Accepted a job offer

[rah]

Somehow I'd bet that their English is better than your Japanese. (or any second language you may have studied)

I studied Spanish in HS for a few years, and at best I know a few phrases.

And where is the library isn't very useful.

[Hauldren Collider]

Rah, by contrast, we had other groups of exchange students from several other places and their english was generally excellent. It was only the Japanese that couldn't speak it well. And they generally did not speak English as well as the Japanese language students spoke Japanese.

[Lorizael]

Maybe we should nuke 'em again?

[Hauldren Collider]

Nah, they were cool people, even if they sucked at english

[N35t0r]

The french have funny english. They can't seem to get around non-silent H.

[C0ckney]

And on the flip side, I've always been amazed at how poor Japanese English is, despite it being a required topic for them in school. Every year at my high school we'd have about 100 students from some elite Japanese high school come over and attend our classes for a full month. Their English was universally terrible, despite the fact that they supposedly had to demonstrate proficiency to get into the program, in addition to having a high GPA and so forth. We're talking like, "Hi, how are you?" elicits a furious search through one of those electronic phrasebooks that they all carried around everywhere.

in a similar vein, i lived with a chinese student for a year. he was a nice enough guy, not too bright, and would sometimes go out and come back extremely drunk after having had one beer. i couldn't really tell you anything more about him, because he could barely speak a word of english. he managed to learn enough by the end of year to reply "very bad" on the third attempt when i asked him how his exams had gone.

[C0ckney]

I studied Spanish in HS for a few years, and at best I know a few phrases.

yeah if you don't use it, you forget it.

also it's much easier to learn a foreign language if you already speak more than one already. for me learning portuguese was quite hard, in terms of effort, even though i was surrounded by it. however when i came to learn french it was so much easier (i think) because my brain was used to having more than one way to express an idea. i think now if i stayed in a spanish speaking country i would become fluent within a few months; in italy maybe a little longer, but not that long.

having said all that, when i go to argentina i'm just planning to speak portuguese slowly until they understand. i can understand spoken spanish, so it should be fine.

[N35t0r]

Yeah, as long as they don't speak very fast, understanding portugese isn't very hard. Italians either.

[C0ckney]

that's been my experience too, as long as everyone speaks slowly and doesn't try to over-elaborate, people can understand each other.

i find a lot of brazilians have a bit of a block when it comes to spanish; it's probably something to do with national pride. i remember a couple of years ago was working in a school and two argentinian girls came in to ask for directions. the receptionists couldn't understand them, asked the girls if they spoke english, and then called me over when they replied that they did. i spoke to them in english and it soon became clear that they didn't speak it, so i spoke to them in portuguese, they replied in spanish and we understood each other. i was going to the same place as them to catch a bus and we ended up having a nice chat.

[regexcellent]

It helps that most Romance languages share a huge amount of vocabulary and grammar. English doesn't share all that much of either with any language except Scots.

[Dauphin]

Eh? English vocabulary is very much like French.

I'm also amazed at how much like English the Northern Dutch and Glaswegian language sounds. It's like they are speaking English with a very thick accent.

[Hauldren Collider]

Parts of english vocabulary are very much like French. Most germanic-derived English words have a french-derived synonym and vice versa.

Edit: In the case of Glaswegian, which Wiki tells me is Glasgow Scots, couldn't it be argued that it is English with a very thick accent?

[N35t0r]

Yeah, that definitely helps. I had a much harder time in Prague than in any of the Italian cities i've been in.

Cockney, I think it's more that people don't think of speaing slowly and not use complicated grammatical structures, they just speak like normal.

[C0ckney]

you'd be surprised; english and french share a huge amount of vocabulary, almost two thirds (about 30% from french directly and almost 30% from latin and 5% from greek - the words being the same or very similar in both languages). words that come from latin and greek are usually very similar in all romance languages and english. the structures are quite different though.

[Dauphin]

Parts of english vocabulary are very much like French. Most germanic-derived English words have a french-derived synonym and vice versa.

Edit: In the case of Glaswegian, which Wiki tells me is Glasgow Scots, couldn't it be argued that it is English with a very thick accent?

The Glaswegian bit was a joke, in that no-one can understand them, even when speaking English.