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Originally Posted by Tye
Thanks for the link!
I plan to study French in college, and I would also like to study German. I wonder how many languages I should learn?
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The sky's the limit! French and German are very useful languages for linguistics since a lot of the linguistics literature was published in those languages.
Regarding Latin and Greek, I think that all kind of depends on your specialization. Some subfields will require that knowledge more than others. If you're doing historical linguistics of Indo-European languages, then certainly yes, but perhaps less so if you're studying some other language family. Some native English speakers study various aspects of English (and so forth) and don't really necessarily use a whole lot of foreign language knowledge in their work.
But certainly a deep knowledge of a foreign language gives one a lot of perspective on the structure of languages in general (if you've ever asked a native speaker of a language why a tricky grammatical point works in a certain way, you may have heard the response "I dunno...I just speak the language!"). Furthermore, learning a language that is very different from your native one can be very eye-opening. For English speakers, something like Chinese, or Hungarian, or some other non-Indo-European language, can give a very different perspective on how one "cuts up" the world linguistically. Just as an example, a lot of early Western work on non-IE languages suffered from attempts to coerce the descriptions of them into a "Latinate" model of grammar, e.g., generating a I/you/he-she-it verb conjugation grid for Japanese verbs, which is useless since there is no such morphology in Japanese.
Immersion is key. If you really love French, get a hold of a text and some CDs (or a college Internet course) and learn some grammar and vocabulary. Here's a freebie (Foreign Service official text): not the most colorful, but authoritative (and free!):
http://fsi-language-courses.com/French.aspx
And look for native speakers, things to listen to (e.g., pop music
) and so forth.
One very important thing when learning a language is, in my opinion, trying to avoid the tendency to focus on "what's the word for 'X' in language Y" but rather to emphasize "what does a speaker of language Y say in such-and-such situation, and how does s/he behave?" There is rarely a perfect mapping between nouns in English and another language, and even less so with verbs, prepositions (ack!!!), and more complicated constructs. Learning how to abstract away how you think about a situation from the words you use to describe it is a very valuable skill to hone.
Anyway, just my $.02. Please feel free to share your interests and experiences!