I want opinions here.
I'm not a linguist. Okay, I have O-levels in 3 languages (French, Latin and Italian) but that does not make me a linguist. I can barely order a beer in French. Scrub that, I make a special point of knowing how to order beer, wine and coffee in whichever language I have to. I absolutely can't do accents. Two of the last three countries I visited are Spanish speaking; we couldn't have survived in Cuba without use of pidgin Spanish (and Jimmy knows dos cervezas, or dos mojitos).
Newspaper-type articles are generally written in simplified language (in English, the Guardian requires a reading age of 14, the Sun 9).
I love reading foreign newspapers. I don't pretend to do a literal translations, but I have Le Figaro, Le Monde, and La Stampa in my Favourites; sometimes I will search out a German newspaper to see what Germany's saying.
Occasionally, I find myself reading Dutch, or a Nordic language and, at least getting the jist. I know when people on Tubes are reading Turkish. On a bus a few years back I sat on a bus reading someone's newspaper and eventually asked him what language it was - it looked like Russian, but wasn't (and was in the Latin, not Cyrillic alphabet) - it was Lithuanian (or Latvian, I forget now...). During the 1980 Moscow Olympics I learnt the Cyrillic alphabet just by watching the TV (Daddy checked it with a Russian speaker at work - I was right). A chance encounter with my dear late cousin and godfather when he returned from Moldova confirmed my ability to read and understand Moldovan.
Is this usual amongst non-linguists? I am really interested in knowing whether I am a freak who has wasted her talents or whether everyone does this and it's so normal nobody bothers mentioning it.
I really quite fancy learning Arabic - it sounds such a beautiful language. When we were out on the boat in Egypt, our wonderful guide was asking the youngsters whether they liked Egyptian pop music. They all had blank faces. I had heard so much I knew I preferred it to what generally counts as Western pop music these days. He got me dancing round the boat. Would you believe that I accidentally wiped the video...?
