Skill Discussion: Languages

As anyone who knows me will affirm, I have always loved languages. I remember being taught to count to five in Spanish back in Kindergarten, and then discovering that my mom could count all the way to ten. Later that week, I went back to school and saw the numbers up to ten one a teacher's door, except one of them was misspelled. I pointed it out to her. Because that's how I rolled in Kindergarten.

Since then, I've spent a significant amount of time studying languages. For the purposes of this blog, I'm going to treat each language as a separate skill, which it is. But the types of activities, missions, and bonuses that apply to languages are going to be the same, so I'm grouping them together. First, I need to set my initial level at each language.

Spanish:

This is the language at which I have the greatest skill level. I started learning it back in 1993, unless you count the six weeks I did in 1991, or the numbers I learned in 1983. I took three years in high school, majored in it in college, and even did a summer program in Costa Rica in 1998. In graduate school, I was part of the Spanish and Portuguese department, and taught several beginning level Spanish classes. Much of my coursework was in Spanish. Since leaving graduate school, I've frequently attended trade shows in Miami where about 70% of my communication is in Spanish, and I deal with Spanish speaking customers on a regular basis.

That being said, I know where this skill needs work. I don't read a lot in Spanish, and I don't listen to a lot of Spanish language television, so my reading and listening comprehension aren't as high as they could be. I speak it fairly well, and my accent is good, but I'm not awfully familiar with the colloquial expressions that make language natural.

I'm assigning my Spanish a skill level of 8. I considered giving it a 9, but I think setting it lower will give me a bit of motivation to improve it, without making it that easy to reach that next level.

French:

On my recent trip abroad, I had a 12 hour layover in Paris. I was surprised at how quickly French came back to me, which I had not studied since 2000. I wouldn't call myself fluent by any stretch, but I could mostly understand what people wanted from me, and I could ask for directions, request maps, order food, and do all the other things that a person with a 12 hour layover in Paris would want to do. I even served as translator between a group of Spanish tourists and a French shopkeeper. The shop girl thought I was German, based on my looks and my accent. I guess she just couldn't imagine an American that knew three languages.

French was my minor language specialization in college, but after graduation in 2000, it fell completely by the wayside. I have not read anything in French for some time, but I still have a very good grasp on the grammar. With the vocabulary, I can cheat because of the similarities to Spanish, which makes it easy to read. That same similarity gets in the way when I try to speak, because any word I don't know comes out in Spanish, not French.

I'm assigning a 4 to this skill. I believe that a review of my old textbooks, listening to the French dubbed tracks on some DVDs, and flipping through some of the books I have in French would help me gain some quick skill.

Portuguese:

Portuguese, especially Brazilian Portuguese, would be of great use to my job. I've never studied it formally, but I do have a textbook of Portuguese for Spanish speakers. I've flipped through it and done some desultory studies in it.

For those who don't know, Portuguese is very, very similar to Spanish, in both vocabulary and grammar. Pronunciation is quite different, but once the rules are learned, it doesn't take long to start picking it up. Already, I can understand about 30% of what I hear in Portuguese, and can read closer to 75%. Nevertheless, I can't speak a word of it, nor can I really write it. These production abilities are the more difficult ones to acquire in any language.

I'm giving myself a 3 in Portuguese. I'm better off than a raw beginner, but I still have considerable distance to go.

Japanese:

After all the Romance languages above, I needed something different. Japanese is about as different as it gets. I have never had any formal training, but I bought a bunch of textbooks, workbooks, and tapes, and started studying it on my own.

I got through the katakana and hiragana, but got stalled when it came to the kanji. Other things came up, and I simply didn't invest the time into learning the new vocabulary. I have studied the grammar pretty extensively, though, and I understand the structure of the language pretty well.

So I'm giving myself a 2. I know significantly more than a complete novice, but not nearly enough to claim any sort of proficiency with the language, spoken or written.

Irish:

Here's another language that I've started learning on my own. It's not a Romance language, so it's different from French, Spanish, and Portuguese, but it's Indo-European, so it's much closer to English than Japanese is. Plus it's half of my heritage (Irish/German), so I feel a connection to the culture.

I've got the textbooks and tapes, and I spent about six weeks going through the first few chapters of one of the textbooks. As usual, life got in the way, and I fell out of it. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I know quite a bit of the grammar, but I don't have the vocabulary to back it up. I would not claim any level of listening or reading comprehension, but I know a few things to look for, and could probably translate a text given a dictionary and sufficient time.

Irish earns a 2 for being better than nothing, but not enough to write home about.

Latin:

I studied Latin for a year in high school, 1992-1993, and it certainly made my later study of French and Spanish easier. I was pretty good at it when I was taking it, but the intervening sixteen years have degraded the skill a bit. Still, I'm not a complete newbie at it. Latin earns a 2.

German:

This is going to be one of my next language projects. I'm putting it here out of a sense of completeness, not because I know any yet (German gets a big fat 1), but because I want to learn. As I mentioned before, German is half of my heritage, and it would be a great language to know for future, hoped-for European travel.