111–115 of 115 posts
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Would you say you're a rare case, as far as learning three languages? Many that pursue linguistics seem offended when asked how many languages they speak.
No, I learned them a long time before I did linguistics, in the course of other non-linguistics pursuits. I got into linguistics later on because of the computational linguistics angle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you say you're a rare case, as far as learning three languages? Many that pursue linguistics seem offended when asked how many languages they speak.
Oh I misread the question! You're asking if it's rare for linguists to learn 3 languages? I dunno. But I think linguists who get offended if people ask them that are kinda of silly...
i call it babelfin.
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True, but you can go at it backwards too. I met my wife in grad school and decided to learn the language afterwards; probably better route IMO. The hard part has been using English as a crutch - it has always been hard to go all out in Japanese.
My husband is a native (Austrian) German speaker and when we met, his English wasn't great. But he was just rusty… meanwhile, because we're DOING things together, we've given up on speaking German because it gets too frustrating and slow. Now, even if I start a conversation in German, he responds in English. Bad habit. :) I've absorbed as much as I can absorb from listening to people, language CDs & trying to read th…
Shameless plug for our startup: Quizlet, which is trying to make learning languages -- particularly vocabulary -- easier. We've got some cool audio features coming out soon. http://quizlet.com/
I've been using Quizlet for a while while learning French. It certainly has come in handy for vocabulary, but as with a lot of sites based around user-generated content it's really hard to find the good content that I want. For example, there are thousands of French flash card sets, but not all of them have English as the first language (and some of them are French and English but English is the second language). I'v…