re: How many of y'all are multilingual?

quote:

---

My gf's family is Dutch-American

---

The Dutch always told me, "Dutch is a language that is as beautiful as it is useful." With that in mind, I never bothered learning any.

I constantly work on several foreign languages. I am pretty good at Japanese, Korean, Swedish, and Danish. Most of the business that I conduct in Japan and Korea is done in the local language and English. I can understand their Japanese. They can understand my English. We just stick to speaking our own language. Same for Korea.

Speaking Asian languages is particularly tricky because of the different versions. I learned my first Japanese from a Japanese girlfriend at Berkeley. I thought I was pretty good at it. On my first business trip to Tokyo, I was speaking a lot of Japanese. Finally, one of my customers says to me, "Your Japanese is very good, but why do you talk like a girl?" I basically had to scrap a lot of what I "knew" and start over. Kanto, Kansai, formal, informal, men only, standard Japanese, women talk... Sheesh. On top of that, you have to figure out what they mean and not what they say.