Languages of which you know at least 10 words

Ten words or more? That expands things a bit.

French
Portuguese
Spanish
Japanese
German
Polish
Italian
Latin
Bambara (but just barely)

Guess that’s it.

German (three years in high school)
Spanish (general exposure since I was a child, starting with my mum, who spent a year or two in Mexico)
French (mostly culinary terms, my pronunciation of which is not guaranteed to be understandable to a Frenchman)
Italian

It’s pretty common to see meals with cacoila or chorize finished off with some malasada for dessert. And the Port sweet rolls are served with just about anything. And a quahog cabinet is pretty much just cold white chowder.

It was meant to be illustrative of the quirky RI lingo, not a serious culinary offering.

Surely, one would drink coffee milk with one’s quahogs. :wink:

I was wondering. I know a lot of words in languages like Hindi and Thai, just from reading menus and figuring things out.

Languages I can make myself understood in:

Polish (native language concurrently with English, although I’m a bit out of practice. I’d say somewhat above plain conversational level.) German, French, Croatian, Hungarian. I could fudge my way through Czech, Slovak, and Russian, but it’s kind of through a generic “pidgin Slavic” or something. I can probably ask very simple things in Spanish, too. Certainly know more than ten words, but it’s embarrassing that I don’t know more, as I’m relatively okay at picking up new languages. If you count learning through menus and cookbooks, I can add knowing at least ten words in Hindi, Thai, Japanese, Korean, etc.

Warlpiri, English, French, Spanish, Japanese.

Ten words?

Americas
None!

European
English
French
Spanish
Portuguese
Russian
German
Italian

African
Fulfulde
Hausa
Guidar
Afrikaans
Setswana

Asian
Mandarin
Hindi
Mongolian
Tagalog

Outside of the Americas, that’s a fairly good geographic spread.

German, French, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Gaelic, Scots, Chinook, Greek, Latin, Arabic

Sweet, a brag thread. :smiley:

Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, are the ones I’m confident of at least 10 words off the top of my head. I’m sure there’s others that I happen to know at least 10 words of if I think about it (actually, German probably, just from reading about WWII).

Oops, forgot Vietnamese. Sin loi.

Enough Spanish that I could force my way through a conversation in an absolute emergency, if the other participant spoke excruciatingly slowly and spoke to me as if I were a third-grader.

Probably a hundred or so Japanese words; there was a time when I could form rudimentary sentences in Japanese but that time is long gone.

Probably a hundred or so words in French, a few dozen in Italian, and a few dozen in Latin.

I also know several Yiddish words, but they’re words in more-or-less common use (schmuck, ferkakte, etc.), so the line between English and Yiddish is a thin one sometimes.

French
German
Latin
Greek
Japanese
Hebrew
Yiddish

Spanish - learned at college and from movies and music. I was able to communicate pretty well in Barcelona, but my vocabulary isn’t great.
German - learned at school. I’m not great at the grammar, but I was able to spend a couple of weeks in Munich without speaking English.
Italian - learned at college. I can communicate, but my vocabulary is poor and gets mixed up with Spanish.
French - learned at school. I can read it pretty well, but my pronunciation and listening skills are bad.
Japanese - Self-taught. I can understand the spoken language fairly well, but I’m very slow at forming my own sentences, and my reading / writing skills are terrible.
Dutch - some fairly basic grammar and vocabulary learned from an audio course
Greek - ditto
Mandarin - ditto
Latin - I tried to teach myself but lost interest, so I can only read some basic sentences
Cantonese - mostly food-related words from working in a Chinese take-out
Esperanto - I tried to teach myself as a child, but I’ve forgotten most of it now
Czech - a few basic phrases learned during a week in Prague.
Welsh - I know plenty of individual words, but can’t make a sentence.
British Sign Language - I did take a class on this, and can remember a few dozen signs, but not how to make a sentence.
Hawaiian - I can sing Silent Night, and that’s it.

Okay, for Arabic, I counted loan words such as harem, nadir and zenith.

Mainly French and Spanish for me. I studied Spanish in school (2 years high school, 2 years college - to the 300 level) and try to keep it up a bit. I can communicate the bare necessities to Spanish speakers, read basic articles, and understand very slow speech.
As for French, I studied it in high school and listened to tapes for a trip to Paris last year. Much more basic than my already limited Spanish, but certainly more than 10 words.

I could find 10 Italian words in my brain somewhere, just from growing up in an Italian-American community and knowing some Spanish and French.

I went to Greece as a teenager and knew a few Greek words at the time - maybe up to 50 words, but don’t remember them.

10 words … let’s see here. Not promising any conversation, though:

French
German
Spanish (and can work out the Portuguese for many -ción/-ção words)
Italian
Polish (barely)
Russian
Japanese (largely culinary terms)

I wish I could say Lakota - that’s cool.

Spanish
Japanese
Hungarian
French
German
Russian
Arabic

If foods count, Hindi. I know like 3 other words, but everything on a menu.

Finnish.
French if I try hard.
Spanish, if I try even harder.
Latin, if you only want bird or mosquito binomial nomenclature.

I’m a bit stunted, verbally. :frowning:

At least a few thousand words in French, if not more – I can read French magazines and newspapers.

A few hundred words in:
Japanese
Spanish

At least ten words in:
Russian
German
Finnish
Dutch
Italian
Greek

Sounds cool to me. :cool: