Language proficiency poll

[Richard Hakluyt]

I met a Frenchman in Portugal many years ago, he spoke Portuguese quite well and I asked him how long he had been studying it..............two weeks 

He had a degree in medieval languages, worked in Germany and had this incredible list of languages that he knew, including Latin and Ancient Greek. He said that getting the basics sorted in another Romance language took him very little time, with his knowledge of how languages change he could often guess a word and get it right etc etc

He was showing off of course, but I was duly impressed.

[Liep]

Danish is easy, Tyr.

[Sheilbh]

There are (dumb) people who  genuinely say Scots is another language

I think you could argue Scots is another language. It's also a dead language and what some Scottish people are now pretending is Scots bears no resemblance to the old makars, it's just a dialect.

Probably around 9. 5 for English, 2-2.5 for Spanish (my reading is better), 1.5-2 for French (reading again).

[dps]

There are (dumb) people who  genuinely say Scots is another language

I think you could argue Scots is another language. It's also a dead language and what some Scottish people are now pretending is Scots bears no resemblance to the old makars, it's just a dialect.

Probably around 9. 5 for English, 2-2.5 for Spanish (my reading is better), 1.5-2 for French (reading again).

Actually, there is both Scots, which is an English dialect, and Scots Gaelic which is a separate languish closely related to Irish (and which isn't exactly dead AFAIK, but certainly isn't very widely used0.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah Gaelic isn't dead. Hopefully it's coming back. when I lived in the Highlands my little brother attended a Gaelic medium playschool which my parents were very involved in.

But you're right it's not widely used. The SNP are sort of allowing more Gaelic medium education - which is novel as they used to be fiercely opposed to it - but it's got a long way to go to recover.

I was speaking about this recently with an Irish friend who speaks Irish properly and is connected by family to the sort of Irish language intelligentsia (her aunt and uncle ran an Irish publishing house, grandparents involved in Irish language league etc). It's really interesting that in Ireland Irish is compulsory but rarely used and the Gaeltacht is getting weaker and smaller; in Wales there are still entire communities that speak Welsh as their primary language, I knew someone at uni from west Wales who didn't start learning English until he was eight. That's happened in Wales despite the fact that Welsh was at the turn of the 20th century in a far worse situation than Irish. She was wondering how you get that level of enthusiasm and penetration of a language as she'd like to see it happen in Ireland and I'd love to see Gaelic make a similar revival in Scotland.

I believe that Manx and Cornish have also seen revivals which is really exciting.

[Razgovory]

There are (dumb) people who  genuinely say Scots is another language

I think you could argue Scots is another language. It's also a dead language and what some Scottish people are now pretending is Scots bears no resemblance to the old makars, it's just a dialect.

Probably around 9. 5 for English, 2-2.5 for Spanish (my reading is better), 1.5-2 for French (reading again).

I think Scots is different enough to be it's own language.  As has been said Frisian is suppose to be close.  As someone who doesn't know German, sometimes you can figure out sentences.  I don't think it would be to difficult for for an anglophone to learn.

[Sheilbh]

There are (dumb) people who  genuinely say Scots is another language

I think you could argue Scots is another language. It's also a dead language and what some Scottish people are now pretending is Scots bears no resemblance to the old makars, it's just a dialect.

Probably around 9. 5 for English, 2-2.5 for Spanish (my reading is better), 1.5-2 for French (reading again).

I think Scots is different enough to be it's own language.  As has been said Frisian is suppose to be close.  As someone who doesn't know German, sometimes you can figure out sentences.  I don't think it would be to difficult for for an anglophone to learn.

I agree. But I don't think it's a living language. Have a look at this Scots website:
http://www.gov.scot/Topics/ArtsCultureSport/arts/ScotsLanguage

But, no-one talks like that. It's reconstructed from actual Scots - the language of Burns, Dunbar and the other makars. But it's like the Northern versions of Middle English (the Gawain and the Green Knight etc), it merged and was drowned by English. What remains are dialects of English with greater or lesser shadows of Scots/Middle English in them.

Just started reading Ernesto Sabato in Spanish and it's going very smoothly so far - I demand an extra point

[Valmy]

German, Dutch, the various scandies. Make the effort, it's not as if we learn other romance languages just by blinking.

Sure we share some vocabulary with German, but its grammar is completely bizarre to us. And we actually share more vocabulary with French. I found French pretty easy to learn but Italians went from zero to fluent in a few weeks. I mean that was nuts. No English speaker could do that with any useful language. I mean yeah we have Scots and Frisian but those are not exactly major world languages like Spanish and French.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah, I mean we're a Germanic language but without gender or cases so it's not like we can easily pick up German or even Dutch.

[celedhring]

I have never found English that useful to learn German myself. Helps with the meaning of some words, but the grammar is too different.

I found my long dormant knowledge of Latin much more useful, regarding the use of cases and some of the word positioning. I guess that's the Indo-European remnant.

[The Brain]

German had two chances to be relevant and took neither. I'm happy I took German in school but it's not like I use it a lot.

[garbon]

Yeah, I mean we're a Germanic language but without gender or cases so it's not like we can easily pick up German or even Dutch.

I think cases are more of a stumbling block. Gender is just memorization.

[Valmy]

And that is just the nouns. The verb tenses are hard enough 

[Tonitrus]

German had two chances to be relevant and took neither. I'm happy I took German in school but it's not like I use it a lot.

Cannot blame them when the rest of the world united to stop them. 

[dps]

I have never found English that useful to learn German myself. Helps with the meaning of some words, but the grammar is too different.

I found my long dormant knowledge of Latin much more useful, regarding the use of cases and some of the word positioning. I guess that's the Indo-European remnant.

English has lost most inflections;  it's almost an outlier among Indo-European languages in that regard.  I think that's probably the main stumbling block for native English speakers trying to learn other languages--some of the inflections, such as gender for common nouns we barely even have the concept of anymore.  Native speakers of other languages find that strange, but I think their main problems with learning English are spelling and the huge size of our vocabulary.