South Africa and pretty much just English. Apparently I was fairly fluent in Zulu when I was little kid, before starting school and losing it. And we learnt Afrikaans in school but Afrikaans kids went to Afrikaans schools and I grew up and lived in English speaking areas so it was never used. If I tried to speak Afrikaans now, I would embarrass myself but I can mostly read it and understand someone if they’re talking slow enough and I’m concentrating hard enough.
Honestly something that pisses me off is that despite going through school in the ‘new’ South Africa, the new government never bothered making sure we learnt to communicate with each other. So instead of learning Zulu and being able to freely communicate with the majority of the population, we learnt Afrikaans because they never fucking bothered to change it.
I can also understand very small bits and pieces of written and spoken German from high school but that’s barely worth mentioning. Also, I can kinda sometimes understand a little bit of written Dutch because it’s remotely similar to Afrikaans.
Zulu is an awesome language! I’ve heard it spoken before. It seems difficult to learn from an outsider. Maybe I’m wrong. Afrikaans is interesting to me because it’s a Germanic creole language. I’ve heard it’s the easiest to learn Germanic language in the world.
Yeah, Zulu is a different beast to European languages. I suppose as different to English as certain Asian languages would be. It also borrows from English and Afrikaans though, for certain Western words and concepts that weren’t in the vocabulary before. And there’s still nouns and verbs and tenses and shit, so it follows the same basic rules / concepts as any language.
As for Afrikaans, funnily enough I’m actually living in a part of the country now where some fluency would’ve been useful. Luckily you seem to be able to get by with just English just about anywhere though.
South Africa and pretty much just English. Apparently I was fairly fluent in Zulu when I was little kid, before starting school and losing it. And we learnt Afrikaans in school but Afrikaans kids went to Afrikaans schools and I grew up and lived in English speaking areas so it was never used. If I tried to speak Afrikaans now, I would embarrass myself but I can mostly read it and understand someone if they’re talking slow enough and I’m concentrating hard enough.
Honestly something that pisses me off is that despite going through school in the ‘new’ South Africa, the new government never bothered making sure we learnt to communicate with each other. So instead of learning Zulu and being able to freely communicate with the majority of the population, we learnt Afrikaans because they never fucking bothered to change it.
I can also understand very small bits and pieces of written and spoken German from high school but that’s barely worth mentioning. Also, I can kinda sometimes understand a little bit of written Dutch because it’s remotely similar to Afrikaans.
Zulu is an awesome language! I’ve heard it spoken before. It seems difficult to learn from an outsider. Maybe I’m wrong. Afrikaans is interesting to me because it’s a Germanic creole language. I’ve heard it’s the easiest to learn Germanic language in the world.
Yeah, Zulu is a different beast to European languages. I suppose as different to English as certain Asian languages would be. It also borrows from English and Afrikaans though, for certain Western words and concepts that weren’t in the vocabulary before. And there’s still nouns and verbs and tenses and shit, so it follows the same basic rules / concepts as any language.
As for Afrikaans, funnily enough I’m actually living in a part of the country now where some fluency would’ve been useful. Luckily you seem to be able to get by with just English just about anywhere though.