Hi/Ola/Bonjour/Hej/ni hao/ salahm

I recently started learning Danish (recently as in this week) independently at home. So far I'm having a great time at it, I've always wanted to learn another language and Danish has always appealed to me, despite the weird pronunciations.

Anyway I was wondering if any of you lovely people also have a passion for languages or even a mild interest. And what languages do you speak/how did you learn them? What is it that drew you to doing it in the first place? For me it was a desire to speak another language because I always thought it would be cool to be able to have conversations that most people where I live can't understand Then it just became about the joy when you reach a stage in the language where you understand what you hear on TV/Movies etc. and can carry a conversation with a native speaker without asking them to speak slowly. It's a fantastic feeling of achievement.

Also if there any Danes reading this "kan du hjælpe mig?", I'd love to get some practice talking in Danish, both in text and speech tusind tak.


Jessie

I would love to visit Denmark one day. As for the topic I am learning Japanese and most likely will be heading to live there next year for a while. It's quite a challenging language but most enjoyable. I try to watch a lot of Jdrama and Anime to help with my listening skill, as well as Jradio over the net.

Ooh, I'm envious.  I've always wanted to learn Japanese and Sign Language but I'm really terrible at learning other languages.  I struggled with my Spanish classes in school so I've not really tried to learn to speak another language since then.

Do to my previous occupation I had to learn a number of languages. Sadly, since I have not used them for quite a while I have forgotten them. I have learned:
Russian
German
Spanish
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Arabic (a few dialects)
And a few others.

Currently supposed to be studying for exams as I am doing 1st year French at Uni. 
Previously I took night school Chinese for 2 years but have forgotten pretty much all of it due to disuse.  I have enrolled in German for next year as well as continuing French.

Karen.

That's all awesome

Brooke that is amazing, I really want to know a few languages at some point. The wish list at the moment is English, Danish, Irish, French, Russian or Arabic, Mandarin or Japanese. That might change though in the future.

ZombieDog, don't let not being good at classes put you off. I studied French and Irish in school for 6 and 11 years respectively and barely knew how to cobble a sentence together. I'm having a much better time learning now on my own using only free internet materiel. Classrooms are not great places to learn languages because you don't get enough real practice with people or get to look at stuff that interests you.
If you want to give it a go at any point for real I have loads of links to places that would be helpful

Kaila, it really is so much easier when there are entertainment things you enjoy in the language. It's really motivating to have that goal to read a book or watch a film in it's original language. It makes it feel much more real than just learning grammar rules from a book or something like that.

Jessie

I spent as summer at the University of Aarhus..."heaven must have loose some Angels"

I used to live in Aarhus as a toddler when my dad worked in the University. That's what sort of put the idea of learning Danish into my head. I have applied for post graduate positions there recently, it would be cool to move back and actually remember this time haha.

Do you mind if I ask when you were there?

I didn't know if it was OK to post the links directly, but here they are now. I am not affiliated with the people who run these sites, I just use the sites for my own personal gain.

General Language:

http://www.memrise.com/
http://ankisrs.net/ (I don't really use this much)
http://www.learnoasis.com/ (English, Danish, Hungarian, Arabic, Spanish)
http://www.lingq.com/ (I don't use this too much either)
http://radiolingua.com/shows/other-languages/ (podcasts)
http://www.onlineradiostations.com/ (internet radio, I choose stations in my target language)

Speaking Practice (using webcam/skype/chat type functions)

http://www.italki.com/
https://www.verbling.com/ (11 major languages [Beta], chat roulette sans penis )
There's loads more that do the same thing, it's hard to go wrong.

Danish Specific

http://www.speakdanish.dk/ (small set of free material, + more for a price [I haven't used the paid content])
http://radiolingua.com/shows/other-languages/one-minute-danish/ (podcasts)
http://www.copenhagencast.com/ (podcasts)

That's all I can think of off the top of my head.

Jessie

I have started using Memrise a bit and I have noticed that I learn languages much better on my own time than in classes o.o I am currently working on French, German and Spanish, but I would like to learn Mandarin, Arabic, Russian, Italian, and Dutch over the next few years as well. I speak English (obviously) and though I am not fluent in French, I am an adequate writer. I am a programmer in a community that is mostly English and French speaking, so I often try to translate tutorials and documentation (usually only around 30 to 50 pages, though). My goal is to be able to read fluently in as many languages as possible so that I can learn and then to be able to write fluently so that I can share my knowledge. Speaking isn't too high on my priority list, but it isn't in English, either XD

I'm something of an amateur conlanger, so I've been trying to learn some other languages to help with that. I have a great interest in Latin and Ancient Greek; I'm adequate at the former and a novice at the latter. I also speak a little French, although I could do with some practice, I'm a little rusty!

I took German in highschool for three years and a year of Japanese and Chinese each in college, but never really stuck with it so I'm couldn't really speak anything though I can understand German pretty well. I've always wanted to learn Aramaic, but since it's dying out I'm running out of time. I also really like Arabic, I think it sounds beautiful especially in the form of the Islamic adhan (call to prayer), also I think Hebrew is really cool as the language has so many subtleties.

