Gar1eth

My 10 day intensive Spanish class at Dartmouth was immersive. But I have to tell you even though we were supposed to converse only in Spanish, being at the very basic level, if we hadn't cheated after class, myself and the others at my level would have been mostly silent outside class. Gman

I used to work with several people with Spanish as their native language. In this instance there were two from Puerto Rico -Angel and Enid with Rafael who was from Mexico. One night I was out with Angel and Rafael. They started talking and picking at each others Spanish-thankfully in my case they were doing it in English. It was so interesting to hear plus very funny. And at one point Rafael said something about Enid (who was not present) -that when she got going, he couldn't understand her- but implying her voice frequently became high pitched, whiny, and spoke extremely fast Spanish. From this I gathered that Puerto Ricans spoke faster than Mexicans. Gman

I understand how you feel. When I was in grad school, my parents still lived where I grew up. And I would visit 'Mama' ( that's what all of us called my Latin teacher) routinely on school breaks. And you have to understand-over my two years with her in high school we were studying for Junior Classical League Tests (Latin Competitions between schools). We studied during lunch and after school. And for the Nationals competition in the summer, we used to study at her house in the summer. My specialties were Derivatives and Vocabulary. I won some ribbons and trophies over the two years. Anyway at one point my parents moved away from where I had grown up back to our hometown. I never went back to where I grew up as I had no family and no real friends left there. The few friends I had had moved away. So nine or so years after my parents moved away, a friend of the family let my mother know that 'Mama' had pancreatic cancer. I didn't do anything at first. I wasn't sure how I felt. I mean I felt bad- but I don't deal well with death-and that's a fatal disease. I was trying to think about what to say to her. Finally my mother rightly said, if she dies before you talk to her, you'll feel very bad. My mom was right. So I called up my teacher, and we had a nice conversation. I also made plans to go back to where I grew up a few weeks later. I was able to get there on a Friday-visit with her in the afternoon at her house and then visited with her again on Saturday and left Saturday afternoon. I don't know if any of y'all have ever been around anyone with pancreatic cancer. I mean I've seen terminally ill people before. But my teacher was so thin and cachectic that I wouldn't have recognized her. And the cachexia was of fairly recent vintage with the cancer. She showed me a picture that was probably takes of her within the last three years. Even though I wouldn't have seen her for 6 years at the time the picture was taken, in the picture she looked very much as I remembered her. So the cachexia with the cancer must have happened only over a two year period or so. Anyway it was a really good visit. We talked about old times and gossiped about people who had been in my class. I was really glad I went, and I know she was glad to see me. I had wanted to try and get our old school group back together to go see Mama even though most of us no longer lived anywhere near there. But she ended up dying about 2 months later. But I was so glad I had gotten to see her before she passed. Gman

Oh see my teacher was great. Plus she was one of those teachers who didn't care how popular you were. In fact she didn't really like the popular kids (athletes and student council) unless they were smart and worked hard. She liked the smart hard workers. She even liked the not so smart hard workers. She would even pass the not so smart if they showed they were trying. When my best friend and I went to college, we were both able to place out of the 1st two years of Latin by taking the department's test. Now the test was stupidly easy. But I actually understood Latin although I don't know how well I would have done as a freshman student taking a first semester junior level course as we hadn't had as much actual readings from Latin writers in high school as they did in the sophomore college classes. My best friend understood next to nothing about Latin. But my teacher was so good (and the test so poor) that he also placed out of 4 semesters of Latin. I will say she wasn't very flexible. She wasn't willing to teach English grammar -so that students who really didn't know or understand English grammar -parts of speech and types of clauses-weren't really going to do well in Latin. She would say the English teachers should have done that. Gman

I loved Latin-but part of this may be due to the fact that I loved my teacher. She was quite a character. And while I don't know a lot about French, my scant knowledge is that it's not really inflected very much-although I have heard verbs can be irregular-compared to German. If however you really understand the Noun Cases of Nominative, Genative, Accusative, and Dative in Latin along with the Latin parts of speech, the knowledge readily transfers over to German. The main problem with German being the endings have changed over time so that most of the endings are either -e, -en, -em, -es, or -er so it's easy to get confused. In Latin the endings are more varied and so easier to differentiate among them. Gman

