English
American (including Maine-ish and Alabamian)
Japanese
Spanish
French
Italian
Tried to recall Korean/Mandarin, no bueno!
"In German oder English I know how to count down,
Und I’m learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun.
Thanks to Tom Lehrer.
I can do spanish, german, and maybe latin and french.
I could add Yiddish, which is somewhat different from German. Ayns, tsvay, dray, feer, finif. The owner of the grocery store that we shopped at until we got a car and could drive to the supermarket, added up your purchases on a paper bag, mumbling in Yiddish
English
German
French
Spanish
Czech
Hungarian
I would have said Latin and Italian, but it turns out that I got “three” slightly wrong in both languages (it’s not actually “tri” in either).
I can do “yan tan tethera”, but I break down after that. Oh, and “ena dio tria”. So just to three in both.
I learned them in Spanish from Sesame Street, in German at High School, and in Maori from osmosis. So that’s four.
English, German, French, Spanish, and Turkish.
Hey, look, full overlap except for Greek. Glad to see someone else here with some Turkish.
Maybe I’ll learn to count to five in Greek.
In the last few years, as we’ve been working our way further east in the Med, I’ve taken to learning minimal basic vocab for the countries we visit. Yes; No, One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Please, Thank You, etc etc. Handy in surprising ways - in Turkiye our hotel room was on floor beş - one floor higher and we would have been screwed.
Re Greek,we’ve had a few posts, but there’s a pronunciation problem, at least for modern Greek:
In modern Greek δ has morphed to something like “th”; and where letter sounds are lost, letter combinations are used to replace them - in this case ντ is pronounced more or less as “d”. So in fact ένα δύο τρία τέσσερα πέντε is pronounced something like ena, thuo (or vuo), tria, tessera, pede (or peday).
I’m sure someone will IPA me on this, but that’s above my pay grade.
j
Four; English, French, Spanish, Thai.
‘Counting to five’ is such a low bar though. I can speak/read only one of those, English.
Correcting myself - slight correction, as I was caught out by the start-of-word vs middle-of-word pronunciation difference. As ντ is in the middle of πέντε, you do get a hint of “n” in there, so pende (or penday).is closer. (On the other hand, in eg.ντομάτα (tomato), at the beginning of the word, it’s a straight “d”).
If anyone is interested:
j
Ha! I actually learned 1 through 10 before going there for a couple of weeks. (Actually, I guess I learned one through 19)
I can do ten, or maybe eleven if you count Austro-Bavarian as a separate language. Grouped roughly by language family:
- English, German, Icelandic, Austro-Bavarian
- French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Interlingua
- Hungarian
- Russian
I’m sure I could recognize, but not produce, counting sequences in a few more, including Greek, Polish, and Arabic.
Four for sure: English, German, Spanish, and French.
I want to add Dutch, but I’m drawing a blank on the Dutch word for “four”.
I bet you can do unary, as well.
Same as German.
If it wasn’t for “Wooly Bully” and Cinco de Mayo, I wouldn’t be able to do the Spanish.
English, Arabic and Spanish.
Ah, so you know Arabic numerals!
Do Roman numerals count as a different language than Latin? I can do both.
4: English, Spanish, French, and Latin.