Hindi - first language
English - second language. Of course my English skills are way better than Hindi.
Conversational Spanish.
A smattering of Japanese.
The rest are dialects. Can speak and understand Urdu & Punjabi.
English and Spanish from youth. Spent 6 months in Germany as an exchange student at age 16 without having studied German before, so I got good real quick. Learned French and Flemish while living in Belgium as an exchange student in university. Got bored a lot as a teenager (still do) so I thought it would be neat to teach myself Arabic and Russian over 2 summers. Ditto Latin but most of that has gone. Picked up Portugese with some classes in my first job out of college. Then I joined the Foreign Service and got sweated through 867 hours of Tamil reading, writing and speaking. Currently learning Dari for a job in Afghanistan. I can still dredge up a lot of Italian and Polish, ditto Yiddish. Some Bahasa Malay from God knows where and a little Sinhala, which means I can read Malayalam and the Tamil means I can make a educated guess at Telugu.
So no Greek or Scandinavian languages and none of the African tribal languages, and I’ve left Chinese and Japanese alone. I’m thinking of Bangkok after Kabul, so I’ll probably get some Thai thrown into the mix.
Maybe 8 that I could get a hotel room and a meal in, and some other linguistic pocket lint. Learining each one gets tougher and tougher as I get older (30 next month).
Nothing to brag about here. I wanted to learn how to speak most of the major languages when I was a kid. Life got in the way.
English, native.
Japanese, about business level. Like Sublight, I read and write at about 6th or 7th grade level. I need a dictionary to get through most newspaper articles, though I can get the gist without one. Considering how long I’ve been here I really should be more fluent than that. I suppose studying would help, and I’ve been a lazy bastard for the last few years.
Spanish, used to be pretty decent, barely conversational at this point. A couple of years ago I went to Spain on vacation. I could understand a lot, but Japanese got in the way of speaking unless I took a minute to think about it first. I’d have to spend a few months in a Spanish-speaking country to get it back, I think.
May I just say that I love the phrase “linguistc pocket lint” and will probably start using it from now on?
I am now officially jealous of most of the posters in this thread, and I think I want to propose marriage to Johanna and/or False_God. 
Can I weasel may way to greater linguistic expertise by saying that I understand basic math and basic electronics, and I can draw as well? I didn’t think so.
Seriously, I have always been somewhat ashamed of being almost monolingual, especially since I live in an officially-bilingual country. That I do not know even basic French cuts me out from prominence on the national scene, as well as making it difficult to, say, buy bus tickets in Montréal. Once I get this whole house-design thing set up, it’s back to French lessons for me.
That’s such an awesome linguistic resume, False_God. I’m really impressed.
Especially this. Malayalam and Sinhala have, IMHO, the two most fiendishly complicated alphabets in the world. Their neighbor Tamil by contrast has what I consider the easiest Indian alphabet to learn. I have good news: Once you learn to read Telugu, the Kannada alphabet is a snap, or vice versa, they’re almost the same. Telugu is one of the most mellifluous-sounding languages in the world, like a darker, softer version of Italian or Finnish.
Telugu proverb:
పరిగెతతి పాల్ దాగే-కంటే, నిలుచుండి నీళ్ళు తాగటమ్ మంచిది
parigetti pāl dāgē-kantē, nilucundi nīllu tāgatam mancidi
‘It is better to stand still and drink water than to run and drink milk’.
Heh, an apt turn of phrase. Most of what I got is just that… linguistic pocket lint.
YES, this is so true. Maastricht pinpointed one of the key facts for polyglots. Once you’ve delved into enough different ones, you start to recognize familiar processes, the linguistic universals that Chomsky wrote about keep turning up everywhere, you can recognize similar things happening in, say, Quechua as on the other side of the world. Once it all starts to look so familiar, the learning falls into place that much quicker.
Where’s matt_mcl when you need him?
