I would like to know how to say “I don’t speak (language)” in various languages. I have a list here:
Armenian.
Chinese (Pinyin).
Danish* [Jeg taler ikke Dansk].*
Dutch [Ik spreke niet nederlands].
Finnish [En puhua sumoalainen].
German [Ich spreche nicht deutsch].
Hungarian [Nem beszek magyarül].
Ilocano.
Irish.
Japanese [Nihon-go dekimasen].
Latin.
Polish [Nie mówim po polsku].
Russian [Ja nie govoriju po-russki].
Slovak.
Slovenian.
Swedish.
Tagalog.
Turkish [Konuşmaarım türkçe].
Ukranian.
Yiddish.
(The translation in italics is my own and I’m not sure it’s correct.)
If I was going to learn only one sentence of a language, I can think many more useful than;
“I don’t speak…”, I’m just saying.
Sorry, I don’t know a second language and can’t help on that front. Surely there are on line translators though, have you tried those?
Não falo português - (I) don’t speak portuguese
No fall-uh port-uh-gace (varies with dialect)
Your Japanese seems weird to me. It translates more to something like “I don’t do Japanese.” You might want more of a “Nihongo o wakarimasen,” which would be “I don’t understand Japanese” or “Nihongo o hanashimasen,” which is actually “I don’t speak Japanese.” All formally, of course.
A few of your translations are wrong:
Ich spreche kein Deutsch.
Nem beszélek magyarul.
Je ne parle pas le français (for French). You can omit the “le” if you want.
ETA: phonetically, juh nuh pah-R-luh pah luh fran-say. The “j” is soft as in Raj, not hard as in jelly.
Chinese (Mandarin): Woh boo shor poo tong hua.
FTR pinyin is a writing system, not a language. What I wrote above is not pinyin.
Chinese (Cantonese): Mm sik gong dong wah.
Wouldn’t the verb come at the end? Ich kann nicht Deutsch sprechen. I can not German speak.
In a subordinate clause or in a sentence with two verb forms (like yours), yes. In my example, no.
dutch is wrong too
better is:
[Ik spreek geen Nederlands]
Swedish: Jag talar inte svenska.
Icelandic: Ég tala ekki íslensku.
That one is actually very useful, it triggers “ok, let’s see who do we find who has a language in common with you” mode. I worked as a lab tech for several years; the sight of a warehouse dude dragging a truck driver into the lab was common enough to be unremarkable. Some of the truck drivers were looking quite scared by being forcibly dragged along by their sleeves, until they saw the white lab coat. White lab coat = person who’s more likely to speak Foreign than the dudes at the warehouse. Many tasks were routing enough to be handled just fine by two guys with nothing in common; for anything more complicated, the truckers got brought to the whitecoats.
“Ga”, not “o”!
Nihongo ga dekimasen. Nihongo ga wakarimasen. Nihongo ga hanasemasen.
Dekimasen is correct - it means “not able to do”.
Irish: Níl Gaeilge agam (lit. “I don’t have Irish”)
Finnish: en puhu suomea
Your Russian looks like it was transliterated by a German!
For Mandarin, it will sound like this:
Wo bu jiang tzong wen
What is the difference between these two? They both start with wo boo, i guess tong and tzong are close, then what?
I was taught that in German it is idiomatic to use the verb kennen by itself to mean "to speak (a language).
Thus: Ich kann Deutch.
jjimm is saying: I don’t speak/talk “ordinary language”, or “common language”. “Poo tong” means “ordinary” or “common”, “hua” can be “speech, talk, language, dialect” but is less formal
For mine, “jiang” is also “speak”, but not as much “talk”. And “tzong wen” literally is “Chinese language”, not just “language” because “Tzong” is short for “Tzong guo”, which is “China” or “Chinese”
Not sure why you left out Norwegian (one of my favorite languages):
Jeg snakker ikke Norsk.
In Japanese, I would just say:
Nihon-go wakarimasen. Literally: Japanese understand not.
You could say Watashi wa, nihon-go wakarimasen but it would normally be understood that you were talking about yourself.
Don’t know about that. It’s the first phrase I learn when traveling to a new country. The second being: Do you speak English? I figure it’s only polite.