be fluent in 3 languages

Portuguese, Spanish and English. and i wanna learn Russian too.

But I have to keep refreshing each language. Even my own native language, English.

Last year I lived with 3 other girls: one who was born in Southern California, but lived a good portion of her life in Denmark; another born in Russia, who came to the US for school and who does summer school in Spain; and the third who was 1/2 Korean and lived everywhere from Indonesia to Scotland to UAE. I could only be described as the All-American one. I want to travel the world and be cultured, I’m just a late bloomer. My French used to be decent, and I studied a little German. But my goals are to learn useful languages, so Arabic and French, for the world’s current hotspots, the Middle East and Africa.

And the time comes when you can actually use all three on a multiple conversation (happened to me on a hostel). Awesome.

Well, I speak English natively, so there’s one.

My German’s pretty good, although my grammar needs work, and I should probably read/listen to more to keep familiar with it. Still, I feel that I have practical fluency, if not total fluency. I can participate in a conversation with a German person easily.

Now all I need is one other language to be fluent in. I’m thinking Esperanto is my best bet at the moment, Italian and Latin will probably take me a while. This shouldn’t be that hard for me, I just need to concentrate and do it! Silly girl… :)

Actually i’d like to be fluent in as many languages as possible, but 3 is a good start.

Actually this is more or less a goal not to be lazy and just practice languages more as in addition to my native tongue Finnish i do speak at least some English, Russian and Swedish. Maybe someday i’ll be fluent in all of them.

One good thing about knowing several languages is the fact that it helps understanding languages that you don’t know. For example through Swedish and English I can understand at least some German (not much though) and through Russian some words of other Slavic languages. And of course Swedish helps me understand Danish and Norwegian too.

I’ve also studied some other languages, but have forgotten almost everything about them. Among those are French, Spanish and Arabic. Maybe someday i’ll try learn those again. Or maybe i’ll start to learn a new language someday. I’ve thought a lot about learning Estonian, which shouldn’t be too hard as it’s quite closely related to Finnish (unlike most of other languages).

But it’s thanks to my mom who’s french and my dad who’s a danish translator so I was born in it really. But I do practice whenever I can and I live in an english-speaking country. I’ll imporve my spanish when I go to a hispanic country – see goal “Live in Perù”.

Lots of people think learning languages is hard, but it isn’t necessarily so. The most important thing is regularity. Don’t miss a day. Learn lots of words – that’s what the language is really made up of. You can get by with lots of words and a little grammar, but not with lots of grammar and a few words. Use a program like Full Recall (www.fullrecall.com) to learn vocabulary; it really helps in the long run.

It’s been a week and I still haven’t heard from eTandem yet! Strange, French and Spanish are the most popular languages on there, I would think that they would’ve found a penpal for me sooner…
Does anyone know of any other similar websites?

well, so far I’m getting back to practicing my french. i heard about this site from a good friend of mine called eTandem.com where you can be connected to a penpals from all over the globe and help them learn english while you are learning their native language. i signed up for spanish and french speaking penpals and i plan to write to them at least once a week in order to get my written language, vocabulary and grammar skills a bit sharper.