I also took japanese in high school. Did a homestudy abroad program, lot of good that did. Was VP of our school's Japanese culture club. fast foward a few years...some japanese guy called our work and all I could muster out was wa ka ri masen although I could probably tell you what's the latest haps with Jiro Tanaka-san.
hoojacks does speak terrorist, but only the North African kind. also has basic French and super basic Tamazight
I'm picturing the "terrorist language" sounding like the faux Arabic spoken in Team America for some reason. Amiright?
Lol, Spanish is the first language of Miami. It doesn't matter that schools teach in English, just an interesting observation for you outsiders. I speak that fluently, also I just got to an intermediate level in Korean. I plan on learning a few more languages because I like to travel, or go on vacation in other words. : ]
If you don't mind me asking, where are you learning Korean? I don't know of too many schools teaching it. I know enough to buy kimchi-jiggae in Pusan without using English, and riding the train where I need to go, but not much else. Reading is really easy--I just don't know what most of the words mean after I've sounded them out.
How do you get the tones down in Mandarin? That seems like the most useful Asian language to learn, but i'm so horrible with that kind of stuff i think i'd go for Japanese or Korean over it for that reason.
I did a quick course on Hausa, which has 4 modalities (low-high, high-low, high-high, low-low), and it was honestly just listening over and over until your brain gets a hold of it.
Is learning German worthless? Most likely, but I hate learning a foreign language anyway. I've always had a really hard time processing it for some reason. I figure, if I'm going to have to learn a language, it might as well be one that I enjoy.
I don't know about German specifically, but I've always thought of languages as gateways. I mean, I learned French in HS and became fluent the summer i lived over there. Didn't speak it for 15 years. Then I did for a few months on a French ship in W. Africa, and it came back. Knowing French to that degree has made it pretty easy to pick up other languages (as disparate as Korean, Pashto, Creole and Hausa). Having a good grasp of the mechanics of grammar (what's an adverb, what's the past perfect tense, what's the difference between should and shall) makes it easy as well, but if you don't have it then the first "new" language you learn you'll pick it up by necessity, and then you'll be on your way to others. Additionally, if you start with one of the latin-based languages (French/Romanian/Italian/Portuguese/Spanish) it might be easier to pick up another. I've never formally looked at Italian or Spanish, but when I was in Naples I could read most signs and figure out most newspaper articles. Same for when my little girl watches Dora or Handy Manny.
I met a guy from Mexico City when I was in Italy and he would just speak Spanish to all of the Italians, and they Italian to him, and they understood each other quite well.
hahaha basically. Me and my American friends would routinely say "derka derka Mohammed jihad" but not in public, of course
Yeah, right. You just want to know what you're saying when you're singing along with your Rammstein and David Hasselhoff CDs.
Well if you have 300 ish dollars to spend you can get that Rosetta Stone thing. That might be the best option. I'm cheap though so I found free websites by searching enough. I've used 7-9 websites so I cannot recommend one single place, just use your favorite search engine. It is extremely time consuming though, and I have a binder full of notes already in just a few months. German is a very useful language in Europe, if that is worth anything to you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population It says Germany is at 56%, in terms of English speaking population. Maybe in the real nice areas it is higher though.
