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LanguageI've always been interested in languages and linguistics, and I thought I was rather good at them, since I did well in them at school. Then I visited Europe and realised that a great many people there not only learnt English and other languages in school, but actually may be expected to use them at any moment when some spoilt English-speaking tourist who didn't bother to learn their language, or somebody from a neighbouring country who also learnt English at school, comes up to them on the street. What's more, they don't seem to mind this. Meanwhile, foreigners living in New Zealand are made fun of by monolinguals for their not-quite-perfect English, and any tourist who asked a stranger whether they spoke another language would almost certainly get a no and probably a funny look as well. What kind of idiot would come here without learning English?
Consequently, Europeans all seem to be able to speak several languages fluently. Of course, I might just get that impression because I don't tend to have conversations with the ones that I don't have a language in common with.
Armed with this new inferiority complex, I couldn't go on living on an anglophone island in the middle of nowhere pretending to myself that I was good at learning languages. So when the opportunity came up to not only work in the biggest particle physics lab in the world, but also to live in a French-speaking area, I jumped at the chance.
These pages document which languages I have 'learnt' to some degree, how I have learnt them, and how well I know them. As you'll see, I basically still only speak one language well, but perhaps this will give you some idea of what works and what doesn't when learning a language.This page has been accessed  times since 2024-11-16 06:03:05 Last updated: 2007-08-31 12:32:45
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