# What languages do you know? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [April 14, 2010, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092 "2010-04-14T18:16:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![VinylTurnip](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/b2d939/32.png) [@VinylTurnip](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/VinylTurnip)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/61 "2010-04-15T17:05:11Z")
French via formal study; Brazilian Portuguese via self-study and marital osmosis. ---
**Author:** ![Kyla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/eada6e/32.png) [@Kyla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyla)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/62 "2010-04-15T17:16:17Z")
> [@dhkendall](#): > > Californian and Texan dopers would need to know it more than Chicagoan and New Englander dopers, and I _think_ we have more of column B than column A here (partly due to the fact that TSD is based in Chicago) Chicago has a very, very large Spanish-speaking community. It has the second largest Mexican-American population in the country (after Los Angeles), and sizable communities of people with with heritage in plenty of other Spanish-speaking countries. I used to see a lot of Ecuadorian, Venezuelan, Colombian, and Puerto Rican flags in particular. ---
**Author:** ![Eva\_Luna](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e495f1/32.png) [@Eva\_Luna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eva_Luna)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/63 "2010-04-15T17:25:45Z")
> [@Giles](#): > > I suspect that the term is used by speakers of other languages in Spain, such as Catalan and Galego (Galician). I also heard it used in Spain to distinguish between speakers of Iberian Spanish and speakers of Latin American Spanish (like me). ---
**Author:** ![Panurge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/fbc32d/32.png) [@Panurge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Panurge)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/64 "2010-04-15T18:20:56Z")
> [@chromaticity](#): > > Japanese, a tiny bit of Chinese, lots of less widely spoken Indian languages (Kannada, Tamil a bit), and a little bit of Braille. Both Tamil and Kannaḍa are spoken by more people than most European languages (around 65 and 40 million respectively) so they are not exactly small languages. Are you a native Dravidian language speaker or have you learned it somewhere? (I’m asking because I have tried to teach myself a bit of Tamil and I find it really, really difficult. I guess it’s because I only know Indo-European languages and it’s hard to adapt to a different “system”.) ---
**Author:** ![HeyHomie](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heyhomie/32/207_2.png) [@HeyHomie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HeyHomie)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/65 "2010-04-15T18:34:01Z")
If I were exiled to some city in Mexco where no one spoke English, I could _probably_ force my way through life with my extremely rusty grasp of the Spanish I learned in high school and college. I know a smattering of words in Italian, French, and Japanese. ---
**Author:** ![Hypnagogic\_Jerk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hypnagogic_jerk/32/4252_2.png) [@Hypnagogic\_Jerk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hypnagogic_Jerk)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/66 "2010-04-15T20:33:27Z")
I speak native French, and fluent English. I know enough Italian to shop for winter boots in Bologna, but I don’t know if I’m yet good enough to say that I speak it. (Still, I’ve never been so close to being trilingual and I will definitely keep it up.) I used to know some Spanish, but now every time I try to make sentences it comes out in Italian instead, which is disappointing especially given that Spanish is more useful as an international language than Italian. I’ll have to relearn it someday. I also know a few words of German and Polish, but I don’t speak them at all. Still, knowing a Germanic language (other than English) and a Slavic language would be interesting and useful goals, so I probably should pursue that. ---
**Author:** ![Ardeleanu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b38774/32.png) [@Ardeleanu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ardeleanu)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/67 "2010-04-15T20:39:22Z")
We were requested to specify what “other” languages we know, but there was no place to do it, so I’m specifying right here. Slovak, some Serbian and Bosnian (enough to get along). I can read all of them. I can also read Romanian but can’t put a sentence together without sounding like one of the yahoos from “Idiocracy”. ---
**Author:** ![Katriona](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/katriona/32/113_2.png) [@Katriona](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Katriona)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/68 "2010-04-15T20:44:37Z")
I took 4 years of French in college, and I’ve learned a wee bit of Scottish Gaelic in recent years. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/69 "2010-04-15T22:38:36Z")
