My native language is English. I can speak, read and write Italian, but I’m not that proficient at any of them, perhaps a bit better at reading than speaking of writing. I also studied Estonian and can speak, read, and write it, not very well, but I’m out of practice so I would need a bit of time before I could produce anything very coherent.
I also studied Spanish in high school, so I can kind of understand and speak it (as well as write it I suppose, nothing complicated though).
To prove my credentials I will now greet you all in all three languages:
I know three. English is my best language, Chinese is my first language but my reading and writing has regressed to the point of functional illiteracy. My French is passable (I took it throughout high school but am not sure what to do with it now); my reading is much better than my writing, listening or speaking.
I am competent in both written and spoken German, but I’m not fluent. I can understand about 90% of television / radio, when the speaker is speaking Hochdeutsch (high German). Local dialects can mess me up something fierce, depending on where I’m at. That’s not unusual though, as native German speakers often have serious trouble understanding other dialects…they’re that different. (for an example, where I live, the standard “Guten Morgen” or “Morgen” for “good morning” is pronounced “Moya”??) I speak German well enough to get my point across in almost any situation, though occassionally I will have to explain things in a more roundabout manner than I would in English.
I can read Dutch on a limited level, due to its similarities to German and English, though I can not understand it spoken, and I can’t actually speak a word of it. It’s interesting to be able to read it, though!
I’m pretty much bilingual: English was my first language, but I’ve been in a Hebrew-speaking environment much longer. Either way, I can speak either language without an accent, not to mention reading or writing - although my English penmanship is awful.
(Actually, my Hebrew has a very slight American accent, but most people don’t pick up on it immediately, and those who do usually can’t place it).
I have always said it reads like a combination of an American who can’t speak German well and a German who can’t speak English well. (No offense to our Dutch linguists!)
Yeah, I’m the same way with Dutch, as well as Azerbaijani and Portuguese. I also took a class in Japanese, though I haven’t kept up with it and have been forgetting it, but for a while there I could read and write the kana and speak simple sentences.
The point made by linguists in earlier threads of this type is that one can know a written language without being able to hold a conversation in it. As a librarian I worked with over 2 dozen different languages and knew enough to figure out what books were about, even if I couldn’t actually speak most of them. So instead of asking “How many languages do you speak?” it’s better to ask “How many languages do you know?”
English, obviously. I learned Spanish growing up, then lived in Germany, then decided to learn Arabic and Russian. Picked up Portugese, French and Dutch (Vlamms, really); some Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. I was taught Tamil (hi, Johanna, Tamil speakers are rare); and can make my way in Hindi and Pushtu. Some Latin, some Hebrew, no ancient Greek. I’m thinking about Kiswahilli next, or the hard course in Arabic.
Well :eek: after False_God’s resume, I’m almost scared to share. English fluently, five years of high school French, Esperanto fluently. Then again at 17 I suppose that’s a decent start.
And although it might be against custom (I’m not really sure), I feel the need to note this as my first post. I’ll be subscribing for Christmas :rolleyes:
English is my Native Language. I took 2 years of German in High school but that was years ago and all I can remember now is how to count and swear. I’ve been teaching myself Latin for the last year, when I get the time. I hope to be get good at that eventually.
I can get by in France on the French I took in H.S.; can definitely read a reasonably simple French text and understand slowly!! spoken French. Speaking and writing are a bit weaker, but I can get by in a pinch.
As a result of having good reading skills in both English and French, I’m pretty much capable of getting the gist of a simple text in most Romance languages (I was able to decipher an Italian newspaper when I was on vacation there).
A language I really should know and don’t is Arabic. At least my children are being forced to take a few years of it at school…
Native English, and I speak Portuguese well enough to fool a Brazilian into thinking I’m from another part of Brazil, at least until the conversation gets into any technical detail. I speak enough Spanish to get by.
The Portuguese comes from 15 years of marriage to a native of Rio de Janeiro.
I speak English (obviously), but its not really my ‘mother’ tongue; that honour goes to Kutcchi, a dialect variant of Gujerati, which I also speak. In addition to that, I speak fluent German, Hindi and Urdu. I can get by in French, and I can read and understand spoken Dutch and Norwegian, and a bit of Swedish and Bengali.
I grew up bilingual in English and Kutcchi, (and a bit of Hindi) and learnt German and French at high school. Gujerati I picked up as a little kid when we visted my dad’s family in Canada who all speak Gujerati. I picked up Urdu whilst in Pakistan on holiday for 6 weeks when I was a teenager. That’s mainly where I learnt a lot of my Hindi too. I figured out I could understand spoken Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian when on a skiing trip in Sweden with some friends who were Dutch, Swedish, and Norwegian, and realising that I could understand exactly what they were saying, and that they didn’t have to translate for me. I picked up some Bengali when I was in India earlier this year; despite the fact that I spent the entire time in Mahrastra, my colleagues at the GMRT were mainly Bengali, so after two weeks with them, I found that I could understand them reasonably easily.
False God,vaNakkam. How extraordinary to meet someone else who has studied Tamil. I suggest you try Sanskrit next. Everyone’s doing Arabic these days. They heard Uncle Sam was hiring.
Angua, I had a friend once whose ethnic origin was Kacchi. She explained to me that although her dialect is spoken in Gujarat, it isn’t really a dialect of Gujarati at all. I looked into it, and found that Kacchi is a dialect of Sindhi. Have you ever tried learning Sindhi?
English (native). I’ve taken Italian classes at university for the past 2-3 years, but it’s not sinking in very well. If only I were in Italy, then I think I could actually learn it and remember it! I took 3 yrs of French in high school, but that was almost 7 years ago. I still find myself thinking in French during my Italian class though! French seemed easier to me than Italian, but I think I know Italian grammar a lot better than French (which is probably why Italian seems harder).