Are you still going to Amersterdam? If so you should look up Bird Migration. He's on the forums and can speak pretty good english.
When i say i speak French, German, and bits and pieces of Swedish so many people go 'WOW!'. But it's getting more common now. Kids in my school (It;s a Language College) Are forced to learn two languages through GCSE whether they like it or not.
At my school it was compulsory to learn French to GCSE. If you wanted you could learn German as well. I think they've started offering Spanish as well but you couldn't do Spanish AND German. I did neither as I chose Latin Greek and Music as my options, so French is the only modern language I did for GCSE. However my university offer free language lessons to all students so I started Italian when I started university and after two years I'm about GCSE standard.
Spanish and German are the languages I speak (not fluently) though. Das ist uno burrito. That is one burrito. Some times I mix the two languages though. Every now and then I will lapse into German in regular conversation. It is the wierdest thing.
someone who's just graduated from uni used to say "ou esti" whenever asking where someone was. And it always got me stuck because it was a mixture of french and greek and had me wondering what the greek for "where" actually was. Then I remembered it was actually pou. Bloody "same but different" always gets me every time.
It's a piece of piss. Everything follows all the rules and there are VERY few irregular verbs or nouns. Well it's a piece of piss until you get to verse literature, or even prose, because they start using vocabulary that rarely came up outside of literary circles - rather like a lot of English poets do I suppose. The vocab isn't too hard to learn at first because a lot of it has found its way into modern european languages. Learning it also helps you understand your own language better. Americans with their bizarre pronunciation of a lot of words end up having a lot of trouble spelling words because they spell them the same way as they pronounce them. Examples of this I've seen include "Alligation, Imbarrissed, Desicion, Definately etc." Also they do tend to get pronunciations wrong as a result of trying to pronounce words. Words that Americans almost never pronounce correctly (and this has nothing to do with the accent) include "clerk, derby, berkely, herbs (don't drop your Hs!), charade, tomato, strawberry, and lieutenant" We can't do much about what Americans have done to spoken English, but if you learn latin at least it'll help improve your spelling
just one word? seems a bit odd. I suppose bristolians and janners do say it like that as well. Doesn't make it correct though.
Exactly. Century old mistakes don't get corrected and next thing you know they're in the sodding dictionary!
English has gotten better though. Have you ever heard someone speak Old English. I could never understand a word of it.
That's because it's a different language. It predates even Chaucer, which is Middle English, and then modern English began around Shakespeare's time.
You've not experienced Shakespeare until you have read it in the original Klingon I've actually got a copy of the Klingon hamlet somewhere although my Klingon really isn't good enough! I think my favourite Shakespeare play is probably Twelfth Night, but only because I've studied it to death.
