Juan -- Wow! That's awesome. I think french is just a pain in the ass to learn. I studied for 5 years, went to France, had French classmates, and came out mediocre. My Italian and Greek are much, much better. I would curious as to your definition of intelligence, as I think we're arguing semantics here. Application, to me, seem to be an integral factor of intelligence -- if you can't apply what you learned, how much smarter are you really for having learned it? The work aspect goes hand in hand with the intelligent aspect -- you can work as hard as you want but you have to be able to wrap your mind around the concepts and small nuances of grammar -- it takes a certain degree of smarts. Damn, I'm still reeling from that resume -- taking Greek in English has been hard enough -- but in French? Damn! ------------------ Hey now, Hey now, don't Dream it's over...
I think we do have a semantics issue here. When I say application, I simply mean work. That you have to apply yourself -- your time, energy, and concentration -- to the study of a language. I don't doubt that intelligence can make learning a language easier. But, by no means would I say it was a primary factor. And I don't like how people always rely on this crutch in defending Kobe: we know he's smart because he speaks all these languages. All that indicates to me is that he was blessed by circumstance -- like I was -- that he was able to travel to these different countries and get some international exposure. It's an issue of social class, not intelligence. Now what were we talking about? Kobe will be younger next year and will win the slam dunk contest, right? ------------------ RealGM Rockets Draft Obligations Summary Gafford Art Artisan
I'd like to see how long you'd last in one of my Greek classes? Or Italian? How about Chinese? I can tell you first hand language learning is an extremely difficult and extremely long process. It's a long process in a country like America where we are raised to really only learn Emglish. The problem here is that we don't always get a chance to use a native tounge, which is actually the best way to learn. I would give props to someone born and raised here that knew about five or six languages, especially if they learned them in school, without ever really getting a chance to use them. However, I will not proclaim someone a genious because they grew up in Italy and learned Italian? How else are they gonna communicate, not to mention that it's very easy for a kid to learn a foreign language if they are in an environment where it's being spoken all the time. How do you think we learned English? You knew how to talk beofre you went to school and took a class, didn't you? ------------------
Icehouse -- I wasn't talking about Kobe and Italian. I was speaking of Kobe whatever languages he knew (I think somebody said German).. ...but I digress, I'm way off topic. Kobe's a moron, blah, blah, blah ------------------ Hey now, Hey now, don't Dream it's over...
