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Do/did your parents learn languages? | ||
Tags: Family | Foreign Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Michael K. Senior Member United States Joined 5541 days ago 568 posts - 886 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 25 of 28 26 December 2011 at 1:58pm | IP Logged |
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My mom took Spanish in high school and can only say "dame dos cervezas" (give me 2 beers), which is useless since my parents and most of my family are teetotalers.
My dad took Spanish in high school and 2 years of Russian at West Point. I think he can say the first line of a Christmas carol in Russian but besides that not much more. He had to take the test that the Army gives to see if you could be trained as a linguist during a Russian class, I don't know how he did, but since he was in the Signal Corp and never left the US while on active duty, probably not well enough. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Humdereel Octoglot Groupie United States Joined 4790 days ago 90 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Written), Turkish, Persian, Urdu Studies: Russian | Message 26 of 28 26 December 2011 at 4:48pm | IP Logged |
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My parents grew up in Spanish-speaking countries, so when they came to the U.S., they had to learn English. Other than that, however, my parents never truly tried studying another language, at least to my knowledge.
I'm the only person in my immediate family that has taken an interest in languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| HenryMW Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4986 days ago 125 posts - 179 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, French Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 27 of 28 26 December 2011 at 5:42pm | IP Logged |
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My parents speak only English and despite my best efforts do not want to learn any
languages. My brother speaks only English. Two of my grandparents spoke only English and two spoke Yiddish and English, but I never knew them that well. Extended family is the same. I'm that guy in the family. My inspiration was the slow progress I was making in my high school French class and stumbling on Francois Micheloud's homepage. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4584 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 28 of 28 26 December 2011 at 5:46pm | IP Logged |
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Both of my parents speak passable English, so I'm not sure if they qualify. My father has tried learning German, Korean and Kazakh at various points in his life, but didn't really get far in any of those languages and doesn't remember much of them beyond the personal pronouns and numerals. My mother is half-Korean and half-German, born and raised in Uzbekistan, but she grew up speaking nothing but Russian and never really tried to master any of those other languages. I'm not sure if they influenced my interest in languages directly, to me it looks like it just sort of "happened" - I started learning Kazakh because I was living in Kazakhstan, took up German because of my ancestry and because it was offered at my school, and English simply goes without saying. It wasn't until I started my self-study of Japanese at the age of 20, without any prompts from my parents or any immediate necessity, that I began seriously learning languages with the aim of becoming functionally multilingual, or at least fluent in more than two languages.
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