I feel comfortable in English and French, and mostly comfortable in Japanese so long as I wasn’t stuck in someplace with a really bizarre regional accent, like Osaka. How many more languages I speak depends on your definition of “speak”. I don’t have much confidence in the German I’m taking now, but classmates sometimes ask me if I lived there as a kid (I didn’t). I can understand a lot more spoken Spanish than I can generate myself, and I can read without a problem.
With the three European languages combined, I can muddle through a lot of others, like Dutch, Portugese and Italian. It is occasionally possible for me to decipher stuff in written Chinese from knowing written Japanese. I’ve taken Navajo, but more as a curiosity than as a serious language – as a language it’s evolving far slower than the English it’s surrounded with, so it’s missing a lot of vocabulary that I would need to get through an average day, plus if I ever move away from the American Southwest the chance that I’ll ever get to have a conversation in Navajo again are basically nil.
I can get through things like Romanian and Esperanto with a dictionary on hand. I understand Louisiana Creole French better than the regular variety, if you count creoles as ‘languages one can be properly said to speak’, because the English-like pattern of word stresses makes it a lot easier for me to separate the words.
I would also count mathematical and musical notation as languages one can become fluent in, but that’s probably a debate for another thread entirely. 
I’m coming a bit late to this, but here goes:
I’m a native French speaker, and I once did a stint as a “native English teacher”, though English is a second language. I have an undergrad degree from an English-language university.
I am fluent in Japanese, as a matter of fact, this is the language I use at work and home. I have a master’s degree from a Japanese school. All classes were given in Japanese and with the exeption of my thesis, all reading and writing was in Japanese also. I can read the newspaper and books on philosophy without needing a newspaper. I have an interest in classical litterature and am teaching myself classical Japanese. It is different enough that from a learner’s point of view, it really is a different language.
Those are the three languages I’m fluent in. Also:
I can have a conversation in Spanish and understand most of it. I have read novels in Spanish, only occasionally requiring a dictionary. With more exposure, I could easily become fluent (again).
I can read some Mandarin. However, my spoken skills are next to nil. I can order in restaurants and try to get directions.
So, stretching it, I can get to five. However:
With knowledge of both French and Spanish, learning new romance languages is laughably easy (compared to learning Japanese from scratch). I was once thinking of moving to Barcelona, and was surprised to find I could pretty much understand over 80% of the University of Pompeu Fabra’s Catalan website, though I have had no exposure to the language whatsoever. Understanding the spoken language is another question, though! The same holds for Portuguese. The more technical the text, the easier it is to read.
In general yes, absolutely; heck, my biggest problem with French classes was how often I’d write something on first impulse and then think “no, no, that’s Catalan!” only to find out it’s the same in French - once I reminded myself that “my first impulses are wiser than my conscious mind”, gee, French’s easy.
But my experience with German lessons is that we had a ton of problems because after 2 classes, we students knew more German grammar… than the teachers! :smack: They weren’t able to adapt to students whose difficulty was not in grammar but in vocabulary.
Learning another language by yourself is easier; learning one with a teacher still requires finding a teacher who fits your needs and style.
Arabella Flynn, German uses just five phonetic vowels (barring regional accents), unlike English. If you’re in an English-speaking location, being someone who’s used to other five-vowel languages already makes it easier for you to read German than for most other students. And welcome, by the way
I can speak and commincate in norwegian, finnish and english. I did learn german at school for many years (it felt like a long time in each class too), so I could probably survive in Germany.
If I cut down on the dialect, swedes and danes could probably understand me. I understand them well because I work with people from these countries and have learnt to read their habits.
Also I know how to order beer and icecream in spanish and italian, so I could survive for some time in those two countries as well.
Besides English, I speak fluent French and Esperanto, reasonable Spanish, and a bit of Italian. I wouldn’t mind learning Catalan, Japanese, Latin, or Inuktitut, or resurrecting my German.
Saluton, matt_mcl!
