Learning Languages

Todd: So, Deanne, you're very multi-lingual. What languages do you speak?

Deanne: I speak Spanish, Italian, French and English fluently

Todd: Wow! All of them.

Deanne: Yes.

Todd: Is there any language that you prefer?

Deanne: Yes. French and Spanish are my favorite languages.

Todd: Oh, why is that?

Deanne: French I like because it's very soft and romantic, and Spanish I think is very vivacious and dynamic and energetic and those two are my favorite languages. I also like the pronunciation of Spanish.

Todd: OK, and how did you become so proficient -- like how did you learn to speak Spanish and French?

Deanne: Well, my mother is Spanish and so I grew up listening to her speak usually when she didn't want my father to hear what she was saying. She spoke in Spanish just because she said. I'd never spoke it at that point but I understood and I grew up with the ear and French, I grew up in a French province in Canada, Quebec so we always had French. From when I was born, I had French. And English, my dad's englaphone and then Italian I learned in university.

Todd: That's interesting. So now we're in Japan, maybe people will be able to hear the Japanese in the background, do you study Japanese now?

Deanne: I'm starting because the last time I was in Japan and I didn't know anything and it's just difficult to get by. This time I said, OK, I have to so I'm going, I'm just beginning actually. Yeah.

Todd: OK, and since, you are an expert at learning languages. What advice would you give to somebody to learn another language?

Deanne: Not everybody has a knack for it, but if you do want to learn it, you need discipline and you need time and it's studying. You have to memorize a whole bunch of vocabulary and you have to dedicate about an hour and a half every day to doing homework and I would do that for the internet. Like try to find people on the internet. I did that with Netscape chatting. I used to find people who spoke other languages like for example Italian or Spanish and I would be chatting with them orally and written and I would learn a lot of new things by doing that because they would each have a different expression that I didn't know and find international friends and do international exchanges, like cultural exchanges with people so that you're forced to speak the language and then you don't speak you own. That's what I did.

Todd: For the net stuff, don't you worry a little about security about kind of not the nicest people on the internet?

Deanne: Yeah, there's a lot of weirdos, but you don't meet them. You don't -- I've never met them. I just stay on the internet with them and we chatted and usually I chat with girls because you don't know what kind of people you'll meet and if they said, "Let's meet!", I just said, "NO" cause I don't really trust that. If I want to meet people, I join those intercultural exchanges where people are actually, you know, monitored, so yeah.

Todd: OK, well