> [@](#): > > We were requested to specify what “other” languages we know, but there was no place to do it, so I’m specifying right here. And this is the place for that. I don’t think there’s a feature that lets you submit write-in choices directly into the poll results. I had to pick some arbitrary limit to how many choices there would be. But I’ll admit it would have been a long long list before I included all of the languages I’ve seen mentioned so far. Heck, I’d never even heard of Luwian before now. ---
**Author:** ![ladyfoxfyre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ad7895/32.png) [@ladyfoxfyre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ladyfoxfyre)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2010, 3:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/70 "2010-04-16T03:48:35Z")
I chose Spanish, French (I can read a large amount and understand a bit spoken), Italian (same story), Russian (took it in college). My others would have been Serbo-Croatian, which I can read from taking lessons and its similarity in the basics to Russian. ---
**Author:** ![HazelNutCoffee](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/ac91a4/32.png) [@HazelNutCoffee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HazelNutCoffee)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2010, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/71 "2010-04-16T05:13:52Z")
I’m fully fluent in English and Korean. I have a very basic knowledge of Chinese characters and an even scantier (?) knowledge of French. I suck at languages. The only reason I’m fluent in two of them is because I learned them both at a very young age. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2010, 5:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/72 "2010-04-16T05:24:09Z")
When I was a very young child, I spoke primarily Tamil at home, but it’s all long since fallen into disuse and atrophy (I can follow enough of it when my family speaks it to me, but there’s a lot of contextual help going on there; and I don’t speak it myself at all), and these days, I am, for pretty much all purposes, English-only. I’m sentimentally saddened by it sometimes, but on the other hand, it makes sense; there isn’t anyone in my life who’d find conversation with me easier in beginner Tamil than in my fluent English, so there’s no impetus for me to use/relearn it. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2010, 1:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/73 "2010-04-16T13:15:54Z")
> [@nicole1912](#): > > You speak 25 languages?! I am in awe - do you mind if I ask how you learnt them? Thank you-- I’ve been drawn to linguistics since I was 6 years old. To start with, it was a gift I was born with, and then once you’ve learned a bunch of languages, the rest all become easier. I have an inclination toward the theoretical, the underlying structure of language, while learning to speak, read, and write, which is analogous to knowing music theory while playing various instruments. The two don’t always coincide, but they do reinforce each other when they do. (I play lots of different instruments too, and have a very solid knowledge of music theory.) > [@](#): > > They’re quite a broad range - was it for work? Or fun? Or do you move countries a lot? It started out mostly for my own intellectual pleasure-- I began studying Arabic purely because I thought it was interesting, but soon discovered it was quite the rice bowl (i.e., a reliable source of livelihood). So once I began getting hired for jobs using lots of different languages, it was an incentive to keep learning more. But my fascination and delight in learning languages always came first. Sometimes, as Mark Twain noted in _Life on the Mississippi_, to make a career out of what you love can take all the enjoyment out of it. I’m happy that wasn’t the case with languages–I love my work and it continues to give me intangible pleasure while it earns me a tangible living. I’ve lived overseas and traveled at length in Asia and Europe, which makes a huge difference, to immerse oneself. Sink-or-swim immersion is widely recognized as the most effective language learning method of all. > [@](#): > > It must have taken a long time - did you take them in groups? Good question. It does help a lot to study a language family as a whole when learning its individual members. So I went for Romance, Semitic, Turkic, Indo-Aryan, and Dravidian languages wholesale. I began with an adult-education class in Italian when I was 12, and just never stopped. I have a voracious appetite for languages. > [@](#): > > Were there languages that were made easier to learn because of languages you already knew? Absolutely! And not just within language families, but across them all too-- in fact, once I got to the level of linguistic universals that Noam Chomsky talked about, I could see the very same linguistic processes happening in every language, all around the world. So having learned a critical mass of languages, it becomes easy to pick up any language’s structure intuitively. You think, Hey, I’ve seen that feature lots of places already, I get how it works. After putting in a lot of work on learning the first 10 or so, the rest become so much easier from then on. > [@](#): > > (Sorry, ignore any of these questions that are too much - it’s just that you’re the first person I’ve ever met who speaks that many languages!) So kind of you to say so, Nicole, thank you! But actually, I don’t _speak_ all that well. I’m shy when talking to people and always had difficulty with using my voice, so I’ve concentrated on the written word. I love different alphabets and scripts and calligraphy. I always found it easier to hole up alone with books than to go out and talk to people, which has hampered my language learning. Only in the past couple years, having gone to a speech therapy clinic, have I gotten my voice to work better. ---
