On Apr 14, 2006, at 12:40 AM, Michael Monnerie wrote:
On Freitag, 14. April 2006 06:32 Paul R. Ganci wrote:
Start young when it is easy for kids to pick up the sounds.
Yes, my daughter has the advantage of learning german with me, french
with my wife, and later at school she will learn english anyway.
Still, people in Belgium have it more easy: in addition to en,de,fr,
they learn dutch and their local flavor, a mix of all languages (which
dutch is already anyways).
The most funny party concerning languages I had was on Crete (and
island
of Greece): It was a party where all the tourist guides were, about 20
people and at least 9 different languages, where each could speak at
least 2, often 4... now that's a mess :-)
My favorite story isn't that extreme. It's about a friend of mine who
went and did his senior year of HS in study abroad. He had learned
German in HS, but was sent to Denmark (close) and spent that year
learning the language.
When he came back, there was this big party thing in Washington DC for
all of the exchange students going in both directions. He came back to
the US not having spoken any English for a year, and was put in a hotel
room with someone who had been in Germany not speaking English for a
year, and a German who had been speaking only English for a year. So,
none of them was entirely comfortable going back to speaking their
native language yet, none of them had been speaking the same language
as the other two during that year ... and they stayed up all night
talking. At first, each just spoke the language they had been speaking
for the year, and the other two just understood.
I think Daniel said that by morning, he was speaking English again :-}
