Site last updated:
1 January 2009

Native English.  The rest is a bit of a muddle.

How many languages have I studied?

Approximately six. Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Latin, and German. Some Mandarin.

How long?

• Spanish (7th grade to 11th grade, 6 wk summer program after 10th grade, one quarter in college)
• French (11th and 12th grade, one quarter in college)
• Italian (two quarters in the US in college plus one quarter of study abroad in Italy!)
• Japanese (one intensive year in college)
• Latin (I audited a one-year course)
• German (I audited one semester)
• Mandarin (Ha ha ha! Still trying to learn Pinyin with a friend)

Am I any good?

• I was pretty good at French, and reached "two years of college French" proficiency.  I won prizes in high school.
• I was really a lot better at Spanish, once upon a time.  But my proficiency level is theoretically at "two years of college Spanish", the same as my theoretical proficiency at French.  I think the 6wk summer program helped my Spanish incalculably: it was not as good as an immersion experience, but much more instructive than class usually is.  I won prizes in high school, and the 6wk program was also an honor.  Georgia Governor's Honors, specifically.
• Italian rocks.  You can't really learn a language without going somewhere where they speak it.  Even though I only studied Italian for one year, I learned a lot.  Was it better than my Spanish?  I'm not sure.  Do I remember it now?  I'm not sure.
• Japanese is really hard.  I remember almost nothing from the entire year.
• Latin - I can read Latin on a low level much better than I can write it.  We had no practice generating or understanding spoken sentences.  The study of Latin is the study of text.  Si hoc legere scis, nimium eruditionis habes.*
• I know some German words and phrases, and I understand the grammar. I never really bothered to memorize all the noun and verb endings, though, so sentence construction is very, very limited...
• As far as Mandarin is concerned, like I said, I'm still trying to learn how to pronounce the Pinyin (the roman alphabet notation for Mandarin Chinese, complete with accent marks for the five tones).

So, WHY did I study all these languages?

• I started Spanish in middle school because foreign language was part of the honors reading track, and Spanish was the obvious choice for me between French, Spanish, and German.
• I started taking French in 11th grade as a kind of elective.  This is somewhat unusual: in my high school, most people were either getting the minimum language requirement over with, or they were pursuing one language as far as they could.  Two was a bit odd.  It was particularly odd because it put me in a class with freshmen when I was a junior and senior in high school - college classes can be mixed, but high school classes weren't that mixed.  And the class was much easier for me than for them, because Spanish gave me a real leg up.  I continued French in college to satisfy a Linguistics department requirement: 2 years of French, German, or Russian to get a Linguistics BA.  I didn't actually have to take 2 years, I just took one quarter, and that put me at the level they intended.
• Italian was my elective in college.  I wanted to study abroad, and I thought that another romance language would be great fun.  It was.  My class in college was Italian through Dante - not your typical 101 course.  We dissected bits of the Inferno.  I probably have some of it memorized still. 
• Japanese was also part of a Linguistics department requirement.  They require one year of a non-Indo-European language.  I don't know what my other choices were, but my roommate had taken Japanese, and I figured it would be a fun challenge. 
• I have always wanted to learn Latin.  It was not offered at my high school, and I didn't have time to take it in addition to Italian when I was in college.  Now that I'm not in school, I am terribly lucky that I have a job which lets me audit Princeton University classes for free.
• German helps me understand the history of English.
• Mandarin would really impress people, if I could actually use it.

Which language do I like the best?

English.  We have an enormous lexicon.  It can say and do so many things.  It's a colossal mutt language.  I'm really glad I learned English as a native language, because I can't imagine trying to get a grip on it otherwise, and I admire the people who can and do.  Also, there is so much written material published in English compared to other languages - if you write in English you have a bigger audience than you do if you write in Dutch, for example, and if you read in English, you have a bigger choice of reading materials than you do if you only read in Dutch.  I'm in publishing.  This is a big deal.

Chinese is similar to English in that it has a huge vocabulary that takes a lot of effort to build up, it has many speakers, and many publications, and it's hard to learn if you don't already know it.  It is superior to English if you are interested in writing as art (calligraphy) or in studying the past: Chinese has a long, rich history.  English has a fascinating history too, but English qua English does not.

