Reply to Languages
If you don't have an account, just leave the password field blank.
One of my friends asked me this question a couple of weeks ago. She got it from another forum... somewhere. Anyway, I have a thing for languages, and I'm rather curious as to what you'd choose, especially for what reasons. To get to the point:
If you could instantaneously master any 5 languages of your choice, (in addition to those you already know), which would you choose? Any kind of language is acceptable. Chinese, Latin, American Sign Language (yeah, watch out with sign languages, there's a great many of them), Esperanto, Klingon, C++, you name it.
I suggest you stop reading now if you don't want to be influenced by my own list and reasoning, and think of your list first.
My personal choices, in no particular order, are:
* Spanish
* Russian
* Finnish
* Japanese
* Chinese
The first two are just to cover area. I already speak Dutch and English, and understand enough German, French, and Italian to get around in most of Western Europe, though I wonder if my French is good enough to get by in Africa. Spanish is useful in South America, and Russian will be useful in Russia (duh).
Finnish... I realized that until now, I only had Indo-European languages, and I desperately needed something from the Finno-Ugric language group, so why not Finnish?
Then there's Japanese and Chinese. This was a tough choice to make. I needed at least one of those two in there, but the other considerations were Arabic and Polish. Thinking of it, I may have originally chosen Polish instead of Chinese. Oh, well. I could, of course, throw away Finnish, since the majority there speaks English anyway, but dammit, Finno-Ugric languages >_>.
No artificial languages like Klingon or Sindarin. While they can be fun to use and learn, I think those 5 language-slots are a bit too precious to include these. If I'd had 10, then one of them would probably have made it.
Also no classic languages, like classic Greek, Latin, or any form of Gaelic. I took Greek and Latin in highschool, and I don't feel like getting into them more than that. Gaelic, while interesting, is not really high on my priority list. I'd like to get more familiar with the texts and culture associated with it. Same thing with anything Futhark.
As for programming languages, I tend to learn those anyway. I thought it'd be a better idea to put languages in here that I'd otherwise not get around to, or be troublesome for some reason.
I didn't include any sign language, or specialized alphabets like Braille or Morse, since nearly every language has its own sign language. When it comes to alphabets, they're just that. You can write English in the Latin alphabet (see this post), or you can write English in Braille. It's still English.
If you could instantaneously master any 5 languages of your choice, (in addition to those you already know), which would you choose? Any kind of language is acceptable. Chinese, Latin, American Sign Language (yeah, watch out with sign languages, there's a great many of them), Esperanto, Klingon, C++, you name it.
I suggest you stop reading now if you don't want to be influenced by my own list and reasoning, and think of your list first.
My personal choices, in no particular order, are:
* Spanish
* Russian
* Finnish
* Japanese
* Chinese
The first two are just to cover area. I already speak Dutch and English, and understand enough German, French, and Italian to get around in most of Western Europe, though I wonder if my French is good enough to get by in Africa. Spanish is useful in South America, and Russian will be useful in Russia (duh).
Finnish... I realized that until now, I only had Indo-European languages, and I desperately needed something from the Finno-Ugric language group, so why not Finnish?
Then there's Japanese and Chinese. This was a tough choice to make. I needed at least one of those two in there, but the other considerations were Arabic and Polish. Thinking of it, I may have originally chosen Polish instead of Chinese. Oh, well. I could, of course, throw away Finnish, since the majority there speaks English anyway, but dammit, Finno-Ugric languages >_>.
No artificial languages like Klingon or Sindarin. While they can be fun to use and learn, I think those 5 language-slots are a bit too precious to include these. If I'd had 10, then one of them would probably have made it.
Also no classic languages, like classic Greek, Latin, or any form of Gaelic. I took Greek and Latin in highschool, and I don't feel like getting into them more than that. Gaelic, while interesting, is not really high on my priority list. I'd like to get more familiar with the texts and culture associated with it. Same thing with anything Futhark.
As for programming languages, I tend to learn those anyway. I thought it'd be a better idea to put languages in here that I'd otherwise not get around to, or be troublesome for some reason.
I didn't include any sign language, or specialized alphabets like Braille or Morse, since nearly every language has its own sign language. When it comes to alphabets, they're just that. You can write English in the Latin alphabet (see this post), or you can write English in Braille. It's still English.
