wiseheart | So, it is party time again, folks!

Each year this time, we launch my virtual birthday party, which starts on October 1 and ends on October 9 at midnight, sharp. The goals of the party are to post as many comments and collapse as many threads as possible, on as many new pages as we can. It is always great fun, as you can see if you check out the similar entries of the last few years.

This year, I'll also throw the real party at mid-time - and post the recipes of all the food that will be there for you, so that you can all participate if you want to. Virtual food has no calories.

Fandom-related discussions are as welcome as the ones about coffee or chocolate (just to name a few favourites from previous years), and, of course, pictures and recipes of birthday cakes. ;)

So, drop by, tell your story, post your pics or silly poems, ask questions you always wanted to ask and have a good time!

Soledad, in excited expectation

Oh, and by the way, to provide birthday gifts hobbit-style, I've got a revived story and a Kansas 2 update for you.

Enjoy!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

And one didn't feel as if her entire life revolved around the Doctor -- she had a strong relationship with her grandfather.

I wasn't allowed to watch all that much either -- we were allowed to watch from when we got home from school until dinner (which was usually only a short time), and then we weren't allowed until we'd finished our homework. Often I got so much homework (and was so perfectionist about it) that I didn't get to watch anything more at all. We did tend to watch the news as a family at 9pm and I sometimes got a dispensation for educational documentaries.

We did watch some education programmes; the Swedish public service television and radio company had (probably still does, but I have been away for going on nine years) a branch called Utbildningsradion which means "the education radio". They had a number of programmes for learning languages. I especially remember one series called Young Australia that we all enjoyed quite a lot. As we got older, we did also watch some drama series, but I would probably have been in my teens by then.

One of the rubbish things about being brought up in the UK is how difficult it is to learn languages -- it really isn't the norm and it isn't catered to much in broadcasting.

I took French in school, but I don't really speak it; I think one of the main reasons people in Sweden are as good at English as we are, is that we get a lot of British and American television series and films, and we do not dub them except for very small children. Therefore you do hear a lot of spoken English and that helps you learn the language. Lovely though French is, it is a smaller language and we got very little French spoken on Swedish television. So despite taking it for six years, I don't really speak or understand spoken French. In the same way you don't get exposed to a lot of any one other language in the U.K. so it is difficult to learn another language even if you do want to; then there is the added problem when English is your first language of what other language to learn. It may not be official, but English is very much the common language in much of international communication, even between people where no one is a native English speaker. That makes it the sensible first choice for a foreign language to learn; there isn't really as clear cut a choice for native English speakers as far as I can see.

It is embarrassing how most people in continental Europe are fluent in English, but the English-language television is definitely a factor in your favour. I think there's also a cultural difference -- here it is often considered uncool to learn languages for some reason, whereas in many European countries it is completely the norm to be fluent in several non-native languages. I once worked with a Finnish lady who spoke six languages fluently; her English was lightly accented but otherwise close to perfect.

I learned French and German at school for five years apiece, but in neither case can I speak the language at all any more. (I can read French a little.) There are occasional French subtitled films but German is even less easy to come by. I don't know what language I'd learn now if I had a choice to start again as a child. Spanish perhaps? Chinese would probably be a good bet, population wise, but much harder for an English speaker.

I took German, too, for the last three years before university, and then at university for a year; I can actually speak and understand some German, and definitely read it, but I feel it would be a great embarrassment if I didn't with that background, since for my university course we had to read a different German work of fiction each week of the academic year! It also helps that I already know two Germanic languages -- Swedish and (at least in theory) English -- so that often enough I can understand things in German without actually ever having learnt the word.

The extra problem with trying to learn Chinese, apart from it being such a different language both in type and script, is of course that you would have to choose which dialect you wanted to learn; I understand from my Chinese colleagues that the different dialects are wildly different and knowing one does not lead to understanding others.

I used to work with a lot of (Swiss)-German speakers but their English so far surpassed my German we always spoke in English. German & English don't feel particularly similar to me, though I know many words have common roots. I gather from those who learned Spanish at my school that it's possible to guess many of the words from the French.

I understood that written Chinese was dialect independent?

It was a problem of sorts, for the international people in my group at Uppsala University; they were generally not 'allowed' to speak Swedish at work, because everybody else's (technical) English was so much better than their Swedish. Of course, that meant they never got a chance to practice their Swedish and therefore didn't improve...

I, too, thought that written Chinese was entirely dialect independent, but my Chinese colleague here at Queen's implied that was not the case. However, I was mostly referring to the fact that the spoken Chinese is very different in different dialects.

Knowing both Swedish and German, I can see the Germanic roots in (some parts) of English; there are definitely very strong other influences as well. Sometimes knowing English actually helps me with my French, with words like 'liberty'; the Germanic 'freedom' is not quite as recognizable in Swedish 'frihet' and German 'Freiheit'.

My husband spent a couple of years living in Germany but barely learned any German because everyone there spoke English, and they all socialised together.

Modern English is quite a complicated language, I think; a bit of a mongrel -- there are roots in Latin, Greek, Old French, Old German and several other languages, and often there are concepts that can be expressed with several words with entirely different roots. I've never studied it but I imagine Anglo-Saxon would be strongly linked with Swedish? (I fear my acquaintnce with Swedish is limited to watching Wallander and the like...)

I haven't studied Anglo-Saxon either, but yes I do believe it is the Germanic parts of English with strong links to Swedish. I do find that the more languages (of a certain group) you know, the more likely you are to spot even the less obvious links. For example, 'light' in Swedish is 'ljus' which is pronounced with a silent 'l'; in Danish (and I think Norwegian) it is 'lys' and in German 'Licht'. Going straight from Swedish to English, it looks quite different, but taking the route via Danish and German it looks much more similar.

According to the dictionary handily placed within reach of my chair, light comes from OE 'leht' which looks very similar to the German, whereas 'lumière' presumably shares roots with all the English words sourced from the Latin, such as 'luminous'.

I have two problems with English, personally:
1) The almost complete lack of connection between spelling and pronounciation;
2) The complete lack of consequent rules. Things work differently on different days of the week or by rainy weather or only God nows why. Learning the countless rules of German grammar is a PITA, but at least when you have learned them, they cause no further problems.

Hmm. To a native speaker it all feels quite logical (well, I'll give you the occasional pronounciation nightmare -- 'Cholmondeley' near us is pronounced 'Chumly', for example).

So, it is party time again, folks!

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