In 1989 I remember finding it very difficult to find an English speaker in Paris. I'm not talking about the man on the street. I don't expect an average New Yorker to know French. But I was trying to make reservations to leave Paris for Amsterdam. Wouldn't you have thought there would have been an English desk somewhere in the Gare du Nord to help me? Thankfully there was a Canadian who had been living in some French speaking part of Africa or maybe the Caribbean next to me in line who helped me make the reservation. But I will say that my two years of high school Latin certainly helped me. I was always fairly good at grammar-but it certainly helped me improve. It also helped with my vocabulary. And if I hadn't learned about noun cases and declining in Latin beforehand, I'm not sure I would have done as well as I did in German in college. And it's funny, I remember a girl in my German class in college. She seemed intelligent. We were in groups one day. I remember remarking how I thought Latin was helping me in German. She said she had taken Latin in high school too but didn't see how the two were alike. I was stunned. I can only think her Latin class wasn't very good if she couldn't see the relationship in the grammar. Gman

'I love you' was the same in both Hochdeutsch (Standard German) and Schweizerdeutsch (Swiss German. Gman

I was going to say that while the average German might not understand Swiss German, I would assume that most educated Swiss who speak German-know standard German (Hochdeutsch). It's what books are ususally printed in. I mean I could envision an older person from a tiny village maybe not knowing Hochdeutsch, but nowadays I think that souls happen less and less. In my 1st year German class in college one of my teachers was Swiss. She was working on her Masters in German. I have a high school friend who is an ex-Mormon. He did his mission in Germany. He came back to the U.S. for awhile. But he married a German woman and lived in Germany for years. About 5 years ago he was transferred to Switzerland for his job. His Hochdeutsch is very good. But we were talking one day about when he 1st moved to Switzerland, and they were buying furniture. He said he had no idea what the salesman was saying. He said he was just nodding along pretending to understand. Luckily his German wife understood the salesman. Gman

I was either told or read somewhere that one reason English triumphed over French in England after the Norman Conquest was that the Norman nobility used to send their children to Paris for education. Eventually the Parisians made fun of their strange Norman French. So the nobility upset started speaking English instead. It's probably a myth. Gman

That's partly what I was talking about. Gman

I think my Conversational Spanish teacher 22 years ago learned his Spanish south of Mexico-maybe in Guatemala. I remember he preferred pronunciations like 'jo' using a soft American 'j' sound for 'yo,' and using the same 'j' sound for the word 'silla' pronouncing it 'sija' rather than 'seeya'. And then when I came back from my intensive Spanish class I was talking about how they told us to pronounce a 'V' as a 'B' when a co-worker from Costa Rica said no they pronounce the 'V' as a 'V'. But I was never quite sure whether she actually pronounced her V the same way I pronounce my English V and that possibly she couldn't hear the difference or whether in Costa Rica the V is pronounced fairly identical to English. Gman

A lot of Minnesotans can sound very Canadian as can people in the far northern New England states. . Wisconsinites can be awfully nasal too-someone told me once it was because the cold always gave them stopped up noses. Gman

We also had a discussion on here once with our dear departed sabbatical Belgian about the differences between Quebec French and France/Belgium. He remarked how Quebec programs were dubbed in France. I'm assuming French in Quebec has as its basis the French of 17th Century France left to evolve without the use of mass media to keep in constant contact with the mother tongue as would occur today. Gman

