Do you speak more than one language? How did you learn the additional languages?
While I can’t say that I SPEAK more than one language, I do know some Spanish. I took Spanish in high school and college. I know just enough to be able to understand most words on menus at Mexican restaurants and pick up words here and there on TV. I am NOT fluent enough to carry on a conversation with anyone who speaks Spanish on a regular basis. I’ve also never gone to a Spanish-speaking country to see just how well (or not well) I could get around with what little I understand.
I’ve thought about taking a Rosetta Stone course in Spanish to brush up on my skills, but holy cow have you seen the prices for those courses?!?! I’m sure they are well worth the cost if they work as well as I’ve heard, but I don’t have the disposable income to warrant such a purchase.
So for now, I’ll keep with the broken words that I understand and speak. Maybe one day what little knowledge I have will be handy.
What languages can you speak? Do you know them well enough to be fluent?
During the month of November, I am participating in the National Blog Posting Month, also known as NaBloPoMo, hosted by BlogHer. Most likely I am following these suggested prompts, but I might just get crazy and change things up every once in a while. I‘m one wild and crazy gal!
Frogdiva Dot Com 
I would say I’m multilingual. But it’s not nearly as glamorous as it sounds. in my case, at least. My mother-tongue is Cebuano, a trade language in the southern Philippines that has so many glottal stops foreigners sound really cute when they try to speak it. I learned it the way babies do. I learned Filipino/Tagalog from the daily evening news on TV and the soap operas that I pretended not to watch. I had a Filipino subject each year since Grade 1 until I graduated from High school. And I had six units at college. English I learned early from class poetry recitations in Kindergarten. “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small..” you know that poem? apple paperbacks and Hardy boys helped, and sitcoms and teacher-mandated compositions. And MTV. 3 languages, but nobody in the entire archipelago is impressed by that – me neither. It’s normal. I just sort of picked-up along the way as I went about growing up and living a normal life.
The only foreign language I’m learning – or trying to- is (Biblical) Hebrew. This might impress some people in the neighborhood. But the only good sentence I could come up in that language is: ha ish oxel et ha lexem. and I’m not even sure I got that right. No way I could bank on that to get me through a day in some Hebrew speaking community. 😀
I took 2 years have high school French and know enough to carry on very small conversations. A dear friend of mine that I met through my business moved here from France and I have been able to brush up or test it a bit that way, but that is it. I find it way easier to read and write French than to try to decipher what someone is saying in its entirety via phone. I think it is because of my lack of fluency and it all happens to fast for me to interpret it. I would love to be more fluent. Maybe someday! Spanish I only remember tiny bits from way back in middle school. Like the hi, how are ya..my name is …type stuff :). O and some friends in China taught me a few phrases… like Ni Hao, but that doesn’t really count! Now there is a tough language to learn! Spanish would come in handy the most !
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