become a linguist

Fluent in English, understand completely spanish, speaking spanish marginal, learning french.

1) English – fluent
2) Mandarin – marginally survivable, studied it in school but still abysmal :(, will refresh with mandarin classes
3) French – passed A1 shall aim to fluency of at least B1.
4) Spanish – haven’t started

maybe Malay. maybe.

Priority List
1) French
2) Mandarin
3) Spanish.

So let’s keep track:

Filipino – v.g. in Tagalog, can understand Pampango
English – v.g.
Spanish – stuck in level 1 (two semesters in college) and might enroll this year.
Japanese – stuck in level 1 (one semester in college) and slowly building up vocab
Italian – no formal training, just taking some conversation basics
French – help!
Korean – help, I cannot go beyond “anyonghaseyo.”

Wish me luck! ;)

currently learning spanish on learnspanish.com… good site

is it good to learn 2 languages at once? like.. one day you learn some german phrases, verbs, nouns, etc. then the next you learn the same phrases in spanish. cuz i know a little of french, spanish, german and italian. yet i tend to forget. my best friend is teaching me spanish, conjugates and stuff. i wish they had linguistics here, but they don’t. maybe when i graduate from Software Engineering (in like 4/5 yrs.) i’ll go to work and earn enough money to go back to college and take linguistics. yeah.

..i think i should just stick to one language at a time. i wish i could stay a 2 months in germany so i could listen to how the actual people say it. that’s how i learned hiligaynon quickly, listening then taking note of everything i heard and sentence structures then asking my mom what they mean. maybe i should hang around in a german chat room or something…

one of our subjects here is ‘filipino’ or tagalog, the national language. i can understand simple conversational stuff and can speak some of it too. i have to take this filipino “tutorial” class instead of sitting in the real class with my classmates. i hate the tutorial class so much cuz for the past 4 years they kept on changing our teacher so we ended up learning the same lessons again every year but we don’t say anything cuz since we already know it we get good scores on tests thus resulting in higher grades.

my dad wants me to seriously become fluent in tagalog so that when we have trips to manila i can communicate well and stuff. but i really don’t feel the motivation to learn it. i mean, everyone there knows english. sure, i’d like to be fluent in tagalog but as long as i know the local dialect where i stay most of the time i don’t think there’s a need to learn tagalog… if only our teacher would give us a harder lesson maybe i’d get somewhere… but he thinks we’re ignorant foreigners.. lol

i wanna learn to speak as many languages as possible. the passion hit me when we moved here to the philippines. i easily learned the local dialect here in iloilo (hiligaynon) not by taking a special course or something but just by listening and asking my companions what the words meant. i also asked the meaning of different phrases and in a matter of roughly 2/3 years i was already fluent and lost my “american slang”...lol

Well, I’m kind of majoring in it…
Have only taken phonology so far, am in the process of semantics. I can’t wait for historical and comparative…ee.