Excuse me? Excusez-moi? Scusilo? Excuseme?

[Ramo]

I mix up Bengali and French a lot. Occasionally really fundamental words (if you interchange the Bengali words for who and what, you get the French words for what and who, so that confuses my brain sometimes).

Anyways:

English
Passable French
Crappy Bengali
Extremely crappy Spanish

2.5 I guess?

I'm going to research in Germany (Wurzburg) over the Summer, so I'm going to make an attempt (though, probably a half-assed one) at learning German in the next couple monts. I'd like to learn Russian as well, so I could read Doesteovsky, Pushkin, and (all) Nabakov without translations. I'm reading this amazing Nabakov compilation of short stories translated from Russian atm, I can't imagine how good they'd be in native Russian.

Problem is that I'm pretty dumb as far as languages go. I have a really difficult time picking up new languages; hell, I have a hard enough trying to speak English. I'm suspect that I'm dyslexic.

[Pekka]

well damn in this case since we are all braking the rules I handle 6 languages, the ones I mentioned, Estonian and understand some Norwegian and Danish. no wait, that's 7 languages already, damn.. Soon I will add fluent french/spanish/russian/japanese, and I am officially smarter than the rest of you peabrains.

Something mongolingual people will never understand is that when you become fluent in other languages, you are able to think differently. What what what? Yes it is very true. Weird but true. But then again most of you poopiepants are not interested in it.

[Dry]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse


couple things:

"au" is a contraction of "a le". saying "au l'Ouest" is ridiculous

also, you should probably say "pour" Western Canada instead of "a" western canada

finally, the way to say Western Canada is "l'Ouest du Canada"

To be even more frenchy:

To the west of Canada : "A l'ouest du Canada " (notice the lowercase)
The West of Canada : "L'Ouest du Canada" (notice the uppercase)
Western Canada : "Le Canada occidental"

[KrazyHorse]

"le canada occidental" is so horrifically pretentious that I would never say it.

[KrazyHorse]

saying "l'Ouest du Canada" is much more common where I'm from.

[Dry]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
"le canada occidental" is so horrifically pretentious that I would never say it.

Ah bon?
Well, probably one of the small differences between the two sides of the ocean.

[KrazyHorse]

Yeah. I agree that you guys are much more pretentious than we are.

[Last Conformist]

I speak Swedish, English, and German.

I understand Norwegian, written or spoken, quite well, but can hardly speak a word of it. I can read Danish, and understand most of it if spoken slowly and clearly. I can read Dutch well enough to get the gist of a newpaper article, but I won't understand everything. I know bits and pieces of Latin.

People occasionally accuse me of knowing French. This is cruel libel.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

canada occidental is so formal it hurts. but i like it cuz its the correct way of saying it.

[KrazyHorse]

Hey Lawrence: neither of us conjugated devoir correctly when we tried to help LotM

It's subjonctif like I thought (not conditionnel like you put down ) but the proper conjugation is "que je doive"...



had to look it up in my bescherelle...

[Thucydides]

I'm learning Mandarin and that's it. I know a little French but I gave up on it along time ago.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

Hey Lawrence: neither of us conjugated devoir correctly when we tried to help LotM

It's subjonctif like I thought (not conditionnel like you put down ) but the proper conjugation is "que je doive"...



had to look it up in my bescherelle...

man, and the subjonctif is the easiest tense when it comes to when you need to use it well, its been a while since ive been to a french speaking country - hopefully in sept ill be studying abroad in geneva

which bescherlle do you got?mine has more emphasis on regles d'accord, and regles d'emplois, et les tableaux types. its got all the verbes, but very few ones actually done all the way through. you need to look in the back for the verb, and then it refers you to a similar one.

so its more then just conjugaison, but takes a little more intuition to figure out how to conjugate.

[KrazyHorse]

Yeah, that sounds like the type I have.

[Verres]

Sadly I can only speak English.....and even that's not perfect.

Used to be pretty fluent in French but a lack of French people living here makes that hard to maintain. Can get by in Spanish, Italian, and German at a push. Just.

Oh, and I can speak and write Latin and Classical Greek, but I don't think they really count, do they?

So, realistically, I guess Im just another ignorant Brit.

[Odin]

American English, Upper Midwestern "Nordic" dialect.

I know a few words of Norwegian; Ja (yes), Nye (no), Velkomen (welcome), God* Dagh** (good day) God Morgen*** (good morning).

*pronounced "goo"
**pronounced "dah"
***pronounced "moren"