Gar1eth

I'm an outie! Ive always had abs, not sure what the connection is though. I think it starts from birth....but the genetics thing could be true too.

Immersion, for me, is the best way to become very good at a language. It's equal parts necessity, plenty of opportunities for correction, and environment. When in a foreign country, you're in their domain, you follow their rules, which includes language. Sure, you will eventually find someone who would like to learn English, giving you some reprieve, but this person isn't trying to learn English 24/7.

I took a 3-week immersion course in German quite a long time ago. When I flew back to the US, I sat next to a German woman who was going to visit relatives for Thanksgiving. When I told her what I had just completed, she switched to German and wouldn't speak English and kept reminding me to speak German. We talked the entire 10 hours back to the US. I was toasted by the end of the flight.

Now that I think about it, I don't think I have seen a pot belly that was an 'outie' so perhaps a lack of abdominal fat stretches out the abs and creates the outie. An interesting (and largely undiscussed) question you ask, Mr. Gman.

http://guidelive.imgix.net/1438973664-FB_IMG_1438828130372.jpg?fit=clip&q=60&or=0&auto=format&w=678
 
Gman

Just retrieved from the fading memory that old crack that Dutch is German spoken with a potato lodged in your mouth.

If I'd had to guess it would probably be our "g". I've had contact with people that speak a wide variety of languages in Europe, and I've never come across another language that pronounces the "g" in the same way as Dutch speakers do. Most languages sound out the "g" like it is in the word "goal". But in the Netherlands it's more like you're coughing up flegm. I personally don't like that variation, though, I prefer the more soft "g" of Flemish Belgium. 
I know that that "g" was often the hardest part when I was trying to have foreign friends say some Dutch words. I would sound out the "g" and they'd look at me confounded and ask: "What are you doing in your mouth and throat to get a sound like that?"
I too have heard though that Dutch is apparently a hard language to learn... We do have some pronounciation quirks and don't get me started on the differences between Dutch in the Netherlands and Dutch in Flemish Belgium. Foreigners are taught "proper" Dutch in courses in Flemish Belgium but when they go out all you hear is the Flemish dialect which has a lot of idioms, expressions and even different pronouns than "proper" Dutch. Flemish people from one side of Flanders have quite some difficulty understanding Flemish people from the other side of Flanders sometimes!
You could liken in to the difference between British English and American English. It's the same language even though there are quite some differences between the two.

I am nowhere near fluent in German. And if any native speakers of Dutch or German think differently I will gladly concede, but I doubt in general that they could understand each other very well at all except for maybe the Germans/Dutch/Belgiums living right near the borders of Holland, Germany, and Belgium. I'm betting their native dialects might be more understandable in those regions. Dutch is pronounced very differently and the words have changed a lot in spelling compared to standard German.
 
Gman

Sorry, but this thread reminded me of the following!
 

 
A classic linguistic moment if there ever was one!

Geoffrey seems to agree with you about bad accents.
 
"There was also a nun, a PRIORESS,
Who, in her smiling, modest was and coy;
120 Her greatest oath was but "By Saint Eloy!"
And she was called Madam Eglantine.
Very well she sang the service divine,
Intoning through her nose, becomingly;
And she spoke French fairly and fluently,
125 After the school of Stratford-at-the-Bow,
For French of Paris style she didn't know."
 
 
Gman

Geoffrey seems to agree with you about bad accents.
 
"There was also a nun, a PRIORESS,
Who, in her smiling, modest was and coy;
120 Her greatest oath was but "By Saint Eloy!"
And she was called Madam Eglantine.
Very well she sang the service divine,
Intoning through her nose, becomingly;
And she spoke French fairly and fluently,
125 After the school of Stratford-at-the-Bow,
For French of Paris style she didn't know."
 
 
Gman

I took four years of Latin in high school. Our teacher made it very easy to learn because we had quizzes all the time and she didn't tolerate kids not doing their homework. In Latin, if you don't keep up with assignments and memorize the vocabulary, you're dead in the water.

I am fluent in Sarcasm, but that's about it--despite 5 1/2 years of French classes and 1 1/2 years of Russian classes. But I can still count to ten in those two languages.

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

Yes, I understand that happening in 1989 because the area around the Gare du Nord is very French, including the train statition. Gman, that very likely would not happen now, except in areas where tourists never visit.

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

When Spanish double ll (usually pronounced like y in the English word yellow) is pronounced instead like a j and thus calle becomes caje is a porteno accent and is limited primarily to the area around the Rio de la Plata of Argentina and of Uruguay. It is most often associated with Buenos Aires. The accent developed because of a large influx of Italian speakers to the area in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is about the only regional accent that I like.

does screaming for jesus and yelling oh god, and babbling in tongues count when being jackhammered?

Gman, there is virtually no accent difference in Australia. There are some differences in vocabulary, but they are minor. There are accent differences between Australia and New Zealand, but none between the east and west coasts of Australia.

Spanish is my mother tongue. Italian is somewhat easy to understand, especially in spoken form, but it can sometimes get real tricky. On the other hand, written Portuguese is an absolute piece of cake. To me, it looks like funny Spanish with a lot of misspellings and weird word order :) As far as spoken Portuguese, it is easy to understand Brazilians, but not so Portuguese, because their accent is a lot more nasal and they do not articulate. In general, it is easier for a native Portuguese speaker (whether Brazilian or Portuguese) to understand spoken Spanish than the other way around.
 
Besides Spanish, I learned English AND French simultaneously as a very young boy, and I am absolutely fluent in those three languages. No foreign accent, particularly in French. Since my primary school education was in Spanish and my high school was in French, I count and do basic arithmetic in Spanish, but solve more sophisticated math questions, such as second degree equations and square roots, in French. Funny how the brain works.

For me being monolingual is a blessing. I get myself into enough trouble with English alone.

I studied Spanish, German, French and Italian in school, but never learned to actually speak any of them. Then I became good friends with someone who spoke all those languages fluently, before he learned English. He is a published writer in English, Spanish and French. How I envied him! So for several years I worked on my German, and became fluent enough to study at the University of Vienna. When I lived in eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, I was surrounded by people who spoke no English, but I was pleased to find that the older ones often spoke enough German for me to converse with them.
 
Like whippedguy, I love to exclaim in 19th century operatic Italian, and I can muddle through enough to get by as a tourist in French and Spanish-speaking countries. But I rarely find anyone in Palm Springs with whom to speak anything but English, except for the occasional foreign tourist or immigrant.

I dunno, Gman. When I put the pics under my electron microscope it became obvious that there's a 7/32nds of an inch difference between the depiction of abdominal muscle 2 in pictures 2 and 3.
 
I'm being facetious, of course. If the advertiser had not used the fictitious phone number I would be less skeptical.