Do You Speak The Language

[MadWoofter]

Fleming - Belgian Shepherd, and no I don't speak French or Flemmish.

Tess - Wolfie X - and no I don't speak any gaelic - although I would love to. I think my next pooch will have to be an ACD or a Tenterfield :laugh:

[Aetherglow]

I don't speak any Finnish, and I'm fairly certain that finding someone who speaks any of the Sami languages of Lapland in Australia would be extremely difficult! Maybe Santa Claus, he lives at the North Pole, and visits Australia at least once a year, but he's normally fairly busy then...

I don't envy anyone trying to learn Finnish or Sami. We were there earlier in the year and despite our best attempts at learning at least the basics, we left not knowing any more than when we arrived!!! We visited the house of a Sami family and boy was that confusing (but useless fact, although both parents speak Inari Sami, Finnish and English, they are only teaching their children Inari Sami, until they are 12 when they start learning English... want to preserve the language and such).

I have a good friend who speaks some Finnish after living there as an exchange student, unfortunately he lives in Sydney so practicing with him is not that practical. He did try to teach me the different way to roll your R's in Finnish, and given that I had enough trouble learning one style of rolled R for French I'm not sure how I'd go with four! Apparently there are some people who are genetically unable to produce some of the R sounds, and Finnish children are taught a little mnemonic to practice it, so presumably it's hard for them too! He's good for silly name suggestions for puppies, though, tried to convince me to call my girl Kala, which means fish. I'm not sure why

Saffioraire, I think I'll be looking into at least learning how to read Finnish, if not speak it. There's a lot of Lappie info out there that's only in Finnish. I'd be okay with German, or at least more okay than with Finnish, as I studied it for four years and my sister majored in German at uni. I'd probably be mostly ok with French, too. Hmmm, maybe I should get a WSS, they speak French and German in Switzerland!

Edited June 3, 2012 by LappieHappy

[Saffioraire]

I think that is the most sensible option - get a White Swiss!

Although that I agree you are more likely to benefit from learning written Finnish than spoken, especially if you are wanting to read information about the breed and communicate with those in the COO via internet. The 'lay man's' dialect that all spoken language is subject to doesn't really affect the written language as severely or suddenly.

You can write "Hind Quarter" and no one looks at you stupidly and then says "..oohhhhh Booty?!' HAHA!