The Other Foot Posted March 17, 2015 Share Posted March 17, 2015 Tried to learn a bit of Luganda before I came out to Kampala, but when I try to use it the locals tend to glare at me as if I have just taken a mazii in their waragi. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SlipperyP Posted March 17, 2015 Share Posted March 17, 2015 I speak Thai and usually only Thai most days, problem with this is that my English is getting worse. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ross. Posted March 17, 2015 Share Posted March 17, 2015 I've been in Switzerland for just under 3 years. The first 6 months I done a few German courses and was picking it up quite well. Found full time work with an American company and the office language is English. Working full time with an hour round trip each way between the house and the office and mostly speaking English has seen my German stay at a fairly poor level. In a 1 on 1 conversation I can get by but quite slowly. In a group I am absolutely lost. I've registered for half a dozen German courses in the last 6 months as I know I really need to get working on it again, but each has been cancelled at the last minute due to having too few people register for the courses. Starting to think I should look at 1 on 1 tuition, which would be expensive but probably worth it in the long term. The other issue here is that they speak Swiss German, which while similar in many ways to "Hoch Deutsch" is very fucking different when you hear people speak fluently. You can't actually learn Swiss German in a class room though, it's officially recognised as a spoken only language, so you need to learn Hoch Deutsch and then try to pick up Swiss as you go along. Most Swiss will speak a decent level of English, which hasn't helped me much as I have a tendency to be quite lazy at times(Posted while at work...). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stevieKTID Posted March 18, 2015 Share Posted March 18, 2015 I speak fluent Dutch after living in NL for 14 years picked up most of it by watching TV and reading the subtitles tried lessons once - but gave up because everyone was speaking english, i occasionally bump into my Dutch teacher and she always compliments my grasp of the language, its an utterly pointless language and horrible sounding as well but the locals do appreciate my efforts especially when the vast majority of expats here don't bother to even attempt it, being Scottish you do have an advantage as we can pronounce the "hard g" used in Dutch, also helps that my girlfriend is half Scottish/ half dutch ( her maw is from Arbroath ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
salmonbuddie Posted March 18, 2015 Share Posted March 18, 2015 Immersion is definitely the way to go if you want to become fluent. imo. I worked in Southern Italy 30 years ago where no English was spoken and went there with no prior knowledge of the language whatsoever. Higher French helped and after two years (without any formal lessons) I could get by and hold a reasonable conversation one on one because I had to. Someone said earlier that you have to think in the languauge to be considered fluent (something my French teacher told me all those years ago) and this is true - to an extent. I'd never consider that I was ever completely fluent but the first time I saw a Q8 petrol station was in Italy and it was always 'Q-otto' to me. It wasn't until a couple of years after I came back and was filling up in one in Barrhead that I saw it wrtitten out as 'Kuwaiti Oil Co.' or some such that the penny dropped........ Made a difference to my French, too - when I went to France on holiday a couple of years later I found it much easier to get by. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duszek Posted March 18, 2015 Share Posted March 18, 2015 Our two kids are growing up trilingual, as we live in France and my wife's from Peru (she speaks Spanish to them). The 8 year-old girl can switch effortlessly between the 3 languages, the 6 year-old lad is a lazy fucker and only wants to use French. I need to make more of an effort to just speak English to him. He won't thank me for it anytime soon, but perhaps one day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ross. Posted March 18, 2015 Share Posted March 18, 2015 I speak fluent Dutch after living in NL for 14 years picked up most of it by watching TV and reading the subtitles tried lessons once - but gave up because everyone was speaking english, i occasionally bump into my Dutch teacher and she always compliments my grasp of the language, its an utterly pointless language and horrible sounding as well but the locals do appreciate my efforts especially when the vast majority of expats here don't bother to even attempt it, being Scottish you do have an advantage as we can pronounce the "hard g" used in Dutch, also helps that my girlfriend is half Scottish/ half dutch ( her maw is from Arbroath ) Dutch is similar to Swiss German in terms of pronunciation, which makes things a bit easier for me. I really need to push myself to speak more of it, but everyone tells me to learn Hoch Deutsch instead, which is a bit annoying when none of the locals bother speaking it. Our two kids are growing up trilingual, as we live in France and my wife's from Peru (she speaks Spanish to them). The 8 year-old girl can switch effortlessly between the 3 languages, the 6 year-old lad is a lazy fucker and only wants to use French. I need to make more of an effort to just speak English to him. He won't thank me for it anytime soon, but perhaps one day. My missus is half Scottish half Swiss. Growing up her parents spoke English and Swiss German, expecting that it would mean the kids automatically pick up on both languages. This worked with 2 of her sisters, but the other sister and my girlfriend didn't speak English at all growing up. She only really started speaking it after moving to Scotland and staying with family there, but she did say she found it fairly easy as she was aware of the pronunciation and rhythm of the language. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
