The beautiful languages
The beautiful languages
I am writing this article after trying several times to play the game of Verbling: https://www.verbling.com/notifications. Have you tried it? How many languages can you recognize? The highest score I could reach was 13 correct answers, ranking #35, which is not so high.
After playing this game, I was thinking I should write something about languages. 99% of the languages in the games were out of my recognition, but I could guess. There were many languages which are similar to Russian and Hindi. Based on these two languages, I eliminated the wrong answers and selected the right ones (for example: Bengali, Urdu, Ukraine, Hungarian...). As I also speak Spanish, I could recognize also Portuguese, Italian, and based on my limited Mandarin, I could guess which was Cantonese or Japanese. Do you have any other technique to beat this game (except playing again 1000 times)? Please share with me:)
Actually this game is not the main topic that I want to write. I also don´t want to advertise my Vietnamese class, which you can easily see it in the list of Vietnamese teachers. I just want to tell you how languages have helped me in my life and my career. Most of the jobs I have got in my CV based on my language skills, not my qualifications or education background. I was not either an excellent law student in school or brilliant legal adviser at work. At the moment I am not either a great real estate agent or financial consultant. However, I used English in Vietnam a lot during the time I was working for Vietnamese and multinational companies in Vietnam, starting as an assistant or translator. Then I tried to work (hard and smart) to achieve the position I want. Now in Spain, where people are not good at English, I decided to learn Spanish and Chinese so that I have an advantage in job market.
In my personal life, most of the best friends I have got came from the language exchange events that I have attended or also from the moments that I approached them to practice languages. I strongly believe that language skills have opened many many chances for me to develop my professional career and personal life, especially when I live abroad.
Everybody is happy when you can speak their languages. Everyday I speak Spanish and English with my Spanish husband at home, going to work I speak English, Spanish and Chinese with my colleagues, and I speak Vietnamese with my mother via Facebook call.
My goal for this year is to improve my Chinese to the professional level, not just basic communication and also start learning Catalan, which is not so urgent to learn but people in Barcelona, where I live, they speak it. I always think that we need to learn languages up to the level that you can communicate confidently, on the other hand, to write and say something that native speakers can understand and maintain the conversation with them both orally and verbally.
Sorry for writing so long and I am sure my English writing is going worse as I have spent most of my recent years to learn other languages, not improving my English. But thanks to my great students from US, my English level is still maintained.
Finally I hope that I will have more opportunities to spread Vietnamese out to all language lovers.
March 1, 2018
