Any Bilingual Escapists here?

[The Eggplant]

English is my native tongue, but I've been studying Mandarin Chinese since grade school. I'm currently minoring in it at uni, with an eye towards working in international relations.

Learning Chinese (any elitists wanna correct me on that one?) at the moment, I'm not all that great at it.

Only because you mentioned it...which dialect?

 

[The Eggplant]

English is my native tongue, but I've been studying Mandarin Chinese since grade school. I'm currently minoring in it at uni, with an eye towards working in international relations.

Learning Chinese (any elitists wanna correct me on that one?) at the moment, I'm not all that great at it.

Only because you mentioned it...which dialect?

Mandarin, but considering that it is the Official Language of the Nation of China, it is still correct to say Chinese. Even if pretty much all of the people south of Shanghai speak Cantonese. Gasp, did I just end a sentence with a proposition?

'Course it is, but since you more or less called yourself out on it, I couldn't help but take the bait. You're not the first person I've met to not make the distinction, but you are one of the few that actually knows why it's acceptable to not do so. Kudos, fer sure.

 

[esperandote]

English is my second language, spanish is my first.

Tu madre tiene un bigote.

Maybe that's whye your IRL BFF delete you from his/her facebook

Google told me that it means your mother has a moustache. Is google wrong or do you just think that moustachioed mothers ruin facebook?

LOL. Yeah, google's right and of course I don't think that, but I can clearly see my mistake now. What I meant was that her manners made her friend delete her from her facebook, wich is the subject of a recent thread jane_eyre22 made.

 

[careful]

English is first
Spanish was second
German was third (weakest out of all now)
Japanese is now fourth (still learning, probably the coolest out of any of them) (it also seems to be the most logical)

have you gotten to 敬語 (keigo) yet? then japanese loses all its logic points in one fell swoop.

lol, no. That is the one thing about japanese, it's only a few islands, but they've got like, 30 different versions of it, lol.

no language is any more logical than any other, for japanese it seems to have very few irregularities and the grammar is surprisingly simple, but the difficulty of kanji compensates for that.
also keigo is of course self-consistent and meaningful as it fits into a whole more general hierarchy of polite/formal modes of japanese language all of which is well defined.

interestingly enough, there is no formal legal declaration as to what the national language or the official language of japan is ( http://houseikyoku.sangiin.go.jp/column/column068.htm ) it is only stipulated that pragmatic matters such as education and court trials must be conducted in japanese. why this is,i have no idea, but im guessing that due to the many various dialects of japanese, it wouldn't be worth the effort to work out a formal classification. specifically, i bet the japanese government was just avoiding the hassle of the potential problems of how the ainu japanese might react with the abolishment of their independent language. (ainu japanese are somewhat if not exactly similar to native Americans in north america, and with a similar history)

 

[Kenko]

Swedish is my first language and I speak english fluently. I know a few phrases and words to a few other languages that could help me get by if im travelling through those areas.