The Multilingual Writers Club: Hey, look! It's the quote of the day!

I've seen this before and now thought, why not join it?

Name: Indra
First Language: German
Second one and so on: English, French, Russian (haven't spoken it in years, so don't ask about it), Spanish
Can write ff in: English, German (never done it), French with some effort (also never done it)
Can read/translate between German, English, French, Spanish (only in writing)

 

Indra. Lol another Russian linguist whos pretty much forgotten the language.

 

Name Miana
First Language English
Second Language Spanish
Third Language and so onASL
Languages in which that person can write ff in English, maybe Spanish. Never tried.
Languages that person can read and translate between: English and some Spanish. Depends on if it's Castillian Spanish or informal Spanish that's spoken down here in CA.

 

Name: Vongchild, aka VC and Vongy
First Language: English
Second Launguage: Hebrew
Can write fics in: English
Can read fics in: English.

My hebrew doesn't go very far beyond conversational. Lo K'tav Fanfic b'Ivri'it. Sli'cha

 

Name: KnightedRogue.
First Language: English.
Second: Informal "American-ized" Spanish.
Third and so on: American (and a bit of French) Sign Language, but I guess we've established that that doesn't really work here.
Language to write ffn: Spanish/English
Language to translate: Spanish/English

Yeah, that's not too impressive, I suppose . . . *sigh* Oh, well.

*KR*

 

Sara. I learned Latin first because I didn't want to take Spanish with my sisters. Then I went to high school and they said, "Sorry, you know too much latin. Here's a nice greek book for you to memorize." Through Latin and Greek, I learned how to read French. In my English classes, I learned Middle English. WHen I got to college, I realized I could finally learn Hebrew, which I've wanted to do forever. Then I got assigned to be a Spanish-speaking missionary and had to become fluent very fast, which was helped by me speaking to everyone in spanish, not english. So, my major, ironically, is English.

 

Name: Greg
First Language: English
Second Language: French
Third Language: Scots Gaelic (well, I'm working on it)...and I can understand little bits of Italian and German.
Languages in which I can write fanfic: English and French
Languages I can read and translate between: Same.

solojones and I have planned to write a collaborative fic in French...although we're not exactly sure what yet, or when we'll be able to get to it. But I love writing in French...such a poetic language.

 

So, who's up for a spanish rr?

 

Lady_WinterCelchu, it's just too hard, isn't it? I never really got the hang of it.

 

Indra
It's easier if you know Polish but it's still confusing. The speech was alright. I still understand speech abit though.

It's one of those that if you don't practice your screwed.

 

DarthIshtar I suppose I am, even though I don't know any Spanish (but I know lots of Latin roots and I'm a good guesser).

Anyone know any French ff? I want to test my French. Or Chinese, but I'd never write any in Chinese because I'm a horrible speller in that language and I don't know all the SW terms/translations...

 

Lady_WinterCelchu, my problem is that it was my third foreign language and I only learned it at school for three years. I can still read it and understand the gist of a conversation, but absolutely can't speak it.

 

Hello, everyone.

I'm German, myname is Alrik Fassbauer, and my stats are :

First language : German (of course in my case )
Second language : English (BE)
Third language : Espanol (sorry, the sign is not on my keyboard), but totally rusted in. I stopped using it about ten years ago.

Besides that, I'm generally inrersted in european languages.

I can write stories in German and English - in fact I already did so, but the translation process (manually ! ) was not easy gfor me, although the more often I do it, the more training I get in it.

I find this highly interesting !

 

I knew Ishy would be in here.

Name: Liana
First Language(s): English and French. It's hard to explain, but I learned most of them at around the same time - although I'm much, much better at writing in English.
Other Languages: bits and pieces of Spanish, Italian, and Old English
Languages in which that person can write ff in: English, French
Languages that person can read and translate between: Italian, Old English


SilSolo: I've written some French fanfics - jedilelila has served as an excellent beta for one of them, because my written French is greatly lacking. My family speaks it, but I've never had much time or opportunity to learn how to put my thoughts down on paper correctly.

And strangely, all my French stories are A/P - something which I don't write at all in English. C'est l'amour et la morte.

