Language ability

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I do this sometimes also. I suspect that at first people respond positively at the effort you are putting into learning their language. I can only imagine that it probably begins to get old after a while. That's what I surmise (although I am known to frequently be way off on guessing how people will respond to things).

If I decide not to ask, I try to remember the approximate sound of the word (a very difficult thing to do), and consult a dictionary at my earliest opportunity.

Once I look up the word and learn it properly, I find myself unintentionally repeating it, either in my head or slightly audibly, for some time.

Wow, you guys all impress me!

I speak fluent English (obviously), and I am a native speaker of Russian, but I'm forgetting it due to lack of practice.

I'm taking French at school, but I don't speak it all that well (J'en ecris assez bien, non?). I can also read Ukrainian and translate it into Russian just due to similarity.

I'm extremely drawn to Sign Languages; I know the alphabets of French Sign Language (LSF), American Sign Language (ASL), and British Sign Language (BSL), but I only know a few words in LSF and BSL, and only some basic sentences in ASL. Sign Languages are apparently easier to learn though because they are newer and not as evolved as spoken languages.

I can speak English, Spanish and a little bit of French(I am learning).I am studying Russian and Japanese.Well, I am only 15.I have a lot of time to learn !

Hello,

My name's is Leanne and I too like languages!...

I randomly decided to teach myself Spanish when I was nine years old, and am practically fluent, despite the fact that NO ONE in my family speaks another language. Now, I am also quite interested in both Modern and biblical Hebrew; I know quite a few words and phrases and know the alphabet, and I am currently teaching myself German.

My aim in life is to be able to speak at least 5 languages FLUENTLY.

(P.S. Well done to my fellow language enthusiasts; what you all are capable of is amazing, and in my opinion you have great taste in hobbies and are extremely intelligent.)

Last edited by KnarlyDUDE09 on 01 Jun 2012, 1:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

Well as of today I speak (in order of fluency and this include writting skills)

1 Montenegrin or Serbian
2. Albanian
3. Spanish
4. English

When I was born the official language was Serbo Croatian, then it changed to just Serbian and then when Montengro became independent they decided that the dialect was Montenegrin so I just say I speak montenegrin.

I love foreign languages. As a teen I was obsessed with learning English (partly because I was obsessed with a faded popstar from the 80s and there was no information about him in German ). Now I'm studying Korean - an extremely fascinating language. I also feel drawn to different writing systems. I learned a bit of Hebrew and Persian and next I'm determined to tackle Chinese. And I'm fascinated with phonetics. Some languages I find pleasant to listen to even if I don't understand a word people are saying. I also like how different the pronunciation feels. Actually, I also feel more confident when speaking English or Korean (even though my Korean skills are still weak).

Scientist - I too must see the word written in order to remember it and understand it. If I see it written down I can look for patterns or if it is similar in my native tongue and most importantly if it is an amalgamation of two words that are combined to create a new meaning, or if there is a word from another language contained within it that helps with the meaning of the word. If you know what I mean? Hard to explain!

My native tongue is English as I am from Australia, but I have also spoken German for many years and am currently learning Spanish! Languages fascinate me, I love that you can communicate with people from all around the world and that you can communicate with people who don't speak your native language and with whom you would not be able to converse, had it not been for you learning other languages.
I also love the origins of different languages and how they influence each other, sort of the relationships of languages!

Great to see that there are other Aspies (I'm guessing?) who have a language ability. My main area is music, I was wondering if any of you guys are also adept at music? I think they are quite similar in many ways.

Flamencita, I definitely think language and music are similar. To me, music is basically another sort of language system. I'm not a very good musician, but I like to dabble in it and enjoy listening to many types of music, including Western and Eastern classical music. I sporadically play piano, guitar and accordion and write songs now and then (nothing fancy).

I'm not sure if I'm an aspie. I don't quite trust my own judgement on this issue. I can only say that from the online tests I did it seems likely that I'm somewhere on the spectrum and the informal lists of traits female aspies are supposed to have could be descriptions of me (minus a few points).

That's exactly how I see it too!
You can communicate so much with music that words cannot and also in situation where words are redundant. Music Therapy is fascinating, do you know much about it? Also there is a documentary called "The Music Instinct" whihc talks about the science of what music does to the brain. There is a guy called Daniel Levitin who is in America and is doing a lot of research into music and the brain. Int he program they have Bobby McFerrin and Sting among others as guests and they actually scan Sting's brain as he composes. Pretty cool stuff.

I love lots of music from all over the world too. I am a classical guitarist but I love Flamenco, south american popular music like reggeaton, salsa, merengue etc, Brazilian music such as choro, bossa nova and basically music that combines my love of music and other languages and cultures. But Spain and countries in south america such as Colombia, Brasil etc are countries that fascinate me and the music from these countries is some of my favourite!

