How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

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garyb
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby garyb » Wed Feb 09, 2022 12:15 pm

Sonjaconjota wrote:I’m not one for grasping speaking opportunities with strangers, but I do perk up my ears when I hear foreign languages. There are plenty of occasions for that in Barcelona, Spain.
We have tourists, exchange students and immigrants from just everywhere in the world.
Among the languages that I can understand, the ones I hear most are English and Italian. It is always mentioned that Italians are the biggest group of immigrants in Barcelona, although it seems that some of them are actually Argentinians with an Italian passport. But yes, Italian is everywhere here.
Whenever I've spent time in Barcelona I've certainly heard almost as much Italian as Spanish or Catalan. In fact when I was hoping to move to Barcelona a few years ago (in the end I didn't get the job I was going for there) I was looking forward to it as an opportunity to perfect my Italian as much as my Spanish.

Anyway I do have some opportunities on my doorstep that I haven't bothered to take advantage of. In fact, even closer than my doorstep in the case of my Russian-speaking flatmate. To be honest we're not particularly friendly so we don't speak a whole lot in any language, but I dabbled in Russian about a decade ago and I'd be very tempted to pick it up again given this opportunity if we were on better terms. I have had several Italian flatmates in the past and have made the most of it.

I also have at least one Italian neighbour in my block of flats, but we've never gone beyond exchanging pleasantries.

I hear Italian very commonly on the streets, and Spanish and French now and again. 10-15 years ago there was a huge Spanish-speaking community in my city and I heard it a lot in my social life, which was the main thing motivating me to learn the language, but it's really died down and/or gone underground in more recent years.

As for German... I wish. But I do hear it on the street now and again, mostly from young people who look like students. I wish I had been interested in languages in my university days: the speaking opportunities would've been absolutely unparalleled, especially if I had got into the Erasmus party circuit. Or even done Erasmus myself. At this point, all I can hope for is reincarnation :lol:
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby ShivChan » Mon Mar 28, 2022 11:21 am

Fortunately, I live in a city full of tourists, students, and many second generation Australians (Australian-born people living in Australia, with at least one overseas-born parent). If I take the tram into the city (15 minutes), there will be Mandarin, German, Korean, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese spoken by people conversing with each other almost every trip, with the occasional French, Japanese, Russian or Dutch tourist/s. In University, on campus (15 minutes the other direction), there will be even more opportunities because there are quite a lot of bilingual teachers and students that are always willing to share/converse. Adding on to the others already mentioned, Norwegian, Tagalog, Arabic, Hindi, Swahili, Te reo Maori, and the many languages spoken by First Nations peoples. If I actively went out to seek more language opportunities (travel more than 20-30 minutes), there would be Italian, Greek, Vietnamese, Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Turkish, and Cantonese further down the tram destination. Sometimes I'll encounter Punjabi if I turn left instead of right, but it depends on the street/time of day. A really diverse place to live but also a lot of racist bigots who take it for granted and wouldn't even know such diversity if it hit them in the face!

My city is the Gold Coast, Australia, if anyone was wondering. It's almost impossible to go anywhere without having A LOT of language opportunities on your doorstep. Thinking back, I was one of the only monolingual people in my social group when growing up, my friends spoke Bosnian, Greek, Polish and Mandarin/Cantonese at home. Cheers to the monolingual childhood :lol:
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby Ogrim » Mon Mar 28, 2022 1:06 pm

As I work for an international organisation, I could have plenty of opportunities in my job. Just in my department, apart from English- and French-speakers, there are native speakers of Italian, Spanish, Azerbaijani, Romanian, Russian, German, Armenian, Polish, Turkish and Alsatian.

In reality we communicate almost exclusively in English or French, which are our official working languages, and I am not the type to "push" my language knowledge on other people. I do speak Spanish with some Spanish colleagues, because they know I am fully proficient in it, and with one German colleague we sometimes switch to German, but that's about it. I guess if I were more extrovert and less self-aware about my skills (or lack thereof) I'd be more inclined to use some of my other languages with colleagues.

In general in my city you find people from all over the world either living here or visiting. There is a large North-African contingent so you hear Maghreb Arabic a lot, but even Asian languages like Urdu and Punjab, Japanese and Korean.
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby Axon » Mon Mar 28, 2022 5:01 pm

I live near the DLI and Middlebury, and I'm not exaggerating when I say I hang out with more Mandarin-speakers here than when I lived in China.

Leaving aside friends who speak the language, there are two Chinese restaurants nearby whose staff will address me in Mandarin on sight, one whose owner does so in patient Cantonese, and a little ways away there's a Mexican restaurant that will do the same for me in Spanish. I've mentioned before running into a few Indonesian speakers working in the area. There is also no shortage of opportunity for Vietnamese and Thai if my skills were better, or Tagalog if I had any ability at all. I'm sure if I spoke any languages from the Middle East I would know where to find other speakers to chat with too.

