Languages?

[sciolygrl258]

Im fluent in:
-English
-Cantonese
-Mandrin
and i took french in school for... 5 years

[Phenylethylamine]

I'm fluent in:
-English

I'm currently learning:
-Latin (Mi nomen Helix_Nebula_Freak est.)
-Hebrew (Helix_Nebula_Freak שמ שלי)

I'm supposed to know some Hebrew, but in reality all I know is prayer stuff and like three words that are actually useful in conversation... most of my Hebrew vocabulary consists of phrases like "from generation to generation" and words like "holy", "eternal", etc. Not really useful when speaking to normal people. I can semi-understand Yiddish, though, because I can read Hebrew letters and I speak German (Yiddish is essentially German written with Hebrew characters).

[Helix_Nebula_Freak]

Yeah... that's how it was with me for a while... but then I decided that I wanted to learn modern Hebrew (very differnt from the bibical prayer Hebrew... sorta like Shakesperan English vs. Modern English) so I decided to take some classes. I've currently got one year under belt, which still isn't that much, but I'm getting there...

I've wanted to learn Yiddish... I know phrases like "Klutz" (big one in my house) "punum" (face) and "mashugana" (crazy) but I'm no where near fluent. There's not many classes, so there's no way to learn... I can read it, but I can't understand...

[Phenylethylamine]

Well, yeah, some Yiddish (e.g. "klutz") has sort of passed into normal English usage (my spell-checker even knows it's a word, lol). It's not 100% the same as German even if you transliterate it, and sometimes if there's no vowels it becomes very confusing, but I can usually get the gist. My mom and I were going to make a valiant attempt to actually LEARN Yiddish until we realized that we didn't have much motivation to take classes or anything just to get that last 25% that we couldn't understand.

[Helix_Nebula_Freak]

Yeah a lot of Yiddish is in English...

Are there Yiddish classes in your area?

[Phenylethylamine]

Yeah a lot of Yiddish is in English...

Are there Yiddish classes in your area?

Not as far as I know- we were going to do online classes.

[Helix_Nebula_Freak]

Oh...

That makes sense!

[Pleiades]

My English teacher gave us an entire lesson in Yiddish once. It was actually pretty cool although no one could understand it.

[Helix_Nebula_Freak]

That would be awesome! We interject a little Yiddish randomly with our English in my family.

[49ers]

I can speak some Japanese
spanish
French
English
and PIG LATIN
and a little bit of latin too, but not much