Question: what is your favourite language to use in your work for easy uses? excluding english and german :)

Daniel Mietchen answered on 22 Jun 2010:

I take almost all of my scientific notes in English (except sometimes when I follow talks in other languages), and most of what I type is in English as well. In fact, I don’t need German at all to do my work, which is sad because it really is a nice language to express scientific thought in. So the only pieces of scientific text that I wrote in German are some book chapters (e.g. this one on which directions human evolution is likely to take).

Apart from English and German, my favourites depend on where I am and who I am with: I use Korean on a daily basis at home, Russian and French several times a week (mainly for emails and the news), and since the songs performed by my band are folk songs from Central Asia, I sing in the languages spoken there, primarily Tajik and Uzbek. I also have a fair command of Japanese (studied in Sendai for a year), Arabic (did a nursing internship in Sana’a, Yemen, social work in Fès, Morocco, and participated in excavations at Ba’ja, Jordan), Latin (had it at school), Czech (have been to Czechia or Czechoslovakia on an almost yearly basis) and Dutch (actually the funniest language for me, since I understand almost all of it without a dictionary by warping it into German or English in some ways that I find amusing). On that basis, communicating in related languages (like Italian, Swedish or Polish) is also possible at a basic level (and usually fun), with reading being easiest.

A somewhat strange side effect of this is that sometimes I can follow conversations (or read the newspapers) easily but am not sure as to what language they are in (since I had never actually studied them). This happens most frequently with languages from the former Yugoslavia (especially Slovenian/ Serbokroatian), but also just two weeks ago with Spanish/ Catalan when I was in Barcelona for a conference.