serene | Friday Five on Sunday (Reply)

nanila did Friday Five today, and

nanila is cool. Therefore, it's cool to do Friday Five today. So:

1. After your first language, what language would you most like to learn? (Say first language too)

My first language is English. If I had to pick one language to really know well, it would be ASL, Arabic, or Korean: ASL/Arabic for work (I work with a number of English Language Learners at work and we have lots of Spanish speakers to help them, but few Arabic speakers and no ASL users that I'm aware of) or Korean for food. I'm a huge Korean-food lover and cooking enthusiast, and I'd love to be able to read all the packages at the grocery store (and interact with my Korean relatives a little more closely, but that's secondary; we're not really close).

(I speak Spanish well enough to get along at work -- since I learned it as a child, my accent is very good, but it's much better than my vocabulary, so it often takes the students a little while to tell I'm a Spanish Language Learner. I know some ASL, Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Yiddish, and Esperanto (not proud of that one), and a teeny-tiny bit of some other languages (Japanese, Thai, Korean, Amharic).)

2. Does your country have a second language? What is it?

Not officially, no. Wikipedia says our second language in terms of users is Spanish. I can buy that.

3. How many languages can you count to 5 in? To 10 in? List them.

I can count to five from memory in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, ASL. To ten: English, Spanish, French, German, ASL. (And I can count as high as I want in English, Spanish, German, and ASL, because I've internalized the rules.)

4. What is the first overseas country you visited? And from where?

We flew from the US (probably from New York, but I don't remember) to Spain when I was eight. I was almost twelve when we came back. While we were there, I traveled with a family friend to Morocco, so that was overseas, as well. On the way back home from Spain, we stopped briefly in Newfoundland, Canada, but I don't really count that as a visit, since we never left the airport.

5. What country do you most want to visit? And why?

Honestly, I dislike travel, so I'd rather stay home, but I like having traveled, so if I had to go somewhere, I'd just pick someplace I haven't been before and try to eat the best of their indigenous cuisine / home cooking, because that's my jam. Might focus on someplace I know a little of linguistically/culinarily (like, say, Korea or Eritrea), but maybe not.