Quote from: septuagenarianTurist on January 21, 2013, 10:04:51 AM
I'm something of an amateur conlanger, so I've been trying to learn some other languages to help with that. I have a great interest in Latin and Ancient Greek; I'm adequate at the former and a novice at the latter. I also speak a little French, although I could do with some practice, I'm a little rusty!

I've just started to get into conlanging, it is so hard! it's like a brain workout!

I took Spanish in high school, but don't really know anything, and French in college but didn't do well (I got a C first semester, a D second).

I was learning Eastern Arabic via Pimsleur, and it was great. I love Pimsleur. I think Arabic is so beautiful, and saying "ma teke inglesi" to canvassers on the street works well to get them to leave me alone. 

I am currently learning Brazilian Portuguese though, also with Pimsleur. I switched over becauce there's a ton of Portuguese people here, including my next door neighbor so I'd have more of an opportunity to practice it. There's also more materials for Portuguese that I can get after I finish the 3 levels of Pimsleur that I can use where there wasn't as many in the Eastern Arabic.

I do want to continue with Arabic though.

Quote from: Jessica M on September 26, 2012, 05:57:02 PM
Hi/Ola/Bonjour/Hej/ni hao/ salahm

If that was your attempt at Spanish, it's spelled "hola." 

Quote from: LearnedHand on February 09, 2013, 03:06:24 PM
I took Spanish in high school

Ugh, don't even get me started. I only chose that class to get an easy A, seeing as to how language class was mandated. 

Quote from: DianaP on February 09, 2013, 03:58:45 PM

Ugh, don't even get me started. I only chose that class to get an easy A, seeing as to how language class was mandated. 

Lol, yeah I really only learned how to say "Corey es calvo" and a bit on how to make cocaine. 

Two years of German during high school. A year and a half of (full time) Mandarin after college. Some Ancient Greek, self-taught in a few other languages.

Managed to get along fairly well in Germany on my one visit there, mainly Berlin. My ex promised (but eventually forgot, to the point where she denied once ever promising) to get us to China or Taiwan some day. Also learned a fair bit of religious Hebrew, Latin and Aramaic. My initial interest in Chinese actually came from being in a production of Brecht's The Good Person of Sichuan -- I had a huge crush/almost SWF identification with the lead actress, who happened to be studying Chinese at the time, and also an interest in reading the Yi Ching in the original.

Also studied most of the Old and Middle English dialects a little as part of a Structure and History class (I was an English major).  The professor for that class allegedly knew somewhere upwards of 20 languages and wanted to make fluency in most of those dialects one of the requirements for English Honors. He was the son of Peruvian diplomats, and so had gained fluency in several languages, probably sometime in pre-school and didn't appreciate that others might not have such quick study skills and yet might still be intelligent and well-versed.  I think he was also a friend of gay historian, John Boswell, though maybe I made too much out of a footnote in Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality?  Whether true or not, he was the object of much curiosity among my friends.

I'm a native English speaker, though I'm fluent in German (10+ years of study, spent time interning in Stuttgart) and Sign Language (one of my grans was deaf).

I could probably get by in Spanish and Gaelic.

... oh and my French is horrendous! :p

I would love to learn an Asian language though!

Quote from: DianaP on February 09, 2013, 03:58:45 PM
If that was your attempt at Spanish, it's spelled "hola." 

Ugh, don't even get me started. I only chose that class to get an easy A, seeing as to how language class was mandated. 

Actually, 'Ola' can pass as Portuguese, lol!

I used to be a big language enthusiast; I could get by in accent-free Quebec French and Castilian Spanish, and took Mandarin and Japanese classes in University College. I also come from a Filipino background, so I could speak basic Tagalog.

I learned Esperanto when I was 13 years old, and that just began a whole whorl of linguistic tendencies! I can also read and pronounce transliterated Punjabi, Hindi, and Sanskrit. Church Latin, German, Korean, Portuguese (both Continental and Brazilian), etc. Not that I understand these particular languages, but at least I've mastered their basic phonemic inventories!

Nowadays, I'm really just fluent in my native language, which is English, lol. However, it would be nice to retake a language and just master it. I would rather be bilingual at bare minimum than monolingual any day!

I took Spanish throughout high school but forgot most of it, unfortunately. I'm only fluent in English...

I would love to learn Swedish, Finnish, or Japanese.

Quote from: Bexi on February 09, 2013, 08:10:01 PM
I could probably get by in Spanish and Gaelic.

Irish or Scots Gaelic, not that they are massively different but the distinction matters to some

Quote from: Mohini on March 05, 2013, 06:23:47 AM
Actually, 'Ola' can pass as Portuguese, lol!

Yeah lets pretend that was my intention and that I can actually spell

Also sorry to resurrect a (presumably) dead discussion but I've been away from the site for a while.