keirw

In most British schools we don't learn nearly enough (French or German at my school) to have more than a basic conversation with someone from that country so if we want to learn a new language we really have to work at it in our own time. Most of us don't due to the good people out there who learn English as a second language.
It sounds arrogant, but it is the truth.
I once knew a Dutch woman who had lived in the UK for 20 years and she told me her inner monologue changed from English to Dutch depending on the subject she was thinking about and her mood.
Is that true for everyone or is she a bit of a weirdo?

wittgenstein

“There are entire fields of connotations differing between languages that do influence "what things mean" differently in different languages.”
Larrey ( post 29)
Agreed. However, I am more interested in ( I have nothing against ) what words refer to as opposed to memorizing new signifiers Signifier and Signified.
However, I am interested in . And Ludwig Wittgenstein (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) . However, Wittgenstein and the philosophers of language are not about teaching how to speak another language.
PS: It is true that learning a second language may give one insights into the signifier /signified relationship. But I feel that the philosophy of language is a more direct approach and since my time is limited I must perform

Larrey

Fair enough. But... You have a general interest in language, but not in any specific one, and the people who speak it, their "Lebensform"?

Anyway, are "Lebensformen" and "Forms of Life" the same things? You read Wittgenstein in English? You don't think translation matters? As they say: "Traddutore, traditore".

Tapio, the king of forest

Indo-Europen languges are dark green. My first language was from a totally different language family, but I really can't say if learning other languages has changed anything.

Iolo

I've had to learn to speak my own language properly: it makes me suddenly able to understand the remembered past, because I lived in muddled bi-lingualism. I also had to learn Gwo-Yeu Chinese, and ,yes, that opened up a new world. The more languages the better!

Jake10

Learning a second language may help underprivileged children make up academic ground:

Black Dog

I tried to learn Latin, and was faced, for the first time really, with understanding how a formally structured language works. Declensions, gender etc. Very confusing to a monoglot English speaker.

But it also gave me an insight into any other Latin based language, and also how modern English developed: the influences from other languages, like the dozen or so that influence English: French, Norman French, Danish, Flemish, some Welsh and Scots and even Irish words, and many others besides the obvious Latin and Greek.

I also picked up a small amount of conversational Welsh when I lived there. However, how correct that Welsh was, I don't know, since a few native speakers told me that it was colloquial Welsh, with a lot of English loan words, slang and not technically correct. I was in no position to judge. Welsh is difficult to learn if you're English and the locals tended to have very confused feelings about Englishmen learning it, but most were pleased that I showed willing.

North Welsh did indeed show traces of a very old language indeed. For instance, I could feel its age because the locals (correctly or otherwise!) used to same word for lightning as they did for electricity: plainly the older word existed but the newer did not, and the older got shoehorned into to describe "electricity". This must and did happen many times in English, too.

Now that I am older, I realise just how important languages and, indeed, accents and dialects are. It is laughable to me to hear people with middle English accents claiming to be from "York-sheer".

This is mainly because alongside the accent or language, there goes an attitude, a culture that belongs with it. Whilst large areas of Wales are English speaking and have their own identity, nevertheless, it is usually the case that one cannot be the thing one thinks one is without knowing the language/accent and using it.

It's like being able to read music but not play it.

I doubt I would have ever got this fact of life without learning a little Latin (badly) and a little Welsh (even worse than my Latin!).