What language is your mother tongue and what others do you speak?

[johnpera]

Native tongue: English

Second language: Spanish

My native state in America is 50% Hispanic and Spanish and English are both official languages there. The place I live in now is over 30% Spanish speaking.

[Alexia_Ashford]

My first language is English, being from England. I speak a little French, though I'm not fluent in it. I can still understand a lot of it though.

[thesilentheart]

English is my first language to learn, speak and write. But technically, my mother tongue was suppose to be Tagalog, the local and official language of the Philippines
(second to English). But yeah, I was also suppose to speak French first.

[Northman]

By the way, how do you find concepts like genders in English? (or especially Swedish, assuming you know any at all). Were they easy to adapt to? A lot of my former colleages from Finland seriously couldn't avoid either only saying "he" or "she", regardless of which gender the person they were talking about actually had -- creating quite a lot of confusion for the rest of the team at times

Oh yes, the good ol' he/she, and han/hon-issue. Well, I can only speak for myself, but personally I've never had any problems adapting to using gender specific pronouns, as funny as the need for them seems to me. From the past 20 years I can only remember maybe 3 or so occasions when I accidentally used "he" in place of "she". Mind you, these were early in my career of learning English. The he/she-split sometimes does introduce minor inconvenience when translating to Finnish from English, because the Finnish "hän" pronoun does swing both ways, making it challenging to indicate the person you're referring to. :p An example, the word "she-devil". In Finland, you would say "naispaholainen", which translated back to English would be "woman devil".

It is understandable that the gender divide might prove a source of suffering to some. It is a pretty easy trap to walk into for those coming from a background of not needing it. But I personally struggled more with the proper use of the definite article "the". For some reason it took me all the way to 1996 to learn to use it properly. Could be because there's no equivalent for it in the Finnish language.

[Carnivol]

Correction: English already HAS replaced Swedish as our middle-ground language, simply because English is so much more useful in the world arena. Don't try to speak Swedish in Finland if you're anywhere outside Åland, or the western coastal regions, because you'd be hard pressed to find someone who actually understands you. But try English and you're likely to have success. Swedish is taught in Finnish schools, yes. But many Finns deliberately don't bother to learn, because it's seen as an annoying, expensive and useless left-over from the days gone by when Finland still was a Swedish vassal state.

Also: Primary Finnish, secondary English.

By the way, how do you find concepts like genders in English? (or especially Swedish, assuming you know any at all). Were they easy to adapt to? A lot of my former colleages from Finland seriously couldn't avoid either only saying "he" or "she", regardless of which gender the person they were talking about actually had -- creating quite a lot of confusion for the rest of the team at times

[Enigmatism415]

I imagine Korean uses a lot more Hanzi

Since the founding of the ROK (South Korea), only 1,800 characters have been required for basic literacy (900 in primary school and another 900 in secondary school). You can certainly use characters outside of this educational list, but you'd have to annotate them with 한글 to indicate their pronunciations.

[AnzuAme]

My native language is Japanese. Secondary language is English.
I study English very hard!

[Scream]

Although quite unorthodox, I studied all of the 漢字(한자) officially taught in Korea prior to learning their 한글 forms. The more characters you learn, the easier it is to learn their Sino-xenic pronunciations (e.g. Sino-Japanese and Sino-Korean), so the 한글 readings came naturally.

Yeah, I had heard that studying Korean through Hanja helps a great deal in memorizing words which was why I asked... I already know the most useful Japanese Kanji (around 2400 or so right now), do those make up the majority of Hanja in usage or not even close? I haven't really checked into it, but I imagine Korean uses a lot more Hanzi (I still have a book on that somewhere "remembering the hanzi", not sure its worth doing if I already know Kanji though).

[Enigmatism415]

not sure what you mean by added but I assume some degree of fluency

Hah... yeah, no, I wish. I meant that I added them to the stock of languages that I'm studying. I can read standard Chinese (with traditional characters) fairly proficiently, though.

So how do you find spelling in Hangul? Easy as hell to read but spelling eh..

It's easy enough to learn the handful of letters (字母 pron. '자모') that constitute a 한글 syllable-block, but as you imply, the orthography itself is quite complicated. 한글 is not typically used to accurately transcribe Korean words phoneme-for-phoneme (in this way it's more similar to English than Spanish spelling, for instance). Instead, its phonetically divergent spelling convention preserves the consistency of morphemes (e.g. 'chicken' is always written as 닭, but the sound changes according to its neighboring syllables).

I started audio transcription (clearly spoken sentences) last month, it's one of the exercises that improved my Japanese the most, but I find it much more difficult in Korean even for simple stuff, perhaps need more time for it to soak in..

It's probably because the Korean language has a richer (and thus more difficult) phonology than does Japanese: more vowels, more consonants, and more phoneme clusters within each syllable.

Did you learn the Hanja at the same time you learnt the words in Hangul?

Although quite unorthodox, I studied all of the 漢字(한자) officially taught in Korea prior to learning their 한글 forms. The more characters you learn, the easier it is to learn their Sino-xenic pronunciations (e.g. Sino-Japanese and Sino-Korean), so the 한글 readings came naturally.

