Originally posted by red clay
As someone who still has trouble with my native lang. which is English, I envy anyone who can learn and use other languages.
My mother could read latin. When she was young she could converse in it.
Up until the early 50's latin was taught in High schools here.
As for Welsh, my grandfather was welsh. The only welsh I ever heard him speak was probably not"nice".
As for me learning any of it, forget it. |
Like Chinese, which I learned in the RAF, it is much easier than they make out, once you learn the mutation rules, which make it difficult to use a dictionary - it has phonetic spelling, for a start. My parents used to speak it when they wanted to keep things from me, which is a great incentive, and most of my relatives spoke both, or a weird mixture. Lstin, on the other hand, lived in books and seldom came out: for O Level I leaned Book 4 of the Aeneid by heart in English, which got me through! I much preferred Greek, which I've mostly forgotten.