Let me add to this. Coming from a monolingual background, learning the first additional language is the hardest. There seems to be something about that first additional language that frees the brain and makes other languages easier. For the first time, one experiences that other languages do things in other ways, and it still works. Perhaps the brain, previously defaulting to native-language ways of doing things, is forced for the first time to find commonalities.
I wonder how much my early exposure to Fench (grade eight on) aided this. I was never fluent in it, but I was exposed to it. One reason I learned Esperanto was so that I could get semi-fluent in something relatively quickly. I found that this new second-language fluency made later French lessons easier as well.
I don’t doubt that polyglots who learn many languages get greater experience in finding the commonalities, though.
Is the experience different for people who grow up with two native languages from childhood, as opposed to having only one native language and learning a second language later?
I think, as has been mentioned before, the more languages you can speak the easier it is to learn new ones. When you learn to speak more than one language from an early age the barriers to learning other languages later on are less.
Almost everyone I know (in my immediate group of friends) is bilingual (at least) and we all learnt it from school age. My daughter is 6 and is fluent in 4 languages (English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Tshwana). I learnt English, Afrikaans and Sotho in school.
Currently I can speak English, Afrikaans, Dutch and German (Which were all pretty ok to learn and followed more easily from each other), French, Spanish and Portuguese (also similar) and Zulu, Sotho and Tshwana (not so similar but enough to make learning the next one easier). I can also get by in Thai having spent a lot of time there but I’m pretty sure I’ll never master it properly.
One of my managers speaks 11 languages fluently. My ex girlfiend spoke 9 languages and her aunt 11. With the possible exception of the mom of one of my Italian friends who can barely speak English (with her Italian) I can’t think of anyone that can only speak one language that I know.
It’s pretty much a given that here in South Africa you need to know at least 2 languages well enough to understand them and many people know a lot more.
I’m fluent in my native English. I’m also fluent in French, though it’s a bit rusty. I can get by in German and Spanish, just barely, and I do better reading both than writing, and better writing than speaking.
I wish I’d started learning foreign languages when I was a kid. When you’re about thirteen, it starts to get harder. I didn’t start studying French until I was thirteen.
Actually, I find that learning German is harder for me than learning French or Spanish was. I think it’s at least partly that I’m expecting German to be even closer to English than it is, so when a word I’m expecting to find is a cognate isn’t, it doesn’t stick as well. Knowing Japanese and French – two languages with vastly different structures – does help me with the verb moods and tenses, though.
I am in an English-speaking location, although that location is the US state of Arizona, which has such a high Hispanic population that sometimes I wonder. I don’t dare try to speak Spanish to you; it’s a very different dialect in Mexico than in Spain and I’m sure I would commit some very funny, but very silly, blunder if I tried. My reading comprehension is fairly good, though, to the point where friends of mine in areas where Spanish fluency isn’t common will forward me news articles and ask for paraphrases.
I would love to learn things like Arabic and Hindi, but there are so many different flavors out there I wouldn’t know where to begin.
Slight hijack. Having grown up with both danish and norwegian, the languages are, in my mind, almost identical (the written form almost totally so). But danes and norwegians have a ridiculously hard time understanding each other. It’s always a strange experience acting as translator for people who are, in essence, speaking the same language.
As I understood it, after infancy, the brain starts downsizing the synapses for sound-understanding. Which is why an english monolingual adult will have trouble even hearing some of the sounds in, say, japanese, and vice-verca. (flaky grasp of the science here, forgive me.)
Growing up bilingual, I suppose the brain retains a slightly more flexible atitude to different sounds. Plus, you never have to “learn” that different languages work differently.
Although, I suppose it depends on the individual, and on the languages. It’s not a great advantage in any case, only a slight head start.
Oh, you just brought back a memory from kindergarten. It was a Montessori school, where little kids ran around loose doing whatever they thought best. There was a girl in my class who was keen on becoming a French teacher. She always tried to make me do lessons with her in a kindergarten-level French book. I was having none of it, and I used to run to escape when I saw her coming my way with a French book in her hand.
