Print Page | Close Window

What Languages do you speak or want to learn?!

Printed From: FSI Language Courses
Category: Learning Languages
Forum Name: General Discussion
Forum Discription: Discussion about studying languages using the FSI courses. If you would like to see a specific language forum not listed below, just let us know.
URL: http://fsi-language-courses.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=268
Printed Date: 16 January 2009 at 3:16am


Topic: What Languages do you speak or want to learn?!
Posted By: lemony_steve
Subject: What Languages do you speak or want to learn?!
Date Posted: 09 January 2007 at 11:17pm
Tell us which languages you speak, are learning, or want to learn!



Replies:
Posted By: andrew
Date Posted: 10 January 2007 at 12:29am
Hi,
 
I speak English as my native language and Spanish as my second language. I finished the FSI spanish basic course (I bought all 4 levels from multilingual books a few years ago). I live in Spain and so pratice quite a lot ;). The difference in the accents here (im in the south of spain) are very different from those on the course. However, I couldnt recommend the FSI spanish basic (sorry I dont have any experience with the programatic) enough! Providing you improve your vocab etc (easy after finishing the course just by listening and speaking, no vocab lists) you can become fully integrated! I still listen to level 4 from time to time to keep my past subjuntive etc sharp!
 
After "finishing" studying spanish (when I can read cervantes quite well) I would like to move on to Russian, Latin and Greek. For Latin I would use the assimil course. I have the "Spoken Russian" from spoken language services and Modern Rusian from Georgetown university press. Both use an FSI approach and so they should serve quite well to get well beyond the basics.
 
For the greek course I wouldnt really use anything else except pimsluer for the basics and then move on to the FSI course. I find that doing things this way you dont need to look at the FSI text so much and you can get more out of it if you drive etc or are on the bus and dont have time to study at home reading the texts.
 
Regards,
Andrew


Posted By: zwazo319
Date Posted: 13 February 2007 at 9:40pm
I am very surprised that this site does not have the Italian language.  I stongly recommend adding it if possible.


Posted By: onebir
Date Posted: 14 February 2007 at 12:46pm
Have a look at the status page:
http://fsi-language-courses.com/status.aspx

The Italian programmatic course seems to be on the way.  Unfortunately, the Italian basic course isn't supposed to be very good, so it might be some time before that gets added.


Posted By: Sir Nigel
Date Posted: 22 February 2007 at 11:59pm
I'd say my ambitions are too high! Firstly, I want to learn Spanish, Russian, French, German and Dutch. Other language I have an interest in are Portuguese, Swedish and well, many others.

Oh, I speak English naively as well.


-------------
Insurance Excuse:
The accident was due to the road bending.


Posted By: smoen
Date Posted: 23 February 2007 at 8:13am
[Oh, I speak English naively as well.]

Naively or natively?  Sorry, couldn't pass that one up. LOLLOL

smoen


Posted By: nieuk
Date Posted: 24 February 2007 at 7:34am
You have to love those Freudian slips LOL


Posted By: Sir Nigel
Date Posted: 25 February 2007 at 9:01pm
Yeah, it was supposed to be natively. I blame the spell-checker I used!


-------------
Insurance Excuse:
The accident was due to the road bending.


Posted By: flashback_0245
Date Posted: 01 March 2007 at 10:32am
Hello,
My native language is Russian, I speak more or less fluently Polish, French and Lithuanian (the latter I'm progressively forgetting due to lack of practise), now trying to learn Hungarian and Hebrew (depending on my mood:) and would like to learn Czech a lot, so I would be very thankful if you add here FSI Czech if possible.


Posted By: Linas
Date Posted: 08 March 2007 at 2:22am
My languages
 
 
Speaking well - Lithuanian(native), English, Russian
 
Speaking to some degree - French, German, Polish, Latvian. I could speak them, but I need some immersion, for example to read something in those languages or to listen for a while in order to get ready to speak
 
Speaking a little bit - Spanish, Portuguese, Italian. I also need immersion to be ready for these languages and my proficiency is lower.
 
Do not speak, but have more or less solid reading knowledge - Dutch, Scandinavian languages, Rumanian, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Bulgarian, Turkish, Arabic, Persian
 
Can read some texts, but have to use dictionary a lot - Estonian, Hungarian, Hindi
 
Have some rudiments, but cannot say that know - Irish, Finnish, Greek
 
Languages that I do not know nothing at all(or tried but have learned nothing), but maybe will try to learn one day, at least acquire reading knowledge(unfortunately probably not all of themCry)
 
Europe: Welsh, Basque, Albanian, Icelandic
Middle East: Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian
South Asia: Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Tibetan
South-East Asia: Indonesian, Pilipino, Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian
East Asia: Japanese, Chinese, Korean
Africa: Swahili, Lingala, Yoruba, Hausa
Americas:Guarani
 
Languages in bold have higher priority.
 
