Ask HN: What natural languages do you learn?

[lsb]

I read Latin and Greek, want to know more French, and am intrigued by Sanskrit and Japanese.

I wanted to read more Latin and have more fun reading, and I decided that looking words up in a dictionary was an easy step to circumvent, so I made a website nodictionaries.com --- if you read Latin, check out http://nodictionaries.com/vergil/aeneid-1/1-7 if you want to read twice as fast.

[yread]

I really like the website! Would it be possible to add more languages and allow users to enter text - stem it and add the dictionary entries automatically?

[civilian]

I have an undeveloped passion for latin (I usually just get excited when I figure out the latin roots for English words). Quick question, what about all of the small words that aren't included in that? Like "qui" and "ab" on the first line of that link you gave? Are you imagining that your users will figure them out through context, or was there another good reason for not including them?

[rprospero]

Mea Hercule! Hodie facere cupivi, sed hunc ludam.

Seriously, though, this is incredible. I'll probably play with this all weekend.

[tokenadult]

Chinese (various Sinitic languages, but especially Modern Standard Chinese), German, Japanese, Russian, the original languages of the Bible, samplings of Latin and of various Romance languages, interesting conlangs, and others.

Here's a link to language-learning advice:

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

Here's one of my favorite links about one conlang:

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/

[wisty]

Chinese too. I've found Mnemosyne (a flash card app) quite useful, for learning lots of characters, though I already knew a lot about radicals, and how to combine them.

My personal project (not working yet) is a language learning web app. I think there's actually a couple of more advanced language web apps by HNers too.

[bartonfink]

I speak English fluently. At one point I spoke Latin fluently, but that has tapered off due to lack of practice (I still read very well). I speak conversational German, and just a smidge of Italian.

One of these days my wife is going to pester me to learn Japanese because she studies early Japanese culture and wants to share.

[dpapathanasiou]

"One of these days my wife is going to pester me to learn Japanese"

You should do it, for the beauty and expressiveness of the writing system alone.

[angus77]

Mother tongue is English. Been studying Japanese for 15 years and living in Japan for 13. Was doing Esperanto for a few years, but since I've had kids I had to ditch at least one of my hobbies. Been recently trying to pick up French, because I'm Canadian and always got good marks in French in school, and I regret ditching it after I finished grade 9 (the last year it was mandatory).

Over the years, I've taken stabs at German, Latin, Chinese, Spanish and Lojban. Same story each time---a few weeks of initial enthusiasm, and then I got bored and never returned to Language X. I don't know what kept me glued to Japanese. With Esperanto, I was about to move on when I discovered there were actually people in my town who spoke it and met every week. It added unexpected depth to what I had been approaching as a novelty language.

[der_ketzer]

I'm spanisch native speaker. Began learning german at age of 5 for 17 years, english at 12 for 8 years, french at 15 for 3 years (barely remember something).

Sadly my written englisch is not as good as it should (altough I have no problem reading it or with conversational englisch. My father doesnt speak englisch, so when technicians from the US came to repair his machines (CNC) I was the translator).

And with german I dont have any problems, I try to read books and watch movies so I dont forget much. And of course german ebm/dark music =)

Being in a german school (Abitur) and living 2 years in Germany helped me a lot in my career =)

[asymmetric]

FYI, it's spelled Spanish/English :)

[mbesto]

Very little conversational German, Swedish and took Latin/Spanish growing up.

Hur är läget? Alles klar? Todos bien?

Quite frankly the only languages you really need in the western world (aside from English) are French and Spanish (and possibly Portugese). Germans and Scandinavians mostly speak perfect English and for the most part don't tolerate my broken attempt at their language. (although they very much appreciate it)

French and Spanish are probably the most valuable because they tend to be less inclined to master English and both have very large native speaker bases. Other useful languages would be Mandarin, Russian and Arabic.

[atgm]

English and Japanese. I also studied Latin for quite a long time, which means I have a decent stepping stone for all of the Romance languages and can read many of them with a bit of thinking. I've also studied a bit of Mandarin. I also learned American Sign Language for a bit and am learning some Japanese Sign Language now as well.

I'd like to study Arabic and Welsh sometime.

I generally study languages based on how much I'd like to learn that language and how different it is from English. I have a lot of friends that study based on business (Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin being the big ones), but that doesn't really appeal to me.

