Oxford, How Many Languages Do You Speak?

how many languages do you speak how many languages do you speak how many languages do you speak how many languages do you speak how many languages are spoken here at Oxford let's ask the students and find out how many languages do you speak currently I speak two and what are they uh English and mandrin and how did you learn those both those languages uh well English is a compulsory language in back home where I'm from which is Singapore and mandin is also compulsory because it's my mother tongue so like everyone is like different languages based

on their ethnicity back in Singapore yeah so cuz I'm Chinese so I do mandin and do you speak Mandarin with your family still nah not really mostly with my grandparents but my family know mostly we speak English one and what's our language English how did you learn English parents spoke it growing up so I went to English school it makes sense M and are your parents from from the UK my mom is my dad's from Nigeria but he moved here when he was 12 how many languages do you speak I speak English and probably basic

to intermediate French basic to intermediate French sounds really fun where did you learn French I learned French in Primary School firstly it started in year six so I was about 11 um and then I carried on all throughout high school and then I took it for a levels which is advanced level from the ages of 16 to 18 how many languages do you speak I speak uh English I speak ancient Greek I speak German and I speak Spanish ancient Greek sounds really fascinating all of those are fascinating but can you tell us a bit more

about ancient Greek and if you've had any experience exploring that out at Oxford or in your recent academic studies I got into speaking ancient Greek because I mean it seems crazy you know it's a dead language or whatever but in reality if you're going for language acquisition for ancient languages and if you're like me like I started taking ancient Greek my first year of college it actually is very very important to have every part of language acquisition platea whether it's Reading Writing or speaking or reading composition or speaking so if you're ever stuck on either

of those two it's because you need the third and just because it's a dead language doesn't mean you can't apply the uh the third principle there how many languages do each of you guys speak uh I speak three languages English Hindi and telu I'm from India so I speak Hindi and telu is where the language of the state that I'm from Telangana I also speak three languages obviously English and then I'm from Mexico so I speak Spanish and I went to French school so I speak French how many languages do you speak currently I'm only

really fluent in English um I speak some Spanish a really tiny bit of Japanese and Chinese um but I wouldn't say I'm fluent in those three languages I speak 2.5 so English and Hindi are one in one and a025 to Sanskrit that's really cool so how did you learn each of those Spanish I first went to some classes in India and then I got this Chrome extension of called tuken whenever you did a Google search or you were on any website it would Place some of the words on the web page with Spanish words so

you learn from Context Sanskrit I'm just beginning to learn what I'm doing is watching this YouTube channel called the Sanskrit Channel they go through old books explain the meanings in Sanskrit how many languages do you speak um one and a half which are the one and a half uh Spanish and English I assume English and Spanish and how did you learn each of those languages well I was born in England so I grown up speaking that and and then Spanish I a level and then I've done a couple of language coures on it since coming

to Oxford I really like the way it sounds and know it's really fun to speak even though I can't roll my eyes I think it's so cool to know another language and Spanish is a great sounding one if you guys could each wave a magic one and become fluent in one additional language what language would you choose I would go for Japanese Japanese why Japanese beautiful language great culture love the food yeah definitely I would say Chinese are Arabic because those are the hardest languages to learn so it start at the top and slowly he

kind of move downwards yeah exactly I I I want to go for a Latin language which would be easier for me just Japanese would be impossible at this point what is Portuguese a Latin language yeah yeah Portuguese and Italian like I can pretty much understand Italian fairly well and Portuguese as well so yeah I like to do Chinese cuz it's the hardest also so many people speak Chinese be pretty useful the phonetics are quite different to anything I'm used to I felt a really strong sense of connection to Japan growing up up I traveled there

a number of times lived there for 4 months when I was 4 years old so many of my like first memories are are from Japan do you have any that you hold fondly honestly there are some smells that you only smell in Japan I can't describe it right now mhm but it would have to be that actually Japanese homes are very different from western homes like there are no beds for example you sleep under the tummy um which is like basically like a little uh futon or mattress just on directly on the floor they don't

