My native language is English, subtype Mid-Ulster English. When I moved to Cambridge I spent roughly the first year saying everything twice and the second time a bit slower, so I got fed up with that and consciously modified my accent to be closer to how people talk around here.
I really enjoyed this post :) And I very much agree with you on 'youse' - coming from West Lancs (and having been schooled in merseyside from age 11), and so being familiar with Scouse, it's always seemed natural to me
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I completely forgot about Latin for some reason! I guess I was stuck in a living-languages track. I took GCSE Latin, and it remains useful in a grammatical and etymological substructure kind of way. (German and Latin were the two things that really made me aware of the grammar of languages; French didn't really do much for that because it's close enough to English in a number of important ways that a lot of that was just skated over in class.)
Even the minimal Irish I've learned is enough to let me puzzle out Scottish Gaelic conversations on Twitter without too much work and occasionally not even a dictionary (hi, khalinche!). I'd love to acquire enough spoken facility to find out how mutually-comprehensible they are in that mode as well. Welsh remains a bit of a mystery apart from spotting the odd distant cognate across the P/Q divide, though.
My grandparents came to the UK when I was four and they didn't speak much ENglish, despite having lived in the US from the late 1930s. They got the flat next door to us and I just picked up German easily. I did it at school too, and having the paths for language acquisitionm made it easier to learn French. I did those at university and Spanish in the first year, but then changed course. Although I'm fluent and my accentis good I still find declensions difficult. And gender of nouns
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The only language I'm any good at is English, which is a matter of some regret. I sound quite RP, as you know.
I have GCSEs in Latin, French, and Ancient Greek (the last of which was done in 2 years, and I enjoyed greatly); the classics made anatomy a little easier. I have also done odd bits of German (a year at school, then a course at the University language center). I try and pick up at least some of the local language before visiting places. Before we most recently went to Portugal, I did a 6-week teach-yourself course (which I LJd about at the time)., which proved moderately useful.
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Oh yes, or alternatively, aye right.
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Even the minimal Irish I've learned is enough to let me puzzle out Scottish Gaelic conversations on Twitter without too much work and occasionally not even a dictionary (hi, khalinche!). I'd love to acquire enough spoken facility to find out how mutually-comprehensible they are in that mode as well. Welsh remains a bit of a mystery apart from spotting the odd distant cognate across the P/Q divide, though.
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I have GCSEs in Latin, French, and Ancient Greek (the last of which was done in 2 years, and I enjoyed greatly); the classics made anatomy a little easier. I have also done odd bits of German (a year at school, then a course at the University language center). I try and pick up at least some of the local language before visiting places. Before we most recently went to Portugal, I did a 6-week teach-yourself course (which I LJd about at the time)., which proved moderately useful.
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