[khasho]

Native: Balochi

Secondary: English, Urdu and Sindhi

[Northman]

Now ... Finland's the Nordic oddball (but I love their language and pronunciations), since Finnish is a completely different beast all together from the rest of the Nordic languages, same goes for the Sami languages and their many dialects, but at least Finnish people tend to know some basic Swedish (taught in schools -- and again; Finnish Swedish > Regular Swedish pronunciation ;D) -- of course, I guess English might be replacing Swedish as their middle-ground language now, since it's slightly more global in our modern age.

Correction: English already HAS replaced Swedish as our middle-ground language, simply because English is so much more useful in the world arena. Don't try to speak Swedish in Finland if you're anywhere outside Åland, or the western coastal regions, because you'd be hard pressed to find someone who actually understands you. But try English and you're likely to have success. Swedish is taught in Finnish schools, yes. But many Finns deliberately don't bother to learn, because it's seen as an annoying, expensive and useless left-over from the days gone by when Finland still was a Swedish vassal state.

Also: Primary Finnish, secondary English.

[Scream]

I suppose if it was flipped and video games were all in Norwegian, I would of probably learnt to at least understand it by now. I didn't encounter any foreign language games until Rival Schools on PS1... Code Veronica was the first game to make me get out a Japanese dictionary and try to do something (haha, I remember trying to find Kanji just flipping through pages, that sucked big time).

My second language is Japanese. I've been studying this language since the turn of the millennium, and have in recent years added Korean and Mandarin Chinese to my repertoire. Just for fun, I've been learning Classical Chinese and additional modern varieties (like Cantonese) as well. As one might infer from my list, I feel naturally drawn to languages that employ Chinese characters, as I am more morphemically rather than phonetically inclined.

Impressive - the full set, not sure what you mean by added but I assume some degree of fluency So how do you find spelling in Hangul? Easy as hell to read but spelling eh.. I started audio transcription (clearly spoken sentences) last month, it's one of the exercises that improved my Japanese the most, but I find it much more difficult in Korean even for simple stuff, perhaps need more time for it to soak in.. Did you learn the Hanja at the same time you learnt the words in Hangul?

[Carnivol]

I would argue that you non-native speakers sometimes have far better English than the native guys on here. Carnivol sometimes makes some simple spelling/typing mistakes (I can see one now) but I thought he was always on track with the thinking of his posts (which is most important). I think it's because of the exposure you guys had to English when you were young and also perhaps a decent environment/education system more equipped for bilingualism? I always try to recommend learning another language to people around me as its quite easy, and as someone once said "Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own".

Ahah. Always manage to sneak in a few typos (slight sync issue between left and right hand whist typing, maybe?)
I guess the biggest and most important factor as far as the Nordic territory and English goes is our general exposure to English. For anything but entertainment for kids, we prefer subtitles to dubbing and such, and video games in Norwegian used to be a rarity up until recently too.

Something I'm seeing quite often these days that makes me a bit sad is parents who basically "protect" their children from exposure to foreign languages. Nothing's a better learning tool for languages than going through some sort of intermediate medium the person is interested in.

Carnivol, being half Norwegian myself, I've visited relatives there before and noticed that most educated Norwegians have little trouble, if any at all, understanding Danish and Swedish. Is this situation the norm up there? I'm assuming that you, with your love of language, can understand other Scandinavian/Nordic languages as well.

The Nordic languages are all pretty close to one another, and in most cases it's not hard to make oneself fully understood with your own language in one of the neighboring countries. The most challenging to deal with for most people would probably be Icelandic and the Faroe language, since they're both sort of archaic in certain ways (but with a bit of context and in written form; it's usually fairly easy to get the grasp of the overall message being communicated, just not all the nuances). I read some article with a few poems and written texts on Wikipedia or something some time ago, with pretty nice comparisons between Icelandic/Old Norse/Norwegian/English, and it's really fascinating to see how incomprehensible some of it is when you have no reference for it, but the moment you grasp the concepts or see the similarities ... everything just falls into place.

Now ... Finland's the Nordic oddball (but I love their language and pronunciations), since Finnish is a completely different beast all together from the rest of the Nordic languages, same goes for the Sami languages and their many dialects, but at least Finnish people tend to know some basic Swedish (taught in schools -- and again; Finnish Swedish > Regular Swedish pronunciation ;D) -- of course, I guess English might be replacing Swedish as their middle-ground language now, since it's slightly more global in our modern age.

But as far as Norwegians and general understanding of our neighboring countries' languages goes, I'd say the many dialects of Norwegian, easy access to Swedish/Danish TV broadcasts, and the teaching of the oddball variant of Norwegian known as "Nynorsk" greatly helps in terms of getting exposed to languages that are similar to your own, but not quite the same.

[Enigmatism415]

My native language is English. Having grown up with a variety of international media and influences, all North American, British, and other commonwealth dialects are perfectly intelligible to me, and have allowed me to build a multi-regional lexicon.

My second language is Japanese. I've been studying this language since the turn of the millennium, and have in recent years added Korean and Mandarin Chinese to my repertoire. Just for fun, I've been learning Classical Chinese and additional modern varieties (like Cantonese) as well. As one might infer from my list, I feel naturally drawn to languages that employ Chinese characters, as I am more morphemically rather than phonetically inclined.

Carnivol, being half Norwegian myself, I've visited relatives there before and noticed that most educated Norwegians have little trouble, if any at all, understanding Danish and Swedish. Is this situation the norm up there? I'm assuming that you, with your love of language, can understand other Scandinavian/Nordic languages as well.

[yurieu]

I speeck portugueez, Engrish, and of course I are fluent in cat.