It's hard to know things for sure, but the best guide as to whether you are an Aspie or not is yourself - if you think you are an Aspie there is a high chance you are. It is hard to spot from the outside and to pick up from tests because there is such variation between individuals and also a big difference between guys and girls usually.
I actually came across Aspergers while I was looking up information about OCD ( I also have mild OCD) and was like "hey all these things are things that I do!" And then went to 2 psychologists who tested me and confirmed my suspicions.
But also o a large degree it doesn't matter if you are an Aspie or not, if you have similar traits or behaviours as Aspies and find the information useful or like the company of other Aspies then that's the main thing. I understand that sometimes being diagnosed is a way of incorporating it into your self identity and being at peace with it and giving yourself less of a hard time about your eccentricities.

Actually, I think maths is also a language. Another connection (Maths-Music-Language). Do you like maths? I have no interest in it, but I was rather good at it at one point (and really bad at another ).

Flamencita, you must be my Aspie twin Nowadays I listen almost exclusively to music in languages I'm interested in. I also love Brazilian music - they have so many interesting, innovative styles! I like Bossa Nova, Samba, Pagode (kind of embarrassing, the lyrics are so kitschy), Nova MPB (a mix of everything?) and Repente is very interesting (it's like slam poetry with music). Actually, I don't think I even know what all the types of Brazilian music I like are called. South American rhythms are great overall.
Now I'm more interested in Asian languages, so I've switched to Korean and Chinese music. Their classical music is perfect for relaxing and Korea has so many cute Indie bands...

I know next to nothing about Music Therapy, but it's a fascinating concept. Do you know much about it? Any type of art therapy seems interesting. I once went to a series of lectures about language acquisition (given by neuroscientists). That was extremely interesting and they had one lecture about music as well. Unfortunately I don't remember the connection they drew to language acquisition, the only thing that stuck with me was that research indicates that there are certain harmonies which are inherently pleasant to listen to. I've bookmarked The Music Instinct for later

Wow, you can play classical guitar. That's cool. I'm even struggling with simple western guitar playing, I can't imagine how difficult classical must be.

At the moment I think I'll try to get a diagnosis. As I see it, I might have some other problem that makes me want to think I'm Aspie, so I'd prefer to get an expert opinion on it. Although I realise it's going to be difficult to find an expert for adult female Aspies... I'm kind of making my peace with it already, because I'm fairly convinced I'm somewhere on the spectrum. I'm mostly relieved - I often felt different and inadequate and had no idea why. Life just seemed to come easier to many of my friends and acquaintances.

Although it didn't come naturally to me at first, I found that with the right teachers and books, languages have come quite easily to me. That's why I'm majoring it them.

I find it's very logical. You take whatever ingredients you're given (the vocabulary), and just put them in the right order. There's also a heck of a lot of memorization involved, which I'm pretty good at, and I love memorizing facts. So it's a lot of fun!

One of the hardest things, however, is that to learn a language, you must learn a people. And to learn a people, you must interact with said people. lol Language is a social science- and I am learning day by day to become more social. One thing that's nice is that, when learning a language, you have permission to be as talkative as want!

I guess I've got some ability for foreign languages, but I'm not nearly as good as you are it took me much less time to learn English\French abc than cyrillic, though Russian is actually my native language.

I've been learning Romanian for a few years now and have reached a fair degree of fluency, though I'm a perfectionist and it can never be enough! I also know German and Greek well, some French, Italian and a bit of Spanish. I find it easy to pick up languages, and certainly agree that you can learn a new language at any age.

I also have that natural ability to learn languages, always had and it became a real passion. I want to learn as many languages as possible. The latest language I've studied is turkish, now I'm beginning with arabic. The others languages I can speak are french, english, spanish, swedish and I can understand quite well italian, portuguese, german, danish and norwegian. I'm doing my best to become fluent in all those languages. For the moment I have very good feedbacks and have always heard that I'm a fast learner so it's encouraging !

I have a better command of my native language (English) than most people who profess to speak it have but I have no natural ability to learn foreign languages. I play Scrabble competitively and majored in English with some linguistics at university. However, my foreign language ability is limited to embarrassing schoolgirl French. I'm trying to improve my ability to read and write French but I don't think I'll ever be able to speak it fluently. My ability to understand spoken French is appalling and probably always will be, unless I am one day forced to live in a Francophone country for years on end.

I've heard the speaking and listening aspect of French is the hardest aspect for an Anglophone. I think I would have more luck understanding spoken Japanese, but I'm intimidated by different alphabets/writing systems.

My mother language is Spanish.

I never studied English, just started reading web pages in English with a dictionary, It took me a month or two until my brain figured it.

I can't tell any English grammatic rule. It comes automatically. I still make lots of spelling and grammatical errors. I know when I write something wrong, but can't tell how to fix it.

My memory is ugly bad. If I had tried to memorize all the words, I would had completely failed. I doubt I could had memorized 10 words.
I can't remember the face of a person to which I had just talked seconds ago. If I see a person many times, my brains learn to recognize him. But if I find that person out of context, sometimes I get a familiarity sense, but don't consciously recognize him.