Language of music: My psychiatrist in 1975 said to me, 'musicians don't play music on instruments, they play it on the heartstrings of your soul.' He wasn't even a seventies rock critic, he was a psychiatrist, fer crying out loud.

"I'm French (from Quebec not France), and I mastered English as well. I'm studying German right now and I know a bit of Japanese but I'll study it when I'll have German mastered."

I'm not French, but I did grow up in manitoba and they start kids very early learning french. I found that really helped while learning German with different cases, ending, genders and grammar structure.

Many people told me so, pronounciation too is supposed to be easy with a French accent. I'm not sure about gender though.. the German genders are completly different from the French ones! With the addition of the neutral gender!? Knowing English I'm used to words being neutral, but French people learning German as 2nd language have a hard time with objects not being male nor female

it is different yeah, but it's also the same kind of concept, know what i mean?
The biggest difference is when you get into genitive cases and stuff. My friends in germany said even people there forget to use proper cases though.

I guess that's like any languages people though, we see terrible grammar everywhere. English included. I can be terrible for that.

Yeah I know what you mean.

About using proper cases, imagine the situation in French speaking areas! I'm sorry for the people learning international, proper French who come here and are exposed to the everyday slang. I only noticed how distorted our spoken French is after an immigrant told me he understood all our texts but nothing we said. Most commonly used words are slurred, the words are not at the right place in the sentence and we use multiple verbs together or none at all in sentences that actually mean something to us, but is gibberish in an academical point of view. Many of the slurs we use are so pronounced that it may be very hard for a stranger to retrace the original words. All of that within our already complex language. The worst thing is that somebody speaking a correct French here may be considered as haughty for being overly formal when it's actually the "regular" language.

Is it that bad everywhere or is it due to the complexity of the language to start with?

my friend grew up in french immersion in winnipeg and is fluent and she called a hotel in Paris for a friend of hers who needed help booking it. She said she had a hard time understanding well spoken French

Hahaha that's bad!

But like I said, even I only understand about half of what the French from France say. It's not only the vocabulary but the accent! After knowing one of them for a while I began understanding more of their speech but I'd probably have to start over now

I think this is a good place to ask for translation if somebody needs any. We seem to be mostly mutilingual people and online translators are so inaccurate! Ever tried to translate a sentence from a secondary language to your primary? Funny or depressing depending on your sense of humor.

I grew up in Budapest and nobody in that country spoke French. There was no need to. But I read the Hungarian translation of a Jerome K. Jerome book in which the author talked about how the kid in his French class was hailed by his teacher for his accent. He spoke with some uncannily true and authentic Parisian accent in London. The the kid, the eminent language progedy, (prodegy?) went to France and could not get one exchange of sentences with any man there, or woman, because nobody understood him, and he understood nobody.

Jerome then goes on to say that he went to Paris during the war (first world) and he spoke bad French with long-ago forgotten rules, and his pronunciation was atrocious (attrocious?), but everyone understood him and he could converse with anyone.

I can speak English, French, and Neo-Latin. My Russian has vanished. I'm trying to revive my basic German via extension class. A few years ago, I could communicate in Malay better than I can now. When I was dating a Chinese woman, I tried to learn Mandarin, but lost the motivation. My passive Spanish is fairly good, but I need to learn it actively. There is a baby Korean CD in my CD player right now.

As for things I can produce to some degree, I've worked through a Washo grammar. I taught myself Biblical Hebrew, since I felt as a Christian and Ciceronian I should be able to read the the Old Testament in Hebrew as well as the New Testament in Greek. I am wending my way through a Hawaiian grammar, in order to get a feel for Polynesian languages (often I study languages more for grammar and syntax than speaking ability)

My immediate future plans are to:
revive German
activate Spanish
review Malay
learn Japanese
escape baby Korean