The most important questions for me are:
 
-how to activize language you have a substantial passive knowledge already(if you know only to read, how to learn to speak?)
 
-how efficiently acquire vocabulary of a new language
 
Now I am experimening with the following method( hope it will work for both purposes) - you take a phrase from the text of the language you are learning, let it be "yesterday the little child was very afraid of going to school" and start repeating the first word at first:
 
yesterday... yesterday...yesterday(10 times or maybe more or less, as necessary). When you are confortable with the first word, you add another one:
 
yesterday the little... yesterday the little...( 10 times again) 
 
yesterday the little child...yesterday the little child...(10 times again) and so on until you can produce the phrase without too much difficulty.
 
If you are completely unfamiliar with the language it is better to write a word-for-word translation of the phrase and have before the eyes while you repeat, if you understand the phrase already but cannot yet produce perhaps this would not be necessary. 
 
Finally I would like to add some links for alternative material of the languages of which there are FSI courses:
 
Thai
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Thai/maanii/menu/default.htm - http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Thai/maanii/menu/default.htm
A textbook based on a childish story, but a serious learning tool. The 2/3 of the first part is rather training for sounds and tones although made from meaningful phrases, the rest are coherent simple stories for reading and listening.
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Thai/home_page/dictionaries.htm - http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Thai/home_page/dictionaries.htm
Online Thai dictionary which list model sentences for the most of entries
http://www.thai-language.com - http://www.thai-language.com
Another, larger on-line Thai-English dictionary
 
Some material for conversational Thai
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Thai/language/conversation.htm - http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Thai/language/conversation.htm
especially this one:
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Thai/spokenthai/Default.htm - http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Thai/spokenthai/Default.htm
 
reading materials for thai:
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Thai/language/reading.htm - http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Thai/language/reading.htm
 
 
Vietnamese
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/vietnamese/vnlanguage/supportns/tableofcontent.htm - http://www.seasite.niu.edu/vietnamese/vnlanguage/supportns/tableofcontent.htm
 
Khmer
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/khmer/writingsystem/writingsyst_set.htm - http://www.seasite.niu.edu/khmer/writingsystem/writingsyst_set.htm
 
The same site http://www.seasite.niu.edu/ - http://www.seasite.niu.edu  also has materials for Burmese, Lao, Indonesian and Pilipino
Many of these pages need to have font installed:
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/seasite.htm - http://www.seasite.niu.edu/seasite.htm  
 
Korean
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/asian/korean/intermediate/index.htm - http://www.lsa.umich.edu/asian/korean/intermediate/index.htm
Although they say that the course is intermediate I had not too much difficulty to follow the first lesson. Maybe later it gets harder 
 
Swahili
http://mwanasimba.online.fr/index.html - http://mwanasimba.online.fr/index.html
http://mwanasimba.online.fr/E_index.html - http://mwanasimba.online.fr/E_index.html
 


Posted By: nieuk
Date Posted: 10 March 2007 at 7:32am

Welcome back Linas... I'm sure I'm not the only one that has missed your input on here and the How-To-Learn~ forum :)

Incidentally, I may as well answer the question for myself...

Currently study (highest to lowest): English, Korean, Tok Pisin, French, Indonesian, Malay, Polish, Arabic.

Future plans: Russian, German, Spanish, Turkish, Japanese, Hungarian, Farsi, Greek, Catalan.... maybe my interests will change though.


Posted By: raincrowlee
Date Posted: 10 March 2007 at 10:25am
Might as well.

Languages I can currently speak comfortably: English, Mandarin Chinese

I can read comfortably: French

Have good knowledge of basics, but not comfortable speaking or reading: Spanish, German, Russian, Indonesian, Latin

Have studied, but still missing essentials: Japanese, Swahili, Taiwanese

Have studied, but not have almost no grasp of: Irish, Turkish, Greek, Persian

Future plans: I would like to learn at least one language from each of the Indo-European language families. I also want to continue studying Mandarin, and get a good grasp of Japanese. I'd also like to study Arabic, but I'm not sure there's enough time in this lifetime. :) Oh, and Indonesian, because that's what my girlfriend speaks.


Posted By: zolmi
Date Posted: 17 March 2007 at 5:01am
my native language is persian.
i can speak english ,hindi and swedish and im studing german
in the future i would like to learn spanish ,


Posted By: nzyyang
Date Posted: 24 March 2007 at 4:57pm
i want to learn hungarian... becoz its exotic!


