Also I want to learn Farsi - I forgot it initially because the list I posted above was something I wrote up a few years ago and memorized, Farsi was a late addition.
First language - English
I’m still working with Spanish - I’ve not managed to cross from speaking it to fluency - there’s too much I have to take a second and translate in my head when someone speaks.
German, I know bits of - I took it for three years in college, but not enough anymore to even say I speak German.
Gaelic - another one I know bits of, but I definitely don’t speak.
I’d like to be able to spend a month in a Spanish speaking country and really get to where I’d like to be with that language. I’d love to really learn Gaelic, and lately I’ve been thinking that Japanese, Russian or Chinese would be neat to learn.
I think Esperanto would be cool. Either that or Klingon.
I know:
English
Chinese
Want to learn:
Spanish - to sing along to Buena Vista Social Club type music
Welsh - because it sounds so lyrical
Wow! I am a native Farsi speaker. I believe I am the only one on the boards. You should get your wife to register, too!
My answer:
I speak Farsi and English natively.
I studied Japanese for 4 years, lived there for five.
Very dodgy French (lived there for 20 months but didn’t study seriously)
Highschool and college Spanish.
I’d like to learn Irish and if I ever want a ‘real job’ here, I’ll have to learn it!
My first language was English, though for the first several months of my speaking life it was also French. My father put a stop to that because he told my mother he couldn’t understand what I was saying. Bah!
I can read and comprehend both French and Russian, but I get a little gun-shy when it comes to making conversation. I have a knowledge of German which allows me to read a menu, correctly pronounce the lyrics to Cabaret, and shop. Reduziert! Wahoo!
I speak first-language English, fluent French and Esperanto, quite decent Spanish, some Italian, and dreadful German. I’d love to speak Russian, Japanese, or Catalan.
I was raised speaking english and gujurati, took six years of german through middle/high school, can understand a bit of hindi (mainly from watching bollywood films), and had a crash course in japanese including 2 writing systems.
English is my first language.
I took Spanish through junior high and high school. I could carry on a conversation pretty easily. Now…less so, unfortunately.
I took Hebrew my first three years of college. I spent my third year of university in Israel, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Har Hatzofim). Ani lo makira af achad sh’ledaber imi, az ani lo zocheret harbeh achshav. Aval ani yoda’at sh’yesh kitot b’beit haknesset b’ir, ani tzricha limtzoa mashu alav. (Basically, I don’t remember much anymore, I need to find a class to refresh my once mad skillz.)
I took intro to Classical Arabic last spring at the UC Berkeley Extension. I learned a little, but have forgotten most of it by now.
So. I recently applied for graduate programs in Middle Eastern Studies, and if I am accepted, I will be probably be continuing my Hebrew study, and starting Farsi. I really want to learn Farsi a LOT, but the MA programs require that a student complete two years of a Middle Eastern Language, and I have a better chance of doing that with Hebrew, which is a good language to know anyway.
I also want to learn Arabic, and, if I ever complete all of these goals and am not yet senile, I’d like to improve my Spanish.
I know you all care soooo much, but this totally doesn’t make sense (I’m way too crazy to let it stand). It should be la’asot mashu alav. I blame the caffeine, or lack of it.
Jeg vil gerne taler meget godt dansk fordi jeg er gift med en danske, og hans familie taler ikke meget godt engelsk.
I was rasied speaking french and english. I have enough school spanish to get by if I need to (especially if I am allowed to write things down). My danish is slowly rising above tourist level, thanks to many visits with my in-laws who speak as if it is a sport where the fastest person to get their point out wins. If I get the danish down, I want to try something completely different, but that’s probably a while in the future.
I speak semi-fluent French and I can usually get by in Spanish. I spent a summer hooked on a Spanish telenovela that aired at 4 AM when I worked the graveyard shift for a credit card company, so I picked it up from there. I started learning German, but couldn’t afford the lessons anymore.
I want to learn Italian, Chinese, and I want to start up my German lessons again.