And that's not even getting started on the tourists coming from every part of the globe.
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby IronMike » Mon Mar 28, 2022 11:16 pm

Axon wrote:I live near the DLI and Middlebury...

Lucky! I miss that place. Three times was not enough. :lol:
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby zenmonkey » Fri Apr 01, 2022 5:06 am

To add to what I wrote before: I can probably meet any of the major languages with minimal effort here in the Bay Area or Europe when I’m there. There are at least 13 languages on my father’s street. And in my immediate family we speak French, English, Spanish, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Italian. Today I heard Russian and Portuguese. Friends speak Hindi, Mandarin and Catalan among the others.

The startups I’m currently mentoring also have speakers of Urdu, Swahili, Bengali, Russian and Ukrainian.

So languages are all around me.

Despite these opportunities I think I’ll always be looking for people with whom to have a longer conversation than the basics and of course, to strengthen my own mastery, so that I can have those conversations.

The limiting factor isn’t people, or opportunities, or isolation, or the difficulties of reaching out. It’s my own limits in ability. Well… and for rarer languages like Tibetan, Ladakhi, Setswana, Shimaore or Zapotec (etc…) - it is going to be the limitations of travel. I am looking forward to planning a trip to Mayotte - although I’ll probably only go with a total minimum of the most basic tourist phrases.
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby CarlyD » Sat Apr 30, 2022 7:21 pm

I'm in northern California and anything "official" that is mailed out is automatically in English, Spanish and Chinese (Mandarin?). The local school district here says that they have kids speaking 56 different languages right now in ESL classes--Spanish, Russian, Arabic tend to lead the pack, but it's a huge list.

In my little town (next to a largish city) Spanish and Russian are heard daily--too bad I'm learning German. :P
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby MaggieMae » Thu May 12, 2022 6:59 pm

I'm in Switzerland, so that UN comment hits REALLY close to home for me. :lol:

Of the languages that I know of specific people or places who could help, oh man, it's so many. German, French, and Italian, absolutely, as they're three of the four official languages. In addition to the aforementioned three, I have friends and family that speak (as native languages) English, Eowundo, Tigrinia, Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Indonesian, Thai, Tagalog, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Iranian Kurdish, Turkish Kurdish, Hebrew, Swedish, Danish, Russian, Serbian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and Hawaiian. Many of these languages are also represented in Language Cafés at my local library.

Edited to correct an auto-corrected word.
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby vonPeterhof » Thu May 12, 2022 10:01 pm

While Moscow has people speaking dozens if not hundreds of languages, the two languages in particular that I keep running into in my vicinity even as someone who doesn't seek out opportunities to socialize with neighbors are Kyrgyz and the Russian Sign language. While numerically Uzbek and Tajik immigrants might have a bigger presence in Russian cities, Kyrgyz people tend to be overrepresented in service sector jobs like fast food, taxis and delivery. As for RSL, this might be something specific to my neighborhood, but I do tend to notice quite a few signers around here (or at least did pre-pandemic, back when I used to go out more). This may have to do with the fact that the biggest mall in the area employs Deaf and hard-of-hearing cashiers, although I'm pretty sure that I saw groups of people signing to each other gather in a restaurant near me all the time even before that particular mall opened.

Also, while I only spend a couple of weeks a year there at most, but my parents' neighborhood in Saint Petersburg seems to be a major center for the Chinese community, to the point where tour buses with groups from Chinaa would regularly stop by to drop off the tourists for lunch, and you could even find ads for sex workers written entirely in Chinese. Additionally, before the pandemic whenever I took a sleeper train between Moscow and Saint Petersburg there would be whole train cars filled with tourists from China. The lack of tourists and new expats in the past couple of years has mostly put an end to this, but from what I hear at least some of the Chinese-owned restaurants back in the neighborhood are still in business. [Edit: Oh and as far as I could tell most of the Chinese speech I heard around me on the train and in the neighborhood was some form of Mandarin; the one time I was travelling in the same compartment with people speaking something that I thought could be a southern Chinese variety it turned out to be Thai.]
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby PeterMollenburg » Thu May 12, 2022 11:52 pm

I want to be a bit of a negative nancy here. I'm in rural Australia, the only useful language here is English. In local small towns nearby it's English English and more English. I have no need for any other languages. Period.

If we go to the large regional city at 45 min drive the situation changes. There are other languages (Indian languages, maybe Arabic), but I do not need them. Melbourne at 90 minutes (at least to the centre) from here changes even more so. Then it's a real vibrant mixture, but again, I don't need anything but English.

And yet we live in a multi-lingual family situation, artificially created (by me), and I love it! ;)
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