**Author:** ![halfliquid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a88e57/32.png) [@halfliquid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/halfliquid)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2010, 1:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/74 "2010-04-16T13:19:26Z")
English only. But I love the French language and sing along with songs in French when I can, but I was never able to properly learn it. ---
**Author:** ![Duke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e8c25b/32.png) [@Duke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duke)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2010, 1:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/75 "2010-04-16T13:32:28Z")
I have a Teach Yourself Catalan book on my desk at work here, but I’m going nowhere with it…nobody around here to talk to, so I guess I’ll be reading those Catalan/Valencian cookbooks I want to get very slowly. Hope I don’t mistake an omelet for a trout ( **Nava** will get that joke). I know little bits of Spanish, French, and German, but barely enough to understand a newspaper, so I only put down Latin, which is useful for nothing anymore but to help translate archival letters from the diocese. I think I’ve done two in the last seven years, but it takes about that long for me these days. My ex was the closest RL equivalent I’ve known to **Johanna** as a polyglot. She is fluent in English, French, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish (of course those three are very similar), Modern Icelandic, and German, and would be fluent if there was anyone around to talk to in Old Norse, Old Icelandic, and Old and Middle English. She recently published a translation of an Old Icelandic saga, so she truly does know her stuff. She was fairly proficient in Italian as well, and when we separated she was learning Welsh and Gaelic and was thinking about learning a few provincial French languages such as Breton. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2010, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/76 "2010-04-16T13:35:27Z")
> [@purple\_cow](#): > > In my experience (early 80s, New York), we got the choice in 7th grade of studying French or Spanish in school. The almost universal choice was French for the top students and Spanish for everyone else. Spanish was considered easier and French was considered classier, as in you’d choose it if you were expecting to move in educated circles when you were older. Same thing in my high school, those were the only two languages offered. I chose to take Spanish when I entered that school back in 1973. But they gave us all a language aptitude test before school began, and my scores were through the roof. They told me that all the high scorers were taking French, and all the low scorers were taking Spanish, so they stuck me in French, like it or not. I learned Spanish on my own anyway, and soon I could do it better than the students in Spanish class, which blew their little minds. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2010, 1:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/77 "2010-04-16T13:45:36Z")
> [@Kyla](#): > > Farsi is just the Persian word for Persian. It’s like arguing over whether Spanish or español is correct. Except that we’re using English here exclusively. If you’re speaking entirely in English and say, “I went to New Mexico and spoke español, to Louisiana where I spoke français, and I picked up a little Deutsch in Pennsylvania, ‘Arabiyah in Michigan, and Nihongo in California” it would sound incredibly phony and pretentious. Those all have perfectly good names in English. But for some bizarre reason, we’re now supposed to drop the word “Persian” which has been in the English language for like 1,000 years and call it Farsi? Makes no sense. I find it interesting that Iranians themselves feel offended to hear English speakers appropriating “Farsi” and they insist than in English the only correct name for it is Persian. The Iranians I know have very strong feelings about that. ---
**Author:** ![Lust4Life](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ecc23a/32.png) [@Lust4Life](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lust4Life)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2010, 2:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/78 "2010-04-16T14:16:41Z")
Didn’t enter the poll because strictly speaking (no pun intended) I am only fluent in English. But I can get by in pretty appalling French and German, and know a smattering of Arabic. ---
**Author:** ![Lust4Life](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ecc23a/32.png) [@Lust4Life](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lust4Life)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2010, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/79 "2010-04-16T14:17:47Z")
Ooops and a little equally bad Turkish. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2010, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092/80 "2010-04-16T15:00:17Z")
French. And though I’m very rusty, I was pleasantly surprised to discover I knew enough to make myself known when I was visiting Paris. And evidently, my accent was quite good. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-languages-do-you-know/536092.md?page=5)