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What languages do you want to learn?

Warden
Slann

Warden

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Question for the group, what languages are you fluent in? And what do you want to learn?



This post was inspired by @Aginor 's post on my paint log, and a conversation I was having with my wife.

I am from the USA, and am only fluent in English. I have taken classes in Spanish (grade/high school) and German (college), but am not fluent in either. I would love to learn these and a few other languages.

My Top 6:

  • Ch'olti' Mayan- I am a big fan of Mayan history. This language is the classic Mayan language, and is what most ancient Mayan glyph texts are written in
  • Yucatec Mayan- one of the current Mayan language spoken, also some glyphs texts in northern Yucatan
  • Spanish- super useful language in my part of the world, and the second most spoken world language. Would help to know it if I ever get a chance to study in Mexico/Central America
  • German- I am mostly German by heritage, to include my grandma, so I really would love to learn it
  • Japanese- I also really like Japanese history (hence the army project), I would love to learn more about the Sengoku period in the original language. Plus it would make watching anime in the original language that much easier!
  • Mandarin Chinese- most spoken language in the world, also Chinese history is also fascinating! Would love to see the Bejing and Shanghai museums someday

My wife was interested in most of these languages as well, but she swapped the Mayan languages for Russian.
 
I learned English and Spanish in school, and went to a course in Norwegian for a year for so during the early 2000s.
Learning Japanese was a fun side project of mine (also 20 years ago), but I failed. I tried to learn from books, but without a teacher or someone to train with I went nowhere.

The only foreign language I can speak and write decently right now is English unfortunately.
I can read and understand Spanish and Norwegian and understand most (in Spanish) or parts (in Norwegian) of what is written, but not nearly as well as I would like to. Japanese is basically a few sentences, introducing myself and so on, and that's it.

So what I would like to is learn all the ones I once started to a decent level, so I can actually communicate in those languages.

After that I think I'd like to learn Russian (opens up all the slavic languages, and I'd like to read Russian news to understand their world view without having to rely on our media), Mandarin (just because many people speak it) and Latin (for old texts).
 
LizardWizard said:
My degree is in Semitic Languages. So most of the languages I know are dead. I am passable in Japanese. Which is to say I can communicate the basics such as directions and minimal questions.
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Aren't semitic languages also Hebrew (bible and modern) and Arabic?

I love how their written texts look, a thing of beauty.
Arabic would also be interesting for me to learn.
 
Aginor said:
Aren't semitic languages also Hebrew (bible and modern) and Arabic?

I love how their written texts look, a thing of beauty.
Arabic would also be interesting for me to learn.
Click to expand...

Correct. Hebrew, Aramaic, Akkadian, and Syriac are the ones I can read the best. And frankly, Akkadian cuneiform is always a guessing game. Syriac is really just a dialect of Aramaic. It has a more attractive aleph bet though.
 
Not that I have actively pursued these but I would like to learn german, elvish, and Scandinavian for fun (because who else can speak Scandinavian lol). Also I have been learning latin for the past couple of years. And I would like to learn as much of the lizardmen language a I can despite it not being a full language.
 
Ad uno disce omiuns. (I think I used the proper declination?)

I only took two quarters worth of Latin.
 
LizardWizard said:
Ad uno disce omiuns. (I think I used the proper declination?)

I only took two quarters worth of Latin.
Click to expand...
I know that says “to one” and idk what disce means and did you mean omnius?
Edit: does disce mean to learn?
 
yep. omnius. lol
It is from Virgil. "From one know/learn all". My Latin instructor use to say it all the time.
 
Lol I’m actually doing my latin homework right now so I had easy access to look up what disce might mean lol.
 
Studied: English (mother tongue), Indonesian, Spanish (a couple semesters in HS), Mandarin Chinese (not quite one semester for the Army), Greek, Hebrew, and Latin.

Want to learn: Anglo-Saxon, German, more Spanish, Irish, Welsh, Aramaic, and several other Ancient Near Eastern languages.

Comes from being a (semi) professional linguist and the son of a professional linguist.
 
Honestly the one language I would really like to learn the most is Brythonic (also known as Brittonic and Old British), the language of the Ancient Britons. Unfortunately because the Celts predominantly preferred an oral culture to a written culture (and the vast majority of any written artefacts they made must have been destroyed by the Romans), Brythonic as it was spoken by the Ancient Britons is virtually impossible to recover as a language. Welsh, Cornish and Breton are the 3 main languages that descend from Brythonic, but they are quite different from each other, meaning they must have all heavily evolved in their own separate ways, while Manx and Gaelic descend from the language of the Goidelic Celts who were a different breed to the Ancient Britons and only inhabited Ireland and the Isle of Man until the Romans abandoned Britain, and even then they mostly raided and only settled in western Scotland. However, the clever folk at the University of Wales have been attempting to reconstruct a vocabulary for Proto-Celtic, which is believed to be the ancestor of all the Celtic Languages including Brythonic.

Close seconds would be Old English and Norwegian due to their ties with the Saxons and Vikings respectively.
 
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