I speak Russian, Ukrainian and English and am slowly learning German. I also have studied and forgot Tatar, Hindi and French (there was some rather twisted education planning involved.)
I feel like the languages occupy their own niches, even the forgotten ones. German feels like really elaborate English with the promise of expressing thoughts more nimbly and precisely. Tatar helped Hindi through some words of the same “Turkish” origin (I mean words like “kitap(b) - a book”), and Hindi was fascinating in its unlikeness to most anything. I still have this “standard of otherness” in my mind. French… is like knitting phonemes, it was taught to us a process more than a language. English is for building from sometimes not-intuitive blocks, and yes, there is that chasm. Russian is my tool for “fencing”, “being witty”, easy to use like a well-balanced knife. And Ukrainian is what I do :)
We were told, when we began studying English, that the more languages you know the more times you’re human. Still, nobody said we’re gonna like the end result, for some reason.
I speak Russian, Ukrainian and English and am slowly learning German. I also have studied and forgot Tatar, Hindi and French (there was some rather twisted education planning involved.)
I feel like the languages occupy their own niches, even the forgotten ones. German feels like really elaborate English with the promise of expressing thoughts more nimbly and precisely. Tatar helped Hindi through some words of the same “Turkish” origin (I mean words like “kitap(b) - a book”), and Hindi was fascinating in its unlikeness to most anything. I still have this “standard of otherness” in my mind. French… is like knitting phonemes, it was taught to us a process more than a language. English is for building from sometimes not-intuitive blocks, and yes, there is that chasm. Russian is my tool for “fencing”, “being witty”, easy to use like a well-balanced knife. And Ukrainian is what I do :)
We were told, when we began studying English, that the more languages you know the more times you’re human. Still, nobody said we’re gonna like the end result, for some reason.