 

Hello everyone! I am...
Name: Sid
First Language-(Teengager)English

Second Language-Hebrew-Aval Ani Lo Tov Maod B'Ha'Lashon(but i'm not that good at the language. i'm descent, but don't even get started at my grammer-it stinks)

Third Language-French (just a tiny bit though)

A fic in Hebrew might be good, or maybe a poem. It's so easy to ryhm in Hebrew.

Sid_the_Sith

 

Old English ? Interesting, I don't know anyone who knows that language.

 

I can speak quite a bit. However, most of it I learned by backtracking the middle english that I already knew, making the words slightly more Danish due to Britain's Danish past, and, voila, Olde English.

 

Liana: J'ai lu vos histoires francais et elles sont belles. Merci. J'adore A/A.
I hope I said it right since they never teach ya how to say fanfiction in French class.

 

Name: Arina

First language: Russian
Second language: English
Third language: Ukrainian
Forth language: Polish (can read but not speak)

If anyone wants some help with Russian, feel free to ask.

A.

 

Wow.

 

Now, that I've escaped hospital...

Name: Viola
First Language: German
Second Language: (school-)English
Third Language and so on: bits of Latin, French and Italian
Languages in which that person can write ff in: I try to write in English, never used German in fanfics before
Languages that person can read and translate between: German-English, French with much time and a good dictionary. Well, MUCH time to practice...

I'm curious. How do you write when you don't use your native language? Do you translate or do you stay in one language?

Personally, I'm incapable to translate a German text I wrote word by word into English. Thanks to my school where it was a deadly sin to speak a German word in an English lesson. I really miss my English/English dictionary.

 

I had painfully (well, at first it seemed me so) translated everything into English, when I wrote in German. I did this a few times (I also write some fantasy stories in an RPG board).

I wanted to try a different approach : I wrote "The Light" completely in English first, and later translated it back into German.

It was a bit easier, because I already knew how I would like it to be (in the end).

I really like the English language (despite my criticism that it drives too many smaller languages into extinction due to its "globality"), and recently I even caught myself writing German but with English Grammar !

I knew then that I was driving too far over the border ...

A friend of mine recently sugested this site for some transltions : http://www.freetranslation.com

It seems to be quite good, but I haven't tested it that much.

By the way, I can also read and understand most of the Dutch language (although I've never actually learned it ) , but I can't speak it.

Edit : The later the night, the more letters are missing ...

 

That's like me and italian. Because I took latin and spanish and am fluent in both, everything sounds like spanish mispronounced and I can understand it.

Does anyone here use their languages to make up new languages for their characters?

In my stories involving Alderaanians, they speak Taiald, which is basically spanish with latin grammar, but with certain phonetic differences. Like feghaza is venganza--vengeance.

For Naboo, my language is based a lot on Hebrew.

For Tatooine, the slave dialect is a lot like Spanish. Padme and Anakin have a habit of saying "tsika ma" or "miya phrecosa." The first is like chica mia--my little girl. The second is like "mija preciosa"--my precious daughter.

 

Sid-
Second Language-Hebrew-Aval Ani Lo Tov Maod B'Ha'Lashon(but i'm not that good at the language. i'm descent, but don't even get started at my grammer-it stinks)


Another hebrew speaker!!!! Yay, I'm not alone. Shalom chaver!!!! Mah Shlomech????

 

recently I even caught myself writing German but with English Grammar !

I'm guilty of that, too! Sometimes I use such structures as "that makes sense" in German ("das macht Sinn" when I should say "das ist sinnvoll"). Bad German, but thankfully language is fluent and grammar can change with time. Well, I'm not the only one who makes this mistake. It's quite common now.

Last night I had a moment when I posted on the German speaking forums and couldn't remember a word in my native language and was forced to write the English word! Scary...

Does anyone here use their languages to make up new languages for their characters?

In fact I have some plans on my mind to create stories around a world that is based on the region where I live. I had the idea to use the local "Low German" (Plattdeutsch) as the language for that planet, but I have to visit my family a bit more to learn to talk in this slang. I've never needed to speak in it (apart from the greeting: "Goat goahn!"), only to understand it. It sounds very much like Dutch. The border is only around 30 km away, so last time I visited Enschede it took only about an hour to understand most of the people.
My favorite word in "Platt": afsünnerlik (=strange), I like the sound...

Viola