I Enjoyed listening to the guest speaker that was here. He had many interesting comments. I agree with him that it is very usefull to learn a other language. Myself i know three languages which are Dutch, English and German. If i go on a Holiday somewhere most of the time these languages help me around the country with no problem. I did not understand everything that he said because he used some japanese words and i have never taken japanese before so that is why i did not understand it. All the novels that he said and translated into english were very interesting and i would have wanted to hear more. My comment on him is that i think it is a very difficult job that he is doing and i appreciate that there are people such as him that are willing to translate a whole book from a foreign language to an international language.
I agree with Mr. McCarthy saying that a second language helps with understanding of your mother tongue. I have always lived in Holland and never spoken any other language then Dutch but when i came here i had no other choice to speak English everyday. When i started understanding the English language more I finally understood what the actual meanings of some words of Dutch were actually saying. The Dutch language has a lot of words in it that are taken from other languages such as English French and German. The dutch word for umbrella is the same as in French and it made me understand why the dutch have that same word. Not every word in a language is just made up by something. Words are created from things you see or you hear in other countries. The street language in Holland is evolving right now and there are a lot of people that are from the Antilles or other countries which still keep on using their own language around town and around friends. These words get spread fast and soon used by the Dutch and saying it is part of the Dutch. It would have a slightly different meaning then that it did before but it would basically come back to the same point.
When i started to learn German it was all different for me and hard to understand what was happening. After learning a lot of words and searching those words up in Dutch i started to realize how close German and Dutch was. The German and Dutch language are very close related. A lot of words in German are pronounced the same as in Dutch or very close to the same and only have a different writing. For example in Holland we have a word called dik which means fat. fat in Germany is written as dick and you pronounce it exactly the same. This could mean that this word is either created in holland or germany and one of the countries took it from the other. Another example is the day Monday. In Dutch you write it as Maandag but in German its Montag. This word is again pronounced almost the same and means exactly the same. It made me think about where my language is actually from. Is it a own language or is Dutch just a mixture of languages such as Spanish, English, French and most of all German.