speccy1984 Posted March 18, 2015 Share Posted March 18, 2015 I've been learning Spanish since January, luckily have a mate who is fluent in Spanish so he's helping me out a fair bit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JogaBonito Posted March 18, 2015 Share Posted March 18, 2015 Quite a lot of people vouching for evening classes and immersion, I take it Duolingo and Rosetta stone are pretty useless then? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Young Joseph Stalin Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Would quite like to learn Italian to make following the football easier and would like to visit Italy sometime. In saying that, I went to Italy a few times in the summer and they all spoke brilliant English, unlike the Spanish. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madwullie Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 I have a decent level of reading and speaking Spanish. The Michel Thomas tapes in the car for verbs and tenses supplemented with rosetta stone for nouns and other common vocab worked for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ross. Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Quite a lot of people vouching for evening classes and immersion, I take it Duolingo and Rosetta stone are pretty useless then? I wouldn't say useless. They are good as a supplementary tool, but my problem with them is that as soon as someone speaks with an accent, you are fucked as far as understanding them goes. A bit like learning English from someone with an Oxford accent and then moving to Newcastle. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BerwickMad Posted March 19, 2015 Author Share Posted March 19, 2015 I'm 5 hours into my audiobook and being taught how to say "he would like to kidnap the baby" in German. Strange. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
itzdrk Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 I learned in September that foreign = bad so i have forgotten everything i know about non english words Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ya Bezzer! Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Quite a lot of people vouching for evening classes and immersion, I take it Duolingo and Rosetta stone are pretty useless then? For me the only way to speak confidently is if you listen to and learn pronunciation from native speakers. Especially in my case where it's quite easy to fall into a sort of comedy Italian accent and then feel embarrassed about it. Also native speakers always talk a lot faster than you learn the language if you aren't 'in country'. This reminds me I was on Sicily for a few months and I hadn't taken toe nail clippers with me and my toe nails were getting a bit long. I ended up going into a shop and telling a shop assistant that I wanted to cut my toes off with scissors. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ross. Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 I'm 5 hours into my audiobook and being taught how to say "he would like to kidnap the baby" in German. Strange. I assume it's German with an Austrian accent? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TickleTown Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Learnt Spanish years ago, but forgotten loads of it, but probably could still get by. Went to night school classes for that. Can speak a bit of Hungarian having lived there for 6 years. I can read Cyrillic which I picked up in Russia as well as some basic phrases and know small bits of Turkish, Tagalog, Mandarin, German and Polish, but only enough to be pleasant which I picked up from living and working in these places. Really wish I could spend time to learn more and have more than just phrases. Would just like to point out the hilarity between the level of culture in this post coupled with the brilliance of the username. Top work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zidane's child Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 I wouldn't say useless. They are good as a supplementary tool, but my problem with them is that as soon as someone speaks with an accent, you are fucked as far as understanding them goes. A bit like learning English from someone with an Oxford accent and then moving to Newcastle. or Liverpool...... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Newbornbairn Posted March 20, 2015 Share Posted March 20, 2015 my wife's from Peru . Can you do me a wee favour? Can you give your wife a slap off the back of the head from me and say "THAT'S for Cubillas" Thank you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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