Which is funny, cuz the few times I've crammed recently helped immensely.

Really now? Naturally you compared your results after cramming to your results without doing any, and your results having revised properly..

The thing about cramming is that it's risky. You can either "thoroughly" study for the test material or miss out on the entire test.

I can't cram. Sometimes I wish I could. Sometimes I'm glad I can't. Like languages....I can read, write & understand 5 languages(not perfectly, of course) but the reason I can (to an extent) understand them is because I've never been able to cram. Some of my friends preferred by hearting most question & answers to score marks. I don't blame them-it's nigh impossible to study & understand 4 languages almost simultaneously. But I could never do that-I always had to frame my own answers & that's not possible if you don't know the basics of a language well. So I put efforts to learn them & that's helping me now (though I'm not doing studying languages presently).

nathanielandbartimaeus wrote:I can't cram. Sometimes I wish I could. Sometimes I'm glad I can't. Like languages....I can read, write & understand 5 languages(not perfectly, of course) but the reason I can (to an extent) understand them is because I've never been able to cram. Some of my friends preferred by hearting most question & answers to score marks. I don't blame them-it's nigh impossible to study & understand 4 languages almost simultaneously. But I could never do that-I always had to frame my own answers & that's not possible if you don't know the basics of a language well. So I put efforts to learn them & that's helping me now (though I'm not doing studying languages presently).

Holy. I think you're guaranteed a job in the future.

What are the other four languages you can speak?

I can do 4 languages, including English.

I'm english, very, very, basic spanish, and then random words in random languages.

I was starting to learn curse words in other languages but dropped it after Finnish.

Then I started learning German so I could pronounce the lyrics correctly for some awesome German songs.

Nero wrote:

nathanielandbartimaeus wrote:I can't cram. Sometimes I wish I could. Sometimes I'm glad I can't. Like languages....I can read, write & understand 5 languages(not perfectly, of course) but the reason I can (to an extent) understand them is because I've never been able to cram. Some of my friends preferred by hearting most question & answers to score marks. I don't blame them-it's nigh impossible to study & understand 4 languages almost simultaneously. But I could never do that-I always had to frame my own answers & that's not possible if you don't know the basics of a language well. So I put efforts to learn them & that's helping me now (though I'm not doing studying languages presently).

Holy. I think you're guaranteed a job in the future.

What are the other four languages you can speak?

Hindi (national language), Tamil (mother tongue), Marathi (state language) & Sanskrit. But actually, Sanskrit doesn't count cause nobody actually speaks Sanskrit. However, Bhajan's are sang in that language. and we have it has a subject in some schools too.
Apart from these languages I can understand Malayalam, Kannada & Telugu (to a very small extent though) & I've learnt a few sentences ('what's your name?', ' what are you doing?' & 'I like this a lot') in Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali & Oriya.

That's quite impressive, N&B.


I am fluent in English, semi-fluent in Spanish. Learning German, as I am the only one in my family line not fluent in it.

I speak English and (some) Physics. (Yes, Physics is a different language. You only have to open one of my textbooks to discover that..)

I is flooent in English, and I can do Spanish to an extent. I can do German and French to some degree.

I'm terrible with languages. For the last six years in school I've been taking French, and I'm really bad at it. Well I guess I'm okay reading and writing it, but I can't speak it worth a damn (and that's really what counts anyway).

wrote:I was starting to learn curse words in other languages but dropped it after Finnish.

That's actually the first thing you should learn when you enter a country where they speak a different language; it's good to know when people are swearing at you. :P

Exactly. Learning a language at school might give you grammar and sentence structure, but you still can't speak it.
I've been taking Spanish for 4 years and I know all the grammar now but I can't even speak it very well.

About foreign language cursing:

I find it more important to have the curses at your disposal and for your use than to know the curses fired at you.

Is it too much to ask for both?
lol.
I'm really good at doing accents and inflections correctly, so speaking (once I know the rules at least) isn't too hard.

Apollo wrote:That's quite impressive, N&B.

It sounds impressive, but it really isn't. Every state in India has a different language & each language has scores of dialects. Some states have a large no. of people speaking different languages. There will be easily 15 languages in the country which are spoken by over 50 million people each. And living in Mumbai (the most cosmopolitan city in India), I have friends from every part of the country. So it's only natural I get a gist of many languages. We all usually spend our lunch breaks asking everyone to speak in their mother tongue (I learnt to translate the word 'mad' in about 17 languages).

wrote:It sounds impressive, but it really isn't.

And then:

wrote:I learnt to translate the word 'mad' in about 17 languages

... it's pretty darn impressive, if you ask me.

No it isn't. Just go armed with a book & pen & ask your friends to translate a word into their native language. An hours work, mind you.

Still, you'll need to memorize all that, then learn the pronounciations, then learn how to write it...

i still say it's impressive.

I memorize phone numbers.
Less impressive than just cool :)
I need to learn how to curse in a few languages.