English only.
I have a few scraps of half-remembered French from years ago, but not enough to have any kind of conversation; I can sort of read it, enough to get the gist of an article or something, but no more than that.
English only.
I have a few scraps of half-remembered French from years ago, but not enough to have any kind of conversation; I can sort of read it, enough to get the gist of an article or something, but no more than that.
Spanish: High School language requirement – plus kind-of a survive in Southern California (menus, street names, talk to the gardner and cleaning staff, etcetera) thing.
Russian: Jr. College Language requirement – but I had to teach myself the 2nd semester because the prof was busy with the next batch of new 1st semester students.
Japanese: College GE language requirement – and for my minor. My mother, who was Japanese, helped me with pronunciation but couldn’t teach me a thing about grammar. When I taught English in Japan for a year, I learned more conversational Japanese in a month than I had ever studied in two years of classes.
French: My best friend took French in High School, so we traded words and grammatical nuances. I can sorta understand, but wouldn’t dare try to wrap my tongue around the words.
Farsi (Persian): I dated a couple different girls whose lineage stretched back to the region. I had fun wrapping my tongue around them – and learned a few phrases and words, as well.
Chinese: I corresponded with a professor who was preparing a Chinese for International Business Students course. In addition to getting words and phrases and nuances, I also (apparently) helped her with the framework of the course syllabus
Korean: Mostly from martial arts training. In fact, many of the special terms I learned in martial arts were either Korean or Chinese.
As part of my Asian Studies minor, I learned a few phrases and terms from India’s languages, though I have no idea which – probably a hodgepodge selection, really, depending on the language of the source material.
–G!
“So we put her on the hit list
of a common cunning linguist
A master of many tongues…”
. --Gillian/Blackmore/Glover
. Knocking at your Back Door
. Perfect Strangers
What, no Irish option?
English, French, Irish, German in order of fluency.
This!
I’m looking for online language classes to brush up on it though, we’re heading for Austria and Italy in April next year and I actually have a shot at improving my German to usability but it’s highly unlikely that I’ll learn enough Italian to be anything more than a polite tourist.
Dutch, English, German, French, Russian, Czech, Spanish - languages that I’ve studied, that I can speak in at least comfortably, and that I can read books in. I also took Latin in high school and was quite good at it but have not kept it up so I would not add that to a list like this anymore.
Other Slavic and Roman languages - I can read a newspaper in them and follow what’s going on but I don’t really have anything beyond passive skills. Still, if I wanted I could master a pretty solid level of Italian, Polish, Slovakian, or Ukrainian in a month or two. Maybe one day I can go back and re-learn Latin - I really loved that at the time, possibly my favorite subject in high school.
Oh, and I grew up in the part of the Netherlands where people speak Frisian, so I can understand that but not really speak it.
So who doesn’t speak English, and how did they find the poll?
Babelfish. And they think it’s a poll about your favorite cuisine.
Urdu (and by extension, Hindi, which is phonetically pretty similar).
French, Italian; a bit of Spanish.
Some English.
But hey, couldn’t you alphabetize this sucker?
English, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, German, French, Romanian: I can comfortably communicate, read etc.
Other Germanic and Romance languages I can get the gist of, but I haven’t ticked those on the list.
My uni is trying to persuade me to learn Swahili, but I’m not convinced. I know it’s meant to be simple, but it’s not indo-european yikes! Anyone want to make a case for learning Swahili?
I can read reasonably well in French, Spanish, German and Japanese, in addition to my native English. Deriving from those, I can read a minor subset of things passably well in the various kinds of Chinese (shares ideographs with Japanese), and I can get something out of virtually anything spoken/written in western Europe, and a few related bits like Romanian. I wouldn’t say I could hold a conversation in Portuguese or Catalan or the like, but I can usually at least puzzle out the topic of a written thing in them.
I’m not sure where to file some of the others. I had an Euskadi friend once point me at a webpage that was completely in Basque, and having no vocabulary whatsoever I worked out several tenses/conjugations, cases, and other assorted grammatical features, and took a guess at what the page was about from the layout and content. Likewise with the contents of BBC Cymru. I have a tendency to look straight at puzzles/cryptograms/steganographic things and ask “Oh, hey, what’s that say?” before anyone else even realizes it’s language, though, so I don’t know how much that says about my actual proficiency in either of those.
Also, I speak/read a reasonable amount of Esperanto, even though it’s not even vaguely close to being in the top 100 languages spoken – it’s an invented language, and there are very, very few cases of people growing up speaking Esperanto. Usually it happens in households where both parents have a different native language, and Esperanto is their only common tongue.
German (native), English, some French, some Dutch and I can say: “La señorita Molina està en la calle de la cruz” because I took Spanish for a couple of months.
I am barely proficient in English, but I can order a beer and inquire about the Gents in 12 languages.
Where’s FORTRAN?
As a teacher, I can attest to the fact that many otherwise great English speakers cannot read directions, nor proof-read lists to see that perhaps there is another option they might have missed.
