Visit to Assisi

[Tidewater]

I really enjoyed my visit to Italy and especially Poggio San Lorenzo.
That village was quaint, but did not act like it. Some places in Italy have an air of self-aware beauty. They are beautiful and they know it. Like the pretty girl in school who knew she was pretty and acted the part.
Poggio San Lorenzo was a beautiful little village, but the people there were just getting on with their day. While I was having lunch, men in work clothes and pliers sticking out of their back pockets were coming and going. Life was just going on. La dolce vita.
I'm sure there are thousands of Poggio San Lorenzos up and down that peninsula. I've seen many of them.

 

[tusks_n_raider]

I was able to make myself understood. (4 years of Latin in high school and fluency in French helped a lot).

That’s impressive. I didn’t realize French had elements that benefitted Learning Latin. From some reason I thought it was Spanish and/or Italian that helped with Latin but I might be completely wrong.

I’m semi-fluent in Japanese after 3 years. I can read and listen and understand a bit better and faster than I output.

I guess I’m fluent in casual speech mostly but certain pockets of technical higher level stuff I’m still lost.

I also study Korean and Japanese has helped me learn it a lot faster because their sentences structures (S-O-V) and Grammar particles and politeness levels are almost exactly 1:1 swap outs with exact meanings and usages.

I had three years, but my French is poor. I read it, but I read French much more easily. I'm really much more at home in the Germanic languages...

I tried French too and I think I could have picked it up in time but I just didn’t have a passion for it.

I couldn’t get Spanish to stick either after 2 years in HS.

I thought about trying to learn German at one point but for some reason it seemed harsh and intimidating to me kind of like Russian…lol



I really want to visit both Korea and Japan on extended stays at some point.

I’m also targeting cities that have public transportation but aren’t super high traffic with
Other foreign travelers that are sight seeing.

At least in Japan and Korea you can get passes for the train system and zip around pretty quick and then go things on foot from there.

I don’t really want to sight see I want to go around and experience day to day life from their perspective as much as that’s possible.

 

[Padreruf]

I'm impressed. I studied Latin (2 yrs hs and 2 in college), French (2 yrs HS) and 1 semester of theological French in grad school, along with theological German, 2 semesters of Hebrew and 4 semesters of Koine Greek. I had to pass reading proficiency tests for my doctoral studies. Whether it is poor memory or the result of all the drugs I took when have a SCT, I can remember little of it other than the Greek. When on a river cruise in France I could not understand their speech and could only read a little. I think my mind is fading...more on that in another post.

 

[TIDE-HSV]

That’s impressive. I didn’t realize French had elements that benefitted Learning Latin. From some reason I thought it was Spanish and/or Italian that helped with Latin but I might be completely wrong.

I’m semi-fluent in Japanese after 3 years. I can read and listen and understand a bit better and faster than I output.

I guess I’m fluent in casual speech mostly but certain pockets of technical higher level stuff I’m still lost.

I also study Korean and Japanese has helped me learn it a lot faster because their sentences structures (S-O-V) and Grammar particles and politeness levels are almost exactly 1:1 swap outs with exact meanings and usages.



I tried French too and I think I could have picked it up in time but I just didn’t have a passion for it.

I couldn’t get Spanish to stick either after 2 years in HS.

I thought about trying to learn German at one point but for some reason it seemed harsh and intimidating to me kind of like Russian…lol



I really want to visit both Korea and Japan on extended stays at some point.

I’m also targeting cities that have public transportation but aren’t super high traffic with
Other foreign travelers that are sight seeing.

At least in Japan and Korea you can get passes for the train system and zip around pretty quick and then go things on foot from there.

I don’t really want to sight see I want to go around and experience day to day life from their perspective as much as that’s possible.

I may be reading you wrong, but French, Italian and Spanish are all outgrowths and descendants of Latin. Latin even has strong influences on the Germanic languages, including German and English. Learning Latin first is therefore the best order. Then, you're continually saying "Aha!" when you learn the Romance languages. It's interesting to me that you had a similar experience with Japanese and Korean...

 

[tusks_n_raider]

I may be reading you wrong, but French, Italian and Spanish are all outgrowths and descendants of Latin. Latin even has strong influences on the Germanic languages, including German and English. Learning Latin first is therefore the best order. Then, you're continually saying "Aha!" when you learn the Romance languages. It's interesting to me that you had a similar experience with Japanese and Korean...

I haven’t researched this but because of the experience I’ve wondered if Korean has a relationship to Chinese like Japanese does or a relationship to Japanese on it’s own.

Japanese Kanji are Chinese characters that the Japanese people assigned their own vowel and consonant sounds to.

They finished the rest out with their own Hiragana ‘Alphabet’ and created the ‘Katakana’ to express loan word sounds from English and other languages.

Korea has their own Alphabet called ‘Hangul’ but there are times when some words sound similar to Japanese with a similar meaning.

I can quasi understand written Chinese because I can read the Japanese Kanji and interpret the meaning even though the words would be pronounced completely differently.

The symbols mean the same thing about 85-90% of the time so I might could stumble through a visit to China as long as I read the Chinese and never have to speak or understand what they are saying… lol

Long story short the Asian languages are probably interconnected similar to how you are describing the romantic languages are derived from Latin.

 

[Tidewater]

That’s impressive. I didn’t realize French had elements that benefitted Learning Latin. From some reason I thought it was Spanish and/or Italian that helped with Latin but I might be completely wrong.

I’m semi-fluent in Japanese after 3 years. I can read and listen and understand a bit better and faster than I output.

I guess I’m fluent in casual speech mostly but certain pockets of technical higher level stuff I’m still lost.

I also study Korean and Japanese has helped me learn it a lot faster because their sentences structures (S-O-V) and Grammar particles and politeness levels are almost exactly 1:1 swap outs with exact meanings and usages.



I tried French too and I think I could have picked it up in time but I just didn’t have a passion for it.

I couldn’t get Spanish to stick either after 2 years in HS.

I thought about trying to learn German at one point but for some reason it seemed harsh and intimidating to me kind of like Russian…lol



I really want to visit both Korea and Japan on extended stays at some point.

I’m also targeting cities that have public transportation but aren’t super high traffic with
Other foreign travelers that are sight seeing.

At least in Japan and Korea you can get passes for the train system and zip around pretty quick and then go things on foot from there.

I don’t really want to sight see I want to go around and experience day to day life from their perspective as much as that’s possible.

Four years of Latin first. Then German. Then Russian. Then French. Now Italian. That was the chronological order.
In terms of proficiency, I would say French, German, Russian and Italian. For me it is about usage and practice. Living in Belgium, I spoke French daily. I have often sought out Germans to practrice with (made a lot easier by the fact that they all speak excellent English. Latin helped with Russian grammar, but I do not practice it often and more modern complex words often escape me. I was able to get around Moscow when I visited.

As for Latin, French and Italian, there are more similarities than one might think: "Okay" or "agreed" in English is "d'accord" in French and "d'accordo" in Italian. "Man" in English is "homo" in Latin, "homme" in French and "uomo." in Italian. Once you get a feel for how the languages evolved over the late classical/early medieval periods, it starts to make sense. There was also a language called Occitan in southern France which still exists as a minority or niche language, which looks and sounds exactly like you would think it would: a mix of Italian, French, and Spanish. The French government stamped it out in the Enlightenment and almost succeeded in killing it entirely.

 

[TIDE-HSV]

Four years of Latin first. Then German. Then Russian. Then French. Now Italian. That was the chronological order.
In terms of proficiency, I would say French, German, Russian and Italian. For me it is about usage and practice. Living in Belgium, I spoke French daily. I have often sought out Germans to practrice with (made a lot easier by the fact that they all speak excellent English. Latin helped with Russian grammar, but I do not practice it often and more modern complex words often escape me. I was able to get around Moscow when I visited.

As for Latin, French and Italian, there are more similarities than one might think: "Okay" or "agreed" in English is "d'accord" in French and "d'accordo" in Italian. "Man" in English is "homo" in Latin, "homme" in French and "uomo." in Italian. Once you get a feel for how the languages evolved over the late classical/early medieval periods, it starts to make sense. There was also a language called Occitan in southern France which still exists as a minority or niche language, which looks and sounds exactly like you would think it would: a mix of Italian, French, and Spanish. The French government stamped it out in the Enlightenment and almost succeeded in killing it entirely.

The Catalonians in Spain speak Catalan, which is a direct descendant of Occitan. I used to buy a wine out of north Italy which had "Langue D'Oc" on it. Where my daughter lived in Savoy, France, the original language was Occitan and the place names still show it...

 

[Padreruf]

Four years of Latin first. Then German. Then Russian. Then French. Now Italian. That was the chronological order.
In terms of proficiency, I would say French, German, Russian and Italian. For me it is about usage and practice. Living in Belgium, I spoke French daily. I have often sought out Germans to practrice with (made a lot easier by the fact that they all speak excellent English. Latin helped with Russian grammar, but I do not practice it often and more modern complex words often escape me. I was able to get around Moscow when I visited.

As for Latin, French and Italian, there are more similarities than one might think: "Okay" or "agreed" in English is "d'accord" in French and "d'accordo" in Italian. "Man" in English is "homo" in Latin, "homme" in French and "uomo." in Italian. Once you get a feel for how the languages evolved over the late classical/early medieval periods, it starts to make sense. There was also a language called Occitan in southern France which still exists as a minority or niche language, which looks and sounds exactly like you would think it would: a mix of Italian, French, and Spanish. The French government stamped it out in the Enlightenment and almost succeeded in killing it entirely.

My parents insisted I take Latin as it is the root language of the "Romance" (?) languages. I never regretted it. I never took Spanish but could read it because of Latin and other languages.

The two hardest for me were Hebrew (different alphabet, rules, etc.) and German...finding verbs and prefixes were not easy and by that time I was tired of languages. German theologians were dense in English, much less German! (Other than Karl Barth!)