Arsene Wenger on Languages

[BeyondGeography]

For those of you who don't follow football/soccer, Wenger is the manager of Arsenal in the UK. He grew up on the French side of the Franco-German border and speaks five European languages plus Japanese. This is a great talk to children on what all that learning has brought to him over the years.

[yuiyoshida]

1. I have a friend who speaks 5 languages...

She grew up in Taiwan. So she learned both Mandarin and Cantonese from her parents. She had and Aunt and Uncle who she would spend summers with in Japan, so she learned Japanese. She also had some close friends, who were Korean, so she learned Korean very well from them.

On coming to the United States, she learned English, which she said was the hardest language to learn. She used to work at this Japanese Restaurant, which is where I met her...and has since moved to work at the San Francisco International Airport, where she works as a translator.

[SheilaT]

2. I have always envied those who speak more than one language fluently.

For an American, I'm okay in the foreign language department. My French is pretty decent, my Spanish acceptable, and I know a little German and Italian. But I never had the chance to live in another country and get really fluent, alas.

[3catwoman3]

3. Our sons are huge Arsenal fans.

I will have to forward this to them.

I have studied Spanish, German, and Japanese, and I remember just enough to ask a couple of questions, but not enough to understand the answers.

[Leith]

4. Me, Too!

I can still understand the gist of a conversation in Spanish, but I can't formulate a sentence on my own. German? Never got the hang of it.

In my youth, I was an exchange student and lived in Tokyo for 3 years. While lack of vocabulary hampers most conversations, I can give and understand directions like nobody's business! Shopping, too. That stuff was needed in a big city.