When I registered for high school, I signed up to take Spanish. They put me in French class against my will because I scored high on the language entry test, and all the high scorers had elected French while all the low scorers had elected Spanish. I still wanted to learn Spanish, and even though I never studied it, I got it just the same. In 10th grade I saw another student’s Spanish homework and just translated it aloud on the spot. He was much dismayed that I understood it better than him without even taking the class. I was good in French. When a Frenchwoman came to visit my 9th grade class and converse about feminism with us in French, I was the only one who talked with her (and rescued everyone from awkward silence).
When I won the grand pris in the Concours National de Français, how I wished I could find that girl from my kindergarten, show her the engraved plaque I won, and thank her. I never appreciated her efforts at the time, but one never knows how the people we encounter will touch our lives. Maybe by the time we realize how much, it will be too late to thank the person.
The first language I actually learned was Italian. I didn’t grow up bilingual. My parents kept a tape recording of me when I was 3, counting from 1 to 10 in Italian, but I forgot it later. When I was 12, I decided I wanted to learn Italian, and found one of those adult education evening courses, pretty soon I was the one assigned to write letters to my cousins in Italy and translate their replies. Heh, I remember when my cousin in the Carabinieri read my first letter, he took me to be a girl and wrote back to “Cara Giovanna.” 
I should go find him and thank him too… Hai avuto più ragione, cugino mio, che mai sapevi.
My first conlang, when I was 13, was a Romance language derived independently from Latin, sharing plenty in common with French, Italian, Spanish, etc. but distinct from all of them.
Chance the Gardener, if you’re right that 13 is the cutoff age, I made it to my language learning just in time. That was a lucky “chance!”
I counted 16 - German language - Wikipedia
English fluently, of course. Some German, although it used to be much better, especially in my European-hitchhiking days.
I’m afraid my Thai is not as good as it should be – I have quite a problem with tonal languages – but I can hold a basic conversation. And I AM literate in Thai. I know the alphabet and can read Thai quite well. It’s like German in that it’s very phonetic: If you can read the word, you can pronounce it correctly. And it’s great not having to rely on English-langugae signs when I’m in remote areas upcountry, mainly because English-language signs are virtually nonexistent in off-the-beaten-track places. It’s also often a scream to note the differences in what’s said in the Thai-language signs and the English-language ones.
Johanna, you must have both sides of your brain running full speed ahead. Surely you must have mad skilz on the spatial relations in order to decipher all those alphabets. I’ve been trying to do Japanese kanji flashcards, but I seem to be too old to pick it up (and I aced all those spatial relationship tests).
I’m a tad bit jealous. Alright, a lot jealous. OK, I’m going start working on French (I borrowed my sister’s Instant Imersion CDs). Ignore all the consonants at the end, right?
Flashcards are useful, but have their limit. In my experience, making meaningful associations is what is most important when learning languages. Words, or characters, never exist outside of a context. This context can of course be neighbouring words, but it can be anything, really. When you rely too much on flash cards, they only context you have are… flashcards. You need to associate characters with something, anything, to make them stick. A place, a story, an image…
I believe - as far as the written language is concerned - that the internet is the greatest learning tool. Find a Japanese page about a subject that interests you, something that you would read if you could read. Scan it, try to find characters you know. Some that you don’t know will stand out. Maybe it’s their shape, maybe it’s because they come up often. You will find that these will be the easiest to learn. The more characters you know, the easiest they become to learn – you start recognising patterns, and your brain “loosens up”. The first 100 are a bitch. The next 200, are hard. However, once you get past about 1000, learning them becomes almost natural. It’s just a matter of exposure.
(By the way, I’m not trying to make this sound easy, or anything. Even with talent, the best strategy and total immersion, you’re looking at many, many hours of study.)