It's interesting, because most of my experience with classroom foreign languages is with translating poetry. I made the perhaps not-so-useful-in-hindsight-but-fun-at-the-time decision to take Latin in high school, so rather than learning to speak a language we spent hours translating Virgil, Ovid, Catullus, and other poets. I wanted to burn copies of the Aeneid at times, but it really gave me an appreciation for how different figures of speech could be used because you have to spend so much time with a poem when you're translating a poem. (At least, I did, because I could never remember vocabulary words so I was always looking things up in the dictionary.) It really makes you savor it a little bit more.
Other than that, I understand a fair bit of conversational Arabic and Spanish because I know a lot of people who speak those languages. I wish I spoke four languages! Kudos to you on that.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-05-08 03:16 am (UTC)Other than that, I understand a fair bit of conversational Arabic and Spanish because I know a lot of people who speak those languages. I wish I spoke four languages! Kudos to you on that.