I've been told it's because Afrikaans is basically 18th Century Dutch which has in some ways been simplified-loss of genders and of case inflection. Could the difference between Dutch and Afrikaans have occurred because there was less commerce between Holland and S. Africa as opposed to the UK and either the USA or Australia? Another part of the puzzle is that the Dutch make a distinction with how their grandparents talk/talked to how they currently speak. I'm assuming the big change might be due to increasing homogenization of the local dialect probably starting around WW1 and increasing after WW2 due to urbanization and mass media. For example-I was born in 1961. My grandparents were born in either the late 1800's or early 1900's. They also didn't die until the 1980's and in one case the early 1990's. In general I can't really say that they spoke that much differently than I do today or that my nieces or nephew speak that much differently than I do. So for modern Dutch to say that their grandparents spoke a lot differently than they do today means the Dutch language has changed significantly over the last 100 years. Also I have to tell y'all that I've been watching a lot of British game shows on my iPhone through YouTube. And I can tell you that our vocabularies maybe fairly congruent with the people of the UK. But some of the accents, compounded by me only listening to copies of the program and on a small iPhone speaker, have me scratching my very bald head as to what they are saying. Of course I know not everyone in the UK can understand everyone else either. And the accents can be a lot more extreme than would occur in most of the USA. Mike -do the accents in Australia vary as much as they do in the UK-or would the variations for the most part be more similar to the lesser variations we see here in the USA? Gman

If I can use the reverse situation-then not always. I formerly had some acquaintances from Brazil. One of them spoke and understood Spanish fairly fluently. That might have been because he had done an exchange year at an American high school and taken Spanish. His friend also from Brazil did not really understand Spanish at all. An interesting thing is Afrikaans and Dutch. Apparently Dutch speakers have an easier time understanding Afrikaans than vice versa. I think I've heard that Afrikaans speakers sound to the Dutch much like their grandparents speak-if it's not the reverse. Gman

Mike-I freely admit you know more about this than I do. But while I can see people who know Afrikaans knowing English, I'm not sure how well I see 'Anglo' English speakers knowing Afrikaans. I've met several South Africans in my younger years. They were all English speakers. And while the subject never really came up, I don't remember any indications they were fluent in Afrikaans. Gman

That's not fair thougho_O. I've always heard it was fairly easy for Italians to pick up Spanish although I'm sure some are better at it than others. My Latin teacher in high school was originally from Genoa (she pronounced it Genova). My teacher told us her mother had studied Spanish, but it was not of any interest to her (my teacher) because she could understand it due to being Italian. The closest living languages to English (aside from Scots) are the Frisian group. And our mutual intelligibility with it is nil. Gman

I wish the ability to speak other languages was genetic. I have German, Dutch, Russian, and Polish ancestors. I wish that gave me a leg up in learning German and Dutch. Gman

I took three years of college German. But I was never fluent. I can write simple sentences better than I can speak it-or rather I could at the time. I also took two one month long Spanish language conversation courses 22 years ago, and a 10 day Spanish immersion course about 8 years ago. But I was nowhere near fluent in that. Some people have the knack for languages. For most of us who can't live in the country of that language it's a slog. From what I've read-aside from the plasticity of a child's brain which is set up for learning language-one reason children learn is they aren't self-conscious about making mistakes. They will say things ungrammatically without any problems. Adults don't want to speak incorrectly. And much like it takes a child three years to really start picking up on language-adults in an immersion experience by living in the country can often need a three year experience to start speaking a foreign language. Gman

http://daddysreviews.com/search/Active/Gino/gino_nyc Gman

Yes and no Boomer. This is a site for us to share our experiences. But if the reviewer's likes aren't-well let's use the term-congruent with a significant number ( even if it's not a majority ) of those of us who read the Forum, then encomiums for an escort don't mean a whole lot although in the spirit of fellowship I (and I'm sure most of us here on the Forum) can definitely be glad that a member of our brotherhood here on the Forum had a good time. That's why it's necessary to know either in general what our Fellow Forum member likes or a more specific relating of the events of the meeting such as in the Reviews. Gman

Thanks, FF. I did understand that. And I thought that might possibly be it. But Yoda's pronouncements usually sound weird-"Listen you must" or "Found someone you have" whereas "Love is all you need" makes perfect sense. Gman

I don't really get it. Are they saying Ringo looks like Yoda? Gman

I read that thread. But I only have a vague remembrance of it. And other Forum Members might never have read it. That's why I thought it was important to make note of Rex's Primary Interests. Gman

I thought in the past you had intimated that he might not be as spectacular as his pictures? So as Rex isn't 'into' total interactivity as they say, can you shed any light on Mr. Garay's interests? Gman