What languages do you know?

I have tourist-quality Spanish, but not nearly enough to consider myself fluent; same with French. I read German rudimentarily.

I grew up hearing my relatives speak Cajun French, which is unfortunately a dying language, and I understand it fairly well but speak it less so. It’s probably the most fascinating of the three, largely because of its anachronistic nature, and surprisingly different from standard French.

Italian. And I’m learning Thai, but I only know a few words so far so I didn’t vote that I know it.

You can relax. My opinion of Volapük is summed up in the last syllable of its name.

I picked Italian, I’m pretty good at that, and my other is very rusty Afrikaans.

  • Arabic

Latin, Spanish, and a fair bit of Irish (enough to be able to read more than half of the words on a page, but not enough to speak it).

In addition to English, I have Latin, Spanish, German and Indonesian.

My Spanish is very limited and comes mostly through derivation from Latin. At one time, I was fluent enough in German that I was beginning to think in it; ie, I wouldn’t have to translate a word into English, I simply knew what it meant. My Indonesian came from a crash course in conversational Indonesian and several lovely Indonesian girlfriends when I lived there.

Limburgs (“dialect” from the region I originate from)

I have to admit, I am really surprised to see that almost 1/4 of the people on this poll speak German as well.
Either we have lots of German lurkers or there are lots of people who don’t admit it - the reason I say that is whenever there are questions regarding German language, it seems like only the usual 5 or 6 people respond.
I mean, glad to see so many fess up to speaking German, but surprised nonetheless.

I studied German for many years, including at the graduate level, but it’s so rusty now that I never trust myself to answer questions about the language .

ASL of course. Also French (it’s ironic seeing as ASL and deaf culture was French influenced…As a matter of fact, ASL is an outgrowth of French Sign…LSQ I think?)
and Latin.

I know English, Castellano(Spanish), Latin (Classical. Ecclesiastical Latin throws me off with the near Italian pronunciations, but I can get it) and, although it’s not listed, quite a bit of Middle English. I can recognize when someone is speaking Japanese as many people assume I am Japanese.

Urdu kahan say seekhi hai?

English and, being Swedish, Swedish.

I find the Latin pronunciations you get on the internet vary so wildly, even from people who know more about the language than I do, that it’s like everybody speaks in a different foreign accent. A lot of it is how the sounds of one’s native language get remapped onto Latin, of course, but I also think that there are a lot of people who were told that macrons were only important in poetry, or needlessly pedantic, or only for low-level students.

If you treat Latin as a language to be spoken, and understood by ear, then those vowel qualities become important, but the people who dismissed them before are by-God not going to go back and learn them now just because the differences are phonemic.

My Japanese is all right but has been sliding since college. The Latin has been mostly overwritten by the Japanese. I know enough Sanskrit to say something like “The king’s boy goes to the village with the elephant.” I used to be decent at Java and C, with a smattering of FORTRAN 77, Lisp, Perl, Smalltalk, and Prolog.

My pronunciation is close to Castellano The reason for this is I learn words by hearing them. If I didn’t hear them, my mind went with the closest to what it seemed. I would even transpose some Spanish words into the Latin at the beginning. So, I’m guilty of speaking in a foreign accent. Unfortunately, Latin is a dead language here, there’s only one course at the local college and none at the community college and, as you said, the material available on the net varies greatly. So it’s unlikely to change, barring some temporal anomaly that puts me in Ancient Rome or the Renaissance or a renewed interest in Latin coupled with a state budget surplus. :frowning:

Every family member born after me, such as cousins, speaks street Spanish. So, I have some difficulty communicating with them. Thus, this problem is not unfamiliar to me.

The worst part about learning Latin is having, for the rest of your life, to think really hard about how to pronounce words like *alumnae *and *alumni *in English. For example, the way I’d say *alumnae *in Latin sounds like the way most people would say *alumni *in English–which can get somewhat confusing.

We need one more French speaker to break a hundred.

I wish the polls would let you sort by number of responses.