I had dinner the other night with friends who have lived with their two young children in the United States, Europe, and South America. The 12-year old girl can speak fluently four languages (English, Spanish, French, and Norwegian) and is well on her way to being fluent in German. She is already trying to decide on her next language (She thinks it will be either Russian or Chinese). She’s 12! That got me to thinking: What is the most languages spoken by a Straight Dope poster? How about you? Please respond only if your total is higher than the previously posted number. I’ll start. I speak one language (English).
OK, I’ll keep things fairly easy for now… 2 1/2. That’s Hebrew and English as a native, plus passable French.
Next one needs at least three native-level languages…
I speak four (Faroese, Norwegian, Danish, English). In addition I can comunicate quite well with swedes i.e. if a swede speaks to me in swedish and I answer in norwegian we can usually have a normal conversation that way. I have a few phrases of german and russian as well, but nowhere near fluency. I suppose I could also decipher Icelandic, with a lot of gestures, shouting and confusion, although since Icelanders switch to bad english whenever I try to comunicate with one, I never get to try.
As long as we’re not saying “speak fluently”, then four, counting English. Fluently, only English. Semi-fluently: French, Spanish. Barely get by: Portuguese. It’s not that I haven’t spoken them all with some degree of fluency in the past, but the farther away the past gets, the less gooder i do.
I’m fluent in Swedish and English, and have some degree of skill in German and Spanish, plus a smattering of Ancient Hebrew. I can usually get the gist of a Dutch text, but understand nothing of spoken Dutch. Danish is sometimes intelligible to me, Norwegian more often so.
I speak 2.1 languages: English, Esperanto, and a smattering of French (barely past the cereal-box stage).
I’d like to get semi-fluent in French, and also take Japanese. If course, if I end up long-term dating someone who speaks a different language, I’ll try to learn that one.
Fluent in English, pretty good at French, used to be good at Spanish but haven’t spoken it in a year and it all turns to French when I try. I’ll probably be taking a Spanish class this summer (I need one more to finish my minor), and I’m afraid I’m going to confuse everyone by speaking some kind of horrible Frankenstein’s Monster language.
I’d like to be fluent in Spanish and French someday, and I should probably learn some German at some point.
I am fluent in German, speak pretty good French and I read Dutch, Latin and Italian.
Unless someone else types for you, your English is decent too.
Fluent English, reasonable if rusty French, very rusty Latin and Classical Greek.
I can read French to newspaper standard (with the help of a dictionary), and can speak on a much lower level. My idiot spoken French gets better after a few days exposure to native speakers but my accent is really really bad apparently. I can puzzle my way through Dutch as seen on menus and public information notices. sigh
ETA I can read Latin with a dictionary to help with vocab
Just English and Spanish. Sometimes I think I’d like to learn French too, since I currently understand so little of it.
English and Korean, both fluently. I can read Chinese and French if I rely heavily on a dictionary, but I can’t speak either of them beyond the standard hello-how-are-you dialogue.
People assume that because I’m bilingual I have some kind of aptitude for langauge, but I learned both English and Korean when I was very young, so I didn’t really study either as a language, if you know what I mean. I actually hate learning languages because I’m so bad at it, which is unfortunate.
English as a native language for me. I’m proficient in Spanish and Japanese – meaning I can converse and read fairly well, but am only fluent in a few select subjects. I’m just starting to learn German. I love languages and probably know many words in a lot of languages, but not to any degree of proficiency.
Native English and French speaker, and I can understand a half-decent amount of Spanish as long as you don’t ask me to speak it back at you.
Native English and Russian speaker, very rusty (rusted shut?) Spanish and Hebrew. A few words of Japanese.
Fluent English, rusty French, dreadful German, and much-forgotten conversational Cantonese, the latter of which I can say is the achievement in my life that gives me the greatest sense of achievement.
mrs jjimm is a born linguist though. I can’t understand how she does it. Her first language is Irish, she has a masters in English creative writing, is fluent in French, and has a bachelors degree in Italian and French. And she took like three Spanish classes, and can pretty much get by in Spanish now. Grrr.
My sister knows English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, and a good bit of Latin and Greek. Me, I’ve just got English with some Latin.
Native English and fluent in speaking+listening Japanese. Shitty at Spanish. So let’s say 2 and 1/5.
Arabic, French, Hindi, Italian, Malay, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek are ones I can have a conversation in, not all of them fluent. I have limited conversational abilities in a few more.
The number I can read, write, and translate in written form is much greater. I can go up to at least two dozen written languages, if I have reference materials as backup. Most of the Romance and Turkic languages, as well as Hebrew and Yiddish, are within my written range. Wherever I’ve worked in my career, they send me whatever stuff turns up in languages nobody else knows. Even if I can’t understand it, I can always identify the language. Learning Uzbek has also incidentally made me get pretty familiar with Russian, since the two are often blended in the former Soviet Union, like Spanglish over here.