have traditional bathtubs in Japan or Western bathtubs like you have like a giant it kind of looks like a a hot tub more than a bathtub mhm and um the amazing food obviously probably choose Portuguese and also I heard like Spanish people could understand you as well so I feel like it wouldn't be as hard to learn Spanish from that yeah plus I really like Brazil culturally um I think it's really interesting I love the music culture there I'd want to go there one day i' never actually been but I think it'd be a good

place I feel like French would be most useful French yeah why French I live we live close to it and also my mom speaks French so be nice to take little trips to France with that I really would like to have know Biblical Hebrew because Biblical Hebrew is somewhat different I've been told grammatically from the modern Hebrew that's spoke in Israel today I mean it's it's a classical language for sure there's a lot of detail um there's like cancellations in Hebrew that help you like understand like how to recite it how to sing it which

is very similar to ancient Greek with the accentuation and The rhythms in the in the meter it's just overall like a very information Rich language and not to mention the mythological aspects of it German I think it's useful and like a lot of like the languages in Europe especially in Switzerland and Scandinavia some roots are from Germanic languages so I think it'll be quite useful as a language to learn if you could teach us a word in a non-english language that you know thank you I guess that's the that's also really useful what which is

CS CS yeah you got it I like buddhi it's the same word from which we get Buddha Gotham Buddha the like Buddhism cuz Buddha means the awakened one or the enlighted one and buddhi is just a certain type of intelligence that your brain contains mhm that becomes active when you're enlightened when you're the Buddha does it have a direct translation in English so I think Budd means awake buddhi probably doesn't have a direct translation in English because all of the faculties so so Sanskrit has a lot of words for different aspects of the Mind mhm

and they just have sentence like translations I would say buddhi is just deep awareness I would go with itas which is the Japanese word for Bon and use that whenever you're about to eat yes yeah exactly so every time um you sit down for me you say I would like to teach Hindi because most of Indians speak Hindi you just go up to someone and Sayo which means how are youo quo yes wow I like that uh okay then I'm going to do something in Spanish uh I'm going to go with Viva Mexico viax which

means we're in Mexico yeah very selfish there yeah yeah yeah also so yeah there you go there you go I like the word m in in French it means cute and it is kind of nice to say as well I like the word aor in Greek a omon ro aor is one of the Greek words for heart yeah for hearts but fascinatingly enough the Greeks never ever mention the heartbeat until the 4th Century BC pragas of C cosos is the first person to mention it in a medical text of all Homer all hypocracy people they

never mention the heartbeat so I like aor because it's one of these many many words that the Greeks describe the chest the heart do you think it's still important for people to study languages today oh yeah definitely languages are the way we communicate super useful if you if you know the more languages you know the more people you can communicate with that's the best yeah I think language learning can be so fun and so rewarding everyone should give it a short I think it helps you realize how flexible your mind is and how much you

can change the way you think just by changing the words that you use MH and I do think that people should do that I think that it is very important to learn other languages because when you travel to places like Japan you realize how few people actually speak English and sometimes Google translate really does not come to the rescue actually there there's still like big barriers um when it comes to talking to people I think so definitely I feel like if you go to like Poland or like Sweden then you start speaking at least saying

phrases and stuff I know a lot of people get really appreciative of that that you've like actually C the effort in can just be good for like General connection this is a personal mission for us all I think I think it's crucial that you think of language as a key to help perhaps unlock parts of yourself that maybe you don't understand fully learning a language is very important because it's more than the language it's about the culture itself because usually languag is also culture shaped languages and languages shaped culture so I think that way is

super important and the business school has been so nice and I mean I don't know how to say it sometimes it can get overwhelming but 99% of the times it's just a beautiful experience we have people from 60 different countries in a cohort something like that yeah and then we're all so close to each other as a cohort so I think this experience I won't get anywhere else English is not my F language I wouldn't be here if I didn't know it so yeah life changing absolutely and yeah it's undescribable the the whole Oxford experience

is just very magical we're here in meriton college one of the oldest if not the oldest I would say the oldest there's two other colleges fighting for it this college was built in 1264 one of the best Oxford colleges if any of yall ever come to University of Oxford do visit Marton College the best and the oldest so yeah there you go