My thoughts on learning languages

In this, my second post on this blog, I thought I would write some of my thoughts about one of my favourite pastimes; learning languages.

My experience of languages so far

Well, I live in England so it's no real surprise that I, like most English kids, didn't start learning a foreign language until the age of eleven. And in those days the choice was pretty much... French. Theoretically another option was German, but who wanted to learn a harsh, guttural language that makes you sound like a Nazi? Plus the school had trouble finding any decent German teachers, if any at all. I started learning both, got out of German after two years, and did French for five years until GCSEs... I can't speak French.  It was only in my first year at university, as one of my optional modules, that I started learning German again. I got quite far with German and I even tried one year of Modern Greek (subsidised by the Greek government... I wonder now if that was very wise on their part).  German is said to be quite a difficult language... it's not - not when you consider that I'm now having a go at Polish and a bit of Russian!

What is it about languages that I enjoy?

I'm a show-off... well that's part of it - I like impressing Germans with my ability to remember useless words like Säugetier (mammal)... and Poles by possibly being the only English person who can pronounce Polish properly  But seriously, as I learned more I realised that there are lots of good and interesting things one can discover when learning a foreign language - not only the ability to communicate.  Here are some things I have discovered in my language adventures:

An appreciation of the relationship between languages

As I started learning German I noticed the similarities between it and English. Here are some German examples: Mutter = mother, Tochter = daughter, zehn = ten, zwölf = twelve, Pfeffer = pepper.  As I knew someone who was German but knew Dutch, I had a go at learning some simple Dutch - now here are those same words in Dutch: moeder, dochter, tien, twaalf, peper.  Wow, this was amazing!  I had not only shown myself that these three West Germanic languages were closely related, but my tendency to spot patterns had shown me the High German Consonant Shift (basically in German you get z or ss instead of t, pf or ff instead of p, etc.).  I love this sort of thing.  I even noticed some less obvious examples like how German Tier (animal) is cognate with English deer, which once meant animal but eventually acquired its current meaning (as in these creatures below).  In German these are actually Rentiere.

The relationship between Germanic languages is not much of a surprise, but as I started looking up some Polish words, I noticed that Polish also has some relationship with Germanic, but this is far less obvious because it is a Slavic language.  Just a couple of examples: matka = mother, noc = night, stać = to stand.  I won't go into more detail, but the Slavic, Germanic, nearly all European and some Asian languages (like Sanskrit) are all in a big family called Indo-European (a notable non-member of this family is Hungarian, which looks like it was imported into Europe by aliens).  Basically, this stuff fascinates me.

The chance to use other writing systems

I started teaching myself Russian a couple of months ago, but I actually learnt the Russian alphabet in no time, over a decade ago. Same with Greek, which has so many similarities to Cyrillic/Russian. It's wonderful when you see a sequence of strange letters like ГЕОГРАФИЯ and you decode each letter and get G E O G R... oh, Geography.  However Cyrillic and Greek are relatively boring alphabets and work the same way as the Latin one, with consonants, vowels, capitals and lower-case letters.  A more interesting script I can read (though not understand the language) is the Korean one - Hangul.  Hangul looks scary at first and comes in blocks, each representing a syllable, but unlike Chinese or the 3 Japanese scripts, each block is made up of actual vowels and consonants so each syllable can be read phonetically. The picture below shows roughly how it works.  The text in the picture says H a n - g eu l (Hangul).

I learnt new sounds, concepts and stuff my language doesn't have

I guess the first concept we English speakers find strange in foreign languages is gender - why is a table male? Then there are grammatical cases. Although, say, English and French actually kind of have cases, you don't really have to think about them.  In German you do, which is eye-opening to an English speaker, but if you really want to get into cases and complicated grammar - but not learn Latin or Ancient Greek - then something Slavic like Polish or Russian is very interesting... and very difficult.  Another eye-opening thing in Slavic languages (especially Czech, for instance) is the seemingly ridiculous clusters of consonants you get.  If you show most English speakers the Polish word wszczniesz (you will initiate) or Czech čtvrtek (Thursday), something like the following message will probably pop up in their head...

Then they'll say "What?  But you can't say that".  But of course you can say it.  First of all, sz, cz and rz are single sounds in Polish, so it can look worse than it is, then in čtvrtek the r kind of acts like a vowel, giving the word two syllables. And you can actually make a lot more sounds and sequences of sounds than you think, but first you have to open your mind a bit and not think so Englishly, or whatever language you speak. Once you're used to it čtvrtek is not so hard to say.

Maybe more respect for other cultures

When I was starting my Modern Greek course I was thinking "What am I doing here?". I felt I didn't belong there because I had no connection to or knowledge of Greece or its culture, but as the course progressed and we learned a bit about Greece along the way, I felt more relaxed and comfortable and I think a bit more respectful and interested in Greek stuff. I don't think doing grammar exercises from a book is necessarily going to have this effect, but usually a language course you attend will cover a bit of culture, like religious festivals or buying food. I don't know if it works the same for everyone, but I think getting into foreign languages, food or anything is a good start in trying to build bridges between cultures and peoples. And on this note I'll end this very long blog post. Auf Wiedersehen.