me, I’m only fluent in English, which is one of three official languages in New Zealand – the others being Maori and NZ Sign Language. My Maori doesn’t go further than the first verse of the national anthem, the Haka, and very basic conversation. Personally, I’m happy with that as Maori is a language I don’t really want to learn (and I don’t think those of us in New Zealand should have to learn but that’s another story for another time).
I did study Japanese when I was at high school – I was about *this* close to studying French. I haven’t had the chance to use it since I finished high school but I do think that if I were to travel to Japan, it would start coming back, with being in that environment. I can still read and write it up to a point (hiragana and katakana mainly) and have a basic conversation in it as well.
I still want to learn French and Italian – I know both the French and Italian national anthems and very basic conversational things (and can count to 16 in Italian) but I really want to learn those two languages.