Thread:Lilliana:3/@comment-397235-20140912011340/@comment-397235-20140924010556

English is a Germanic language with Latin grammar applied to it, thanks to the French conquest of England in the middle ages. As a result, English is a really difficult language to learn, because it breaks its own rules so often (like the word "its" for instance: this means possessive, but the normal way to make a word possessive, by adding an apostrophe and an S, makes a different word, the contraction for "it is" or "it has").

As for linguistic relations themselves, German is the precursor language to English, and I assume, Dutch as well (and to a lesser extend, Polish, though that's gotten muddled with Russian in recent years). That's why certain sentences in German are more or less understandable to an English speaker if they sound it out. It's the same relationship Latin has with Italian, and to a lesser extent Spanish and French. A native Italian speaker can understand someone speaking Latin, but not their written letters.

As for dialects, we have them here too. People from (New) Jersey like to drop their Rs, so they "Pok" their "ca"s; people from my part of the country (not me, thank God) like to pick them up, so the capitol of the nation is "Warshington." They also like to add vowels to words in which they don't belong: thus do people join the school "wrastling" team. Fortunately, this seems to be on the decline. We're all starting to have the same accent, which is good, because we don't all sound like ignorant hicks.

It's true in America, you can get pretty far speaking only English and Spanish, with two exceptions: Brazil and Quebec. Brazil, due to convoluted history involving the Napoleonic Wars, speaks Portuguese, but not the same dialect as they do in Portugal. Quebec, which was a French colony until the English drove them all the way down to Louisiana, still speaks French for most of the their day to day business (and very badly doesn't want to be a part of Canada anymore).

I'm a customer service rep for an international company, so being bilingual would be nice. While most of our customers can speak English passably well, we do get the odd Mexican or Quebecois who doesn't. One of my friends, who's fluent in Japanese, Spanish, French, and Welsh (don't ask me why), and was teaching himself Italian and Danish, was extremely helpful to have around in those cases.

I don't, unfortunately, get many calls from Europe (we're a hunting and fishing company, and apparently Europeans themselves either don't hunt and fish or buy everything locally). Mostly I deal with customers from the US and Canada, though I've had calls from Belize, England, Saipan (which I guess is still technically America), Turkey, Israel, and Australia. A friend of mine once got a call from a gentleman in Tehran (sadly, I then had to explain to my friend where Tehran was and why it was a big deal someone had called him from the capitol of Iran); the most fun I've ever had was a customer trying to get me to help her smuggle fishing goods to her brother in Cuba (that, by the way, is a felony).

As for America itself, yeah, this is a huge country. About the only one that's bigger is Russia, and thanks to not having spent 80 years trying and failing to build the New Soviet man or environment is in a lot better shape than theirs. Of course, that size has its pros and cons. I mean, on the one hand, Kansas, Iowa, Florida, and California grow enough food to feed the country and leave some to sell elsewhere, but on the other, getting around can be a chore. I live in Missouri, smack dab in the middle of the continent, and to get from where I live to the next biggest city, St. Louis, is a three hour drive. I live in town and it takes me two hours to get home from work on the city buses (you don't want to live in the Midwest without a car; it's horrible).

As for being a pilot, man, I way couldn't do that. I'm terrified of heights; I've never even been in an airplane. Of course, on the other hand, I've pretty much lost the game of Russian roulette known as Affirmative Action (white, male, straight, and protestant; they even have a snazzy acronym for people like me, WASP), so if we go to war with Russia, I'm kinda screwed. So maybe not being in the Air Force isn't such a bad thing after all? I mean, you're a nurse, right? That's an honorable profession and takes a lot of skill (and no small manner of decency) to do well.