At school I was in the 'top band' for every subject, apart from French and I was in the 'remedial' class....I would love to speak French or Italian..but my brain doesn't do languages..having a Dutch Mrs who speaks excellent English and smattering of other European sort of exposes my linguistic limitations...and she never fails to pull up my mispronunciation of foreign words...Whilst English people Anglicise words the Dutch tend to incorporate the pronunciation of origin....hence my pronunciation of 'Paella' is a constant battle in our house.
My 9 year old lad can understand Dutch but not speak it , though out of the blue he's expressed an interest in speaking Dutch, which as he grows older will have no fucking benefit whatsoever unless he goes and lives in the Netherlands....or he and his mum talk about me in front of me....without the decency to do it behind my back in English!!!
Yes, and at least that would give you the chance to hide in the laundry basket and listen
As far as learning foreign languages goes, there's too many of them, and they are all fascinating, so how anybody can focus on just one goes way behind my concentration capacities. I like changing channels from time to time.
There's an old book, about the 1940s, called
The Loom of Language, by Frederick Noades, and he explores / explains the roots of the Romance languages (Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French), and the Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian) all with regard to English. His view is that knowing the 'rules' of how each branch developed, and their relationship to English, you may as well learn a whole branch at a time rather than just one.
I've bolded the title to force you to remember it
but it should be available online second hand for under a tenner.
Get hold of some Spanish nursery rhymes too, and counting games, probably off Youtube. And just listen, listen, listen.
(Shouldn't mention this, but - lot of language courses, audio, torrentable.)
