I have a vocabulary of about 200 or 300 words in my native language, Yiddish (strange but true), several thousand words in French, a hundred or so in Italian, a few dozen in Spanish, maybe a dozen or two dozen in Hebrew, several hundred in Latin probably (though never formally studied Latin even for a minute), and th-th-th-that’s all, folks. (Does Pig Latin count?)
A smattering of:
Spanish (studied in school)
French (listened to tapes)
Japanese (listened to tapes)
I’m sure I probably know ten words of Russian, Italian and German, but I couldn’t string them together into a sentence (does “Ich bin ein Berliner” count?)
“Latin is a language, as dead as it can be, it killed the ancient Romans, and now it’s killing me.”
Somali, French, English, German, Russian, spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Latin, ancient Greek, probably Hebrew, ancien français if that counts, romanian! oh yeah Turkish and Irish. Mandarin I forgot about, and Japanese. Mind you, I can only speak a few of these, and most not at all except a few little tourist phrases.
Probably a pretty short list compared to most of you book people.
Depends on whether you mean “know right now” or “knew at one time.”
Besides English, I speak with varying degrees of fluency Spanish, French, and a little Portuguese. At one time I could read German. As I scientist, I know a fair amount of Latin and ancient Greek. Being from New York, I know plenty of Italian and Yiddish words.
While traveling, I picked up a little Hindi, Swahili, Tagalog, and Maori. And I made an attempt to learn some Irish Gaelic once.
No doubt I know ten words of Russian, Arabic, and Hebrew also.
I’m an American, but my descent is half-Latvian. Does that count?
Sadly, I don’t know ten words from that language. It’s a pity
The only language I’m fluent in is English. I did study Spanish in school for three years, but that was many years ago. So, I’m not fluent, but I do know lotsa words.
Ten words? Lessee…
German. My mom is German, so I gleaned a lot from her. I know how to count to ten, so there’s that right there. But I know a few words more than that.
Italian. I’m a big opera fan, and there’s no way around Italian being that.
Bits of Latin -learnt for a year at school; Welsh -started learning it as a kid when we planned to move there, but the move fell through, and I’ve forgotten most; Maori -lots of animal names and random bits; Malaysian -a few scraps learnt on holiday; Finnish -ditto; Spanish -very little… I can probably scrape together 10 words of Polish, Japanese and Swahili, can’t think of anything else.
The first language I spoke as a baby? I think that’s my native language. It’s down to a few hundred words by this point (the people I spoke it with, my parents and grandmother, have been dead for over forty years) but it is in the most technical sense my native language. I spoke it, and I didn’t speak any English, for almost a year when I was learning to speak. Yiddish is my mama-loshen.
Spanish, French, Latin, American Sign Language, Turkish, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Mongolian, Malagasy, Thai
After ASL in that line-up, we’re talking *maybe *10 words. What is the idea of this, though? Should I reread?
I’m American too, but both my parents’ families came over during WWII. I grew up speaking only Latvian until age 5 when I started school and needed a crash course on phrases like, “I need to use the bathroom”. I remember being completely baffled when I’d talk to my teacher and she’d look at me like she didn’t know what in the world I was saying. I must’ve been speaking Latvian. I learned English pretty fast, though. I don’t remember ever feeling left out by the other kids or anything.
There are a number of basic online Latvian language courses if you want to get your ten words.
I love languages, and always try to learn at least a few words when I travel or otherwise encounter a certain language.
I picked 10 because I didn’t want people to think they had to be fluent, but I didn’t want people to count languages where they knew how to say “hello”. Somewhat arbitrary. I figured it would be easy to count to ten.
I… I… I fudged. For some, I had known at least ten words when studying something about them; then, onto the same feature in another language, or another feature, and in another language, altogether. I often look back wistfully at when I was actively engaged with speakers of one or another language.
I suppose I might know that many animal or food names in Algonquin or Nahuatl but only because the words have entered English or Spanish. I suppose at one point or another I’ve learned that many in Kuna or Embera, but can’t recall them offhand.
I learned English pretty fast, though. I don’t remember ever feeling left out by the other kids or anything.