[SarioAlvey]

I am native German and learned English and Latin in school. I value both languages very highly. I started with Esperanto, but got bored fast and left it again. Later in school I added Russian, which I really liked, but have forgotten by now, because I never get to pratice. I picked up Finnish at university, which really is a beautiful language and I can only recommend (not much use, but nice to learn^^). At the moment I am learning Swedish as I will move to Sweden in a few months. On my still-to-learn-list reside Arabic on top, closely followed by Japanese. I just love learning a few more scripts.

[furyg3]

Dutch.

I moved to Holland from California several years ago, and have picked up the language after taking a few courses. You don't need it here, but it sure helps you break out of the expat scene.

This is the first language I've really 'learned' to a good conversational level, and I am really fascinated by the process. I didn't get far with Spanish in high school, but since the process of Dutch has been so wonderful I plan on revisiting it soon, possibly other languages as well.

[IvarTJ]

As a non-native speaker (Norwegian), I give a lot of attention to my written English skills. I learnt some German in school, but haven’t maintained what I learnt.

I learnt the Korean alphabet through Wikibooks when I wanted to try out input methods. The writing system seems to be easier to learn than other CJK languages, and I might learn more of the language as the Nation of Samsung seems pretty interesting.

[VuongN]

I would like to learn French and Chinese. Being Vietnamese and trying to understand more about Vietnam's history, I know that there are a lot of ancient tomes written in French and Chinese (Vietnam had 1000+ years of Chinese occupation and about 200 years of French). My hope is to some day read those original tomes in their full context and meaning rather than translated ones.

[Symmetry]

I learned Spanish in high school, and while I can still read it ok spoken Spanish is usually to fast for me to follow.

I can also speak basic Japanese (started learning in college and continued on my own), but while I learned the syllabaries I only know a very few characters, so I can't write it.

Between the two, that's one whole language at a basic level.

[funkfellas]

My native is Ukrainian, fluent in Russian. Converstional Polish and Slovakian. Just passed exam in Danish, wanna start German and Dutch. Some time ago I tried to learn Japanese, but it was quite difficult without any plactical application... Finnish would be intereting, as it's one of 3 non-indoeuropean languages in Europe;)

[BasDirks]

I speak Dutch and English fluently (minus the odd expression) and am able to read Flaubert's French and Nietzsche's German. I remember only part of the Greek I picked up reading Homer. I'd like to learn Italian and Chinese, and I'm pretty sure I'll get around to it.

[ThatOneKid]

I took 4 years of Spanish in high school, and during my fourth year I also took a year of Arabic. It was very interesting going directly from one to the other, as well as seeing the similarities (and the many differences) between the two.

[wccrawford]

Japanese and Esperanto.

I took Spanish in highschool, but haven't been using it, so it's pretty much lost. I can understand little bits.

I would love to learn a lot of other languages including German, French and Irish Gaelic.

[scottseaward]

German - I'm moving to Berlin in a few weeks and want to cram as much language learning into that time as possible.

Can any of you talented polyglots recommend techniques for learning lots of vocabulary quickly?

[barry-cotter]

The quickest dirty hack is using Anki or another spaced repitition sytem program. If you download Anki you can get at the shared decks and there rea some very nice ones for German vocabulary.

For speaking/understanding speech I've heard great things about Pimsleur. Once you have the rudiments of the language listen to podcasts all the time.

Learn the grammar. You are unlikely to pick up more than the utter basics by osmosis. Good luck!

[robflynn]

I used to study Spanish but have become quite rusty at it due to lack of use over the last 10 years. Quite interested in picking up either German or Russian (I like both, I just haven't settled on one yet).

[doublez]

As a native Russian speaker, may I advise German. Russian has all the grammatical complexity of German + non-Roman phonetics + Cyrillic alphabet + word order that's not prescribed, but has stylistic meaning.

[amix]

I am currently learning Spanish and can speak Danish, Bosnian, English and German (conversational). Would be interested in tips/articles/tools on how to learn Spanish fast (or any language for that matter).

[flomincucci]

I'm fluent in English, learning Esperanto (mother tongue: spanish). Took 3 years of Portuguese at high school. I'm learning sign language too (i'm not deaf), does that count as a natural language?