Ava
English is my native language. I can read enough French, Spanish, and Italian to at least get the gist of a newspaper article (usually), but I can’t actually speak any of them. I’m currently studying Japanese in a desultory fashion; I basically picked it on a whim, although being able to watch anime without subs/dubs would be a nice bonus.
Mi primero lengua estaba ingles, y ahora, aprendio espanol IV. Hablo un poco espanol con mi madre, pero quiero aprender mucho.
Translation: My first language was English, and I am now learning Spanish IV. I speak a little bit of Spanish with my mother, but I want to learn more.
Speak passably well: Spanish. (Also know Latin and Old English, but those don’t count for obvious reasons.)
Speak a little, would like to know more: German, French.
Have tried to learn and utterly failed: Hungarian, Czech, Thai. I might give one or more of these another shot if I decide to go there for an extended period, otherwise, they’re pretty much lost causes.
Would like to learn: Italian or Portuguese.
Native English, near-native Spanish (although I’m getting rusty from lack of conversational partners), fluent Russian (although with vocabulary gaps, plus I suck at slang), painful but semi-functional French. I can swear in Yiddish here and there, and order food in a variety of others. Ah, priorities!
I can understand Italian and sometimes Portuguese (Brazilian is easier to me than Portuguese), and can puzzle my way through a newspaper article in most Romance or Slavic languages. I can pronounce German reasonably well, I’m told (all those years of singing Bach oratorios in choir), and used to be able to fake enough extremely basic Portuguese to make a receptionist understand who I was trying to reach. The most fun, though, was the crazy receptionist job I had one summer in college; we had lots of Polish-speaking clients, but only one Polish-speaking staff person, so for those occasions where she wasn’t around, we had a list of about 20 phonetically transcribed Polish sentences posted next to the phone; things like “Please hold, I don’t speak Polish,” “Is this an emergency?” or “Please call back in an hour.” I’d generally understand the more basic answers, but the problem was when they didn’t believe me that I didn’t speak Polish and would babble about their situation in southern Highlander dialect at 500 mph.
It would be fun to learn just about any additional languages, but I think I should work on the ones I know half-assed first. Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish (or maybe another Turkic language like Azeri or Uzbek), German, Brazilian Portuguese…all are high on the list. Maybe someday I’ll have the torture of picking one!
Native English, pretty solid Spanish (I’ve no problem with Castilian Spanish but don’t know how I’d do in Central/South America), just getting started with ISL (Irish Sign Language), and hope to look at ASL/FSL in the near future.
I know Arabic, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Malay, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, Urdu, and Yiddish fairly well. Or at least not too terrible. I put this group on my résumé.
I sort-of-know Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Latin, Lithuanian, Mongolian, Japanese, Kyrgyz, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Uzbek. At least a little. I can manage just a wee bit of several others including Armenian, Gujarati, Hawaiian, Irish, Polish, Russian, Swahili, Tatar, Telugu…
I have the ambition to learn all of India’s official languages. In addition to the Hindi and Urdu I already know fairly well, I want to someday master
Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Panjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, and Telugu.
I’m still working on my invented language, Mömö.
Gadothu jom wïl hatï mü Mömö gelün cevdim. Döle gerü Uralshï-Altayshï gelde wöni corubun vededim: Suwomï, Majar, Türük, ba Mongol-da. Mömö himete öder Sibir mardhï, Ïrtïsh holanï fölödhi osuldïta.
This topic actually came up in a restaurant the other night. I was dining with a girl I met online and her parents. Let’s observe:
I then had to go through my what-Esperanto-is,-why-I-stopped-learning-it-but-I-can-still-speak-it speech again.
Anyways, it’s hard to learn a language around here because I live in a very rural area. There are very few native speakers of other languages and little access to materials on foreign languages. My high school only offers French and Spanish, both of which I am currently taking. I think I would like to start learning a non-Indo-European language next.
I’d like to speak perl.
Je puis parler français. C’est bon juste? Après la guerre ce pourrait être très utile.
and Derleth, I’m going through a Mentor Graphics install so I’m at least learning flexlm for “corporate butthead”.