My absence

[Leto85]

I beat you, Leto... Nederlands (Dutch), Deutsch (German), Francais (french), I am also learning Espanol (Spanish). I have had 4 years of ancient Greek (Hellenika) in school, so, although I may sound like Shakespeare, people speaking modern Greek may be able to understand it...

Cool Illu! Someone who speaks some languages better than me I only can see on the bright side. Maybe you can someday help me with something in Spanish? Because I got stuck somewhere. Those hard grammatic rules.... not comparable with Dutch, nor English.

[Pam]

I hope you enjoy your vacation, Leto.  We'll be here when you get back! 

To all of our multi-lingual members, I'd like to ask that you include an English translation of the things you post in other languages.  English is our only common language here and we should keep that in mind when posting.  Thanks very much!

[The Illuminator]

Cool Illu! Someone who speaks some languages better than me I only can see on the bright side. Maybe you can someday help me with something in Spanish? Because I got stuck somewhere. Those hard grammatic rules.... not comparable with Dutch, nor English.

What you think is hard is, in fact, easy for most people. We are not used to that kind of grammatical rules; characteristic for most Germanic/Celtic languages, especially for Dutch, are the many exceptions.

When the Visigoths from Gotland came to Spain during the Barbarbian Invasions, they took their language with them. Since Spain was a Roman province, their languages was much influenced by Latin and the old Celtic languages.
The structure of Latin (I've had 3 years of Latin lessons, I know many of these rules by hard) combined with the exceptions and irregularities of Germanic/Celtic languages results in what you (me too sometimes) call hard grammatical rules.

[Jonna]

I have had 4 years of ancient Greek (Hellenika) in school...

I took Hellenistic Greek in college!  I remember it being a lot of fun.

Also I studied French from junior high through college.  Pretty sure I've forgotten most of it but I do remember I had a rockin' accent.  

[Swede1992]

Well, English is pretty common for all Swedes (at least partial fluency since many here know English in theory alone); French could have been worse on me, but I'm not good at it. Norwegian and Danish should rightly be considered two other languages since they really are, but if you know either Swedish, Norwegian or Danish you get the other two pretty easy with a little practice. Sure enough, that amounts to 5 languages (without much of an attempt made)!

I have to say though that I'm impressed of people that know some of the Italic languages since the Germanic languages are quite a bit away from them. French does technically belong there, but I find it so similar to English that I believe Latin and such would be harder.

Oh yeah, enjoy your vacation Leto!
And the moderator in me says that this shouldn't be made into a new babble thread, so try to keep this conversation as short as possible.

[samoht04]

English is so common because we got invaded a lot of times!  Many languages got mixed, so we have similar words to other languages.