How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

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

Postby IronMike » Fri May 13, 2022 12:55 am

I must say that I reached out to the Passamaquoddy tribe who ran/run a language class, asking them about the class and if anyone could sign up. Never got a response. I really wanted to take advantage of the fact that I lived but an hour away from where they held classes. Missed opportunity, I guess.

Living now in our 19th house in 30+ years of marriage, and I must say that I always seek out "foreign" neighbors. I've learned words/phrases of Spanish, Tagalog, Icelandic, Japanese...all because speakers of these languages were "on [my] doorstep."

At least in the USA, there are amazing opportunities on our doorsteps.
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby QueenBee » Mon Oct 10, 2022 11:17 pm

In Israel, one can easily come by opportunities to practice one's:

-- Hebrew
-- Levantine Arabic
-- Russian
-- French
-- English
-- Spanish, Portuguese
-- Amharic
-- Tagalog

You can also find (with some effort) Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Farsi, and Indian languages.

I used to live in Toronto, Canada (the most multicultural city, per capita, anywhere in the world). But interestingly, I actually find Israel (which also gets a lot of immigrations) to be a better environment for practicing languages. In Toronto, the English language really predominates. You can practice a language by becoming friends with people from that immigrant community, but that's about it. And each individual linguistic community makes up a small enough % of the population that it's hard to really immerse yourself full-time in that language.

In Israel, it's a bit different. Most immigrants speak either Russian, French, English, or Amharic. What ends up happening is that people over the age of 45 rarely master Hebrew, and some don't even try to learn it. So you actually get ghettos (in certain cities) of these major immigrant languages where a person could (theoretically) survive without ever using Hebrew. And each major immigrant languages starts to take on more importance. For example, the phone menu of banks and medical clinics automatically offer several languages on top of Hebrew and Arabic.

I've joked about how I get to use French more in Israel than I ever did in Canada. :lol:
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby Iversen » Tue Oct 11, 2022 6:02 am

There are many people in this town who speak foreign languages, but I would have to be more sociable to take advantage of it.
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby DaveAgain » Tue Oct 11, 2022 3:47 pm

There are a number of Polish shops in my UK town, that would perhaps be the easiest language for me to practise, our local newspaper even tried having a Polish-language section for a time.
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby anitarrc » Thu Oct 13, 2022 6:37 am

The commune of Troisvierges
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troisvierges

has a population of about 3300.
The town has 1400 :D

Not so long ago, I claimed that this is a very international place and that you can communicate in at least 15 languages. I thought hard about it and came up with

Letzeburgish, French, German (official languages)
Portuguese, Italian, English (most common new languages)
Arab, Turkish, Polish, Roumanian, Bosnian (well, Serbocroat) the most common immigrant languages
Farsi, Pashtu, Dari, (Swahili methinks, Congo refugees) the main refugee languages
Ucranian, Russian, Spanish, Chinese and Korean.

If you count Cape Verdean Creole as a different language from Portuguese, there are 21!

To me, this tiny town is fascinating with its international character
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby Sae » Fri Oct 14, 2022 11:24 pm

In terms of my village, no opportunities as far as I am away, we're a tiny village. But in my local area, like the nearest town there is an Eastern European population, which are mostly Polish and Romanian. A friend of mine ended up learning Polish because most of his colleagues are Polish and he visited Poland recently as well. There's also Turkish, Pakistani and Indian populations here.

However, because I am a nerd who spends too much time playing video games on the interwebs, I do have a few friends I regularly speak to, which include ones who're Finnish, Swedish, Puerto Rican, Filipino, German, Italian American and Czech. And I work with a Polish guy and an Indian lass.

In terms of family, I have a Sri Lankan aunt and an Indonesian aunt and one set of cousins are half Sri Lankan and the other half are half Indonesian, but we're not really in touch. And then half of my family is Irish, but those I know from that side of the family don't speak it.

In terms of what I've actually utilised for language learning? I learned 3 words in Polish from a colleague that would probably break the forum rules here for me to repeat. I am not learning any of the above languages, so they're not ones I can really practice with. However, through online communities there are a few Mongolian people, my singing tutor's wife is Tuvan who live in Mongolia and of course I have a Vietnamese tutor who is a native living in Vietnam, so he is good to practice with and speak to in Vietnamese.

But I have been tempted by Polish before because of the community here and the people I know and I know my colleague would no doubt help me practice and it seems like a useful language to learn, plus I'd consider visiting Poland. Turkish might be cool to learn too. I did try Swedish once and learned some German in school. But I think for now, given my current skill level in the languages I'm learning, it'd be thinking too far ahead of myself.
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby allf100 » Thu Dec 15, 2022 1:55 pm

Almost zero. There are probably just a few foreigners in my neck of the woods.
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby Iversen » Thu Dec 15, 2022 6:27 pm

Iversen wrote:There are many people in this town who speak foreign languages, but I would have to be more sociable to take advantage of it.


.. and now I don't even live in a town anymore.
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby Le Baron » Thu Dec 15, 2022 8:51 pm

Iversen wrote:
Iversen wrote:There are many people in this town who speak foreign languages, but I would have to be more sociable to take advantage of it.


.. and now I don't even live in a town anymore.


A village now? Me too and it does cut down the opportunities somewhat. Unfortunately the opportunities I have here are all languages I dont know and which I'm not learning.
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Re: How many language opportunities are on your doorstep?

Postby tastyonions » Thu Jan 26, 2023 5:37 pm

I use my Spanish from time to time when it seems like someone I've heard speaking it is having trouble with English. There's a "Latin" (mostly Mexican) supermarket here where I've gone to get things from time to time and it seems a lot of the employees default to Spanish with customers, which is neat.

I actually noticed someone speaking Dutch when I was at the park with my kids the other week but I'm too ashamed of my level in that language to dare inflict it on anyone. :-)
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