Heeeeeeey - so great to read a proper background story about you :D Funny to read about the 'Fins who speak Swedish' thing, ever realized that. I hate German :D As a Dutch person it's just similar enough to have it be extra confusing because you constantly have to remind yourself how again it's different :') I'd rather learn a language that has no similarities as I can start fresh and just accept the language for what it is.
Anyway - great to be on Hive and see where this is going. I was a bit bummed with Steem before 'everything happened' anyway, but am excited to add some renewed energy and inspiration to this place.
Cheers!
I’ve forgotten much of the German I learned in high school, but at one point in college I had need of doing research where most of the material was in Dutch and the German came in handy. It turned out that I could understand written Dutch fairly well because it seemed like every word was either almost like something in English or almost like something in German.
I’m a lot older now so my ability to learn other languages is diminished, but I’m working a bit on Spanish.
………………
What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks one language? American.
Ahahahahaha - this is so true.
I speak native of fairly well: Dutch, English, Spanish
I speak 'holiday proof': French, German
I can deduct a lot of Italian (thanks to Spanish) and Swedish and probably a few other languages I don't think about right now. I feel blessed to be able to navigate the world a bit easier thanks to this - I wouldn't want to have it otherwise.
When I learned the Cyrillic Alphabet it was fun to travel through Russia and 'spell' the Cyrillic letters and realize everything comes from English :D Then I crossed the border to Mongolia and I could still spell Cyrillic but there was NO word that I could recognize, apparently they have no such influence over there.
Speaking/reading languages makes the world a whole lot more interesting :-)
This surprised me at first but then I realized I have the same even with languages I don't speak perfectly - I can still understand other languages better due to it (see the Italian thanks to Spanish).
That's so much talent in one man. The gift of different languages wow! We can call it the gift to speak in tongues perhaps! 😊
There are three major West Germanic languages: English, Dutch and German. The minor ones are Frisian and Afrikaans, the latter of which I believe is practically Dutch. People say Dutch has some features that may help speakers of North Germanic (Scandinavian) languages understand it.
I know English, Swedish and German because I studied them all in school. For me, Dutch has so many unfamiliar basic words that I'm quickly lost if I have to read even a simple Dutch language text.
There is a 5% Finland Swedish minority in the country. In rural areas, there are people who do not know the majority language at all. The maternal grandmother of my sister's ex husband did not know any Finnish. My sister is a language teacher and Swedish is one of her languages. My sister was able to communicate better with her than she could with her own grandson.