That wasn't the original question, though.  What you really meant was:

Which of those foreign languages do I like the best?

I happen to like the Italian language better than Spanish and French: this is because of the way the words are built, in other words the way it sounds, and also probably because I went to Italy and had great experiences that I associate with the culture and language of Italy. 

Which language was the easiest?

Inherently, the easiest one is probably Spanish or Italian.  French has pronunciation and orthographic problems for speakers of English.  (And going to France to speak French, I've heard, can seem like an exercise in futility insofar as the French do not try to meet you halfway when you are attempting to communicate.)  For me, the easiest was Italian, since I'd already learned French and Spanish grammar and vocabulary.  Also, while in the US I had a great Italian teacher, and because when I was in Italy, heck, I was in Italy! 

How hard is Japanese?

Very.  First, there are no cognates.  Cognates are words that were "born with" English words, in other words, derived from the same original source (Latin).  Japanese and English share no words.  (Japanese has borrowed some words, but that's different, and they don't sound like English words anymore after they've been borrowed, anyway!)  Because there are no cognates, you have to memorize everything.  Everything becomes a stream of sounds, whereas with romance languages, the word structure is familiar and usually seems to make some sense.

The more obvious difficulty is that there is no alphabet.  There are in fact two syllabaries and a boatload of borrowed Chinese characters.  The student must memorize the reading and writing of two syllabaries (one for Japanese words, one for borrowed words), learn the principles of writing the characters correctly, and memorize the structure, meaning, and pronunciation of each and every new vocabulary word.

Then, in order to make sentences, you've got to tie a knot in your brain.  All notions of pronouns, definite and indefinite articles, singular and plural, masculine, feminine and neuter genders, to say nothing of prepositions, word order, and punctuation, must be discarded.  Even verb tenses are non-intuitive.  Then, having torn down conventional notions of grammar, you must build up an intricate conception of appropriate levels of politeness...

Normal foreign language classes in college meet three hours a week, possibly with extra labs, discussions, or other mandatory activities.  Japanese class met five hours a week (that's every day at 9am!) and we were expected to do two hours of homework every day - and that means seven days, folks, not five.  While I was taking Japanese class, incidentally, I was also taking three other classes (one of which required 20 hours/week of programming, another of which was history, and involved copious amounts of reading), and tutoring 10 hours a week.  I was also partly in charge of a club that met once a week, and presumably I also had goals relating to eating and sleeping.  I'm not sure how I did it.  But I remember very little.

I'm good at languages.  I learn fast.  But when studying Japanese, there is really a lot to learn.  One year of Italian goes much much much farther than one year of Japanese.  Take my word for it.

What am I going to study next???

I have books on learning various foreign languages (from Dutch to Hindi) but those are likely to be more novel than useful for quite a while. 

Since I haven't quite exhausted the romance language tree, it's barely possible that I would study Swiss Romansh or Romanian/Moldovan.  I'd probably have to learn from a book, though, because I'm not sure who'd teach me!

Why did I buy all those books on the Foreign Languages page?

I like books. I like foreign languages. Therefore I like foreign language books.

Hopefully, I can make myself read some of those things to keep the words from slipping away.  I've discovered that it's easier to just barrel through and sort-of skip over the words I don't know than to stop and look them up.  This is so tedious that it makes me disinclined to read at all, which defeats the purpose of looking the words up in the first place. 

I read part of the Spanish version of Harry Potter when I bought it, and it was pretty understandable, so the words must be up there somewhere.  Reading is easier than writing, speaking, or listening in a foreign language, but it's better practice than doing nothing at all...

Why do I have Harry Potter books in so many foreign languages (on the J.K. Rowling page)?

Because I like books and foreign languages. Also, Harry Potter has been translated into something like 50 languages - most books aren't!  This is a unique opportunity to buy books in parallel, so to speak.

And, I like and respect Rowling and her characters.  I honor them by surrounding myself with their many incarnations.  I am willing to spend money on multiple copies because I value the work of the author more than I value the work of most other authors.  There you are, Rowling, have some royalties from yours truly.  It's a drop in the bucket, or the ocean, really, but it's the thought that counts.

*If you know how to read this, you have too much education.