Posted By: Umbria
Date Posted: 07 April 2007 at 11:16pm
Hi,
 
My native language is Turkish. I can English and German.
 
Best Regards,
 
 Umbria


Posted By: Exocrist
Date Posted: 09 April 2007 at 11:04am
I speak English and German, and am slowly learning Spanish from FSI Programmatic and Basic on my bike rides to school.  For some reason, I want to  learn Scandinavian (Danish + Norwegian + Swedish).  I also want to learn Korean and Chinese.   Those are the "big ones" on my list.


Posted By: fbsmith3
Date Posted: 11 April 2007 at 6:59am
I speak English.   I can read and write basic French and know some Quebecoise French.  I love Quebec City.

 

I desperately want to learn Thai.  I have been trying for 3 years now.

 

I have a Thai wife and I am trying very hard to learn Thai.  My wife tried to teach me Thai.  Unfortunately my way of learning and her way of teaching do not match.  I am using Pimsluer right now, but without a transcript it is hard for my wife to help. 

 

I am so happy to find this FSI web-site  I have downloaded the student text and a few lessons.  Hopefully I will learn passable Thai to impress her family and friends. 

 

I also have a toddler son who my wife is teaching Thai.  I want to make sure I can at least keep up to him. 



Posted By: sakhmet
Date Posted: 02 May 2007 at 3:56am
I speak English fluently. I understand Hindi very well, but can't speak the language (very frustrating, my parents spoke to me in Hindi as a child but I never started speaking it myself!). I study French at uni and hope to work on my Arabic - a language that I was schooled in for many, many years, but the great rift between classical/MSA/spoken Arabic I think prevents me from communicating properly in it. I'm finding the FSI Arabic course book excellent. :)


Posted By: dalaohu
Date Posted: 02 May 2007 at 9:32am

Hi,

My native language is Russian and I can speak and understand some other Slavic languages, viz Polish, Czech.

My second languages are English and Deutsch, these two languages let me understand written texts e.g. in Swedish etc.
I have master degree in Tibetology and Sinology, but I don't think that a possibility to master these "exotic" tongues can be achieved with the same easiness as European.
I would like to speak Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Mongolian and Vietnamese. To tell the truth I would like to be able to speak a language from every language family and group. I'm not quite sure that human life is long enough for such an object.


Posted By: irish
Date Posted: 02 May 2007 at 9:37am
I am a native speaker of English.  I am at a conversational level in Mandarin.  I live and work in China.  I have studied Spanish for many years but do not get many chances to use it now.  I now find it easy to understand and read but difficult to speak.  I am planning on brushing up my Spanish in the near future.  I just started the FSI Thai I program and love it.  I get to travel to Thailand annually for work so Thai is something that I've become interested in.  The languages I'd like to learn in the future are: Thai, Indonesian, Hakanese, Greek, and Hindi.


Posted By: Lamp
Date Posted: 03 May 2007 at 9:01am
Native: portuguese
Secondary (with reasonable fluency): English, latin
Languages to study: French, Spanish, Italian, German, Classical Greek, Classical hebrew, Classical Arabic and Sanscrit


Posted By: jplaine
Date Posted: 11 May 2007 at 4:02pm
Iam married to a Finn and struggling with Finnish I would love the text books for the FSI language courses in Finish.
Main Stack   PH135.R981 1987
and
Finnish: graded reader Main Stack   PH137.U6


-------------
Junie


Posted By: CornFlower
Date Posted: 12 May 2007 at 7:49am
Hi I'm Polish. I can speak English, a little Spanish, Russian and Turkish. I hope to get higher level from these languages.

Good luck for everyone!


Posted By: Anatoli
Date Posted: 15 May 2007 at 2:02am
Let me introduce myself.

I speak Russian and English, used to be fluent in German.

My strong long-term interests are Japanese and Chinese. I added Arabic to my hobbies a year ago but I am not winning as I never had a teacher and I find it difficult to use any of textbooks, although I covered first large chunks of:

Mastering Arabic
Teach Yourself Arabic
Ultimate Arabic
Introduction to Koranic and Classical Arabic (dry but probably the best in consistency and makes it possible to learn on your own).

Can help someone with Russian.

I am not fluent in Chinese or Japanese but I have no problem continuing to learn, have enough resources, just need more time.



-------------
Анатолий - أناتولي - 阿纳托利 - アナトーリー


Posted By: helene23186
Date Posted: 16 May 2007 at 12:29pm
Hi - I just recently found your website.  Thanks so much for doing all this!  At this point, I only speak English (pathetic isn't it?).  All the classes I took in school were for dead languages. Dead
 
I can read Latin fairly well, and have had some training in Ancient Greek and Old English.  I also taught myself to read German for grad school.
 
I finally decided that I should learn to speak languages as well as read them, so I'm starting with German, figuring I have a head start.  Eventually, I'd also like to learn to speak Thai, Spanish, and Italian. 
 
My list of languages I want to be able to read is *way* too long to ever complete, and contains mostly either dead or old/classical forms. 
 
Again, thanks for providing this great resource!


Posted By: jalabi99
Date Posted: 21 May 2007 at 3:33pm
Wow Linas I get tired just reading that impressive list of languages that you know or want to learn! You make me look like a slacker! Smile


Posted By: rmikura
Date Posted: 21 May 2007 at 4:51pm
English - native
Chinese (Mandarin, w/ Taiwanese accent) - conversational (used to be fluent two years ago...), no reading (can only read about a fifth or sixth of most things)
Japanese - conversational (used to be fluent), with reading ability for most things
 
There are too many languages I'd like to learn to list, and not enough time to learn them...


Posted By: EddieN120
Date Posted: 21 May 2007 at 5:07pm

The only language that I speak, write, read and understand fluently is English. I learned French in high school and so can still read it pretty well, and can speak it a bit (lack of practice); my Spanish is also pretty weak now too.

I want to learn Hindi -- I have many Indian friends, and love the people and the culture -- and become fluent in it as well as Spanish and French. If I can read, write, speak and understand all three of these languages in the next few months, I will be quite happy (it should not take me much to get my French back to its formerly very high level).


Posted By: leon
Date Posted: 23 May 2007 at 11:40pm

I am  Chinese .chinese -native ,I want to learn hungarian because of work.I  am glad to communicate with you !!Embarrassed



Posted By: gentlemanjack
Date Posted: 25 May 2007 at 2:19am
I am currently studying Norwegian. Could you post the Norwegian FSI courses? Thanks


Posted By: Kveldulv
Date Posted: 25 May 2007 at 10:27am
Originally posted by gentlemanjack

I am currently studying Norwegian. Could you post the Norwegian FSI courses? Thanks


There isn't one.


Posted By: Darechka
Date Posted: 10 September 2007 at 10:56pm
Russian - native.
English - fluent.
German - used to be almost fluent but it`s pretty rusty now after several years of inactivity, trying to refresh it.
Italian - passive knowledge: can fairly comfortably read and understand spoken Italian but have difficulty speaking it, need more active practice.
Spanish - strated studying not that long ago, it`s going pretty well: I can read and understand spoken Spanish almost as well as Italian (probably because of similarities with Italian), can have a basic conversation in Spanish.
French - just started, still struggling with pronounciation (I believe that one should try to pronounce as correctly as it takes from the beginning rather than trying to "relearn" pronounciation later).
Hebrew - make attempts to study it every once in a while.
Languages I want to add eventually (once I`m comfortable with the ones I`m studying now): Portugese and Arabic.


Posted By: johnfinch
Date Posted: 04 October 2007 at 7:24am
English (native), French (fluent, but starting to get a bit rusty. Need to go there on holiday). Also speak a bit of Italian.
 
I'm going to use FSI and Assimil to study Hungarian, as I lived there from Sept 2006-Jan 07, and I want to live there again.
 
I also want to pick up a Slavic language - Czech, Polish or Slovene, but that's going to have to wait.


Posted By: mouse
Date Posted: 05 October 2007 at 1:37pm
I speak English (native), Mandarin (fluent, my parents' native language), and am studying Spanish (which I also take in school) and French.
 
I would like to learn a language that doesn't use the roman alphabet. Specifically, Korean or Russian look pleasing to me.


Posted By: mspxlation
Date Posted: 02 December 2007 at 11:25pm
I am a native speaker of American English who works as a Japanese-English translator.

As an undergraduate, I majored in German and minored in French, but in the intervening decades, I've lost my active knowledge of these languages, although I can still read them easily.

I know enough Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Norwegian, and Russian to be a tourist.

I'd like to improve my Chinese and start Korean.


Posted By: nyperi13
Date Posted: 06 December 2007 at 9:07pm
Originally posted by zwazo319

I am very surprised that this site does not have the Italian language.  I stongly recommend adding it if possible.
 
I agree!  I'd really appreciate Italian being added to this wonderful, ever-growing storehouse of languages Thumbs%20Up


Posted By: cvicvi
Date Posted: 13 December 2007 at 12:42am
native: polish
understand ;) : english, russian, german

want to learn:
1. hindi
2. quechua
3. bahasa indonesia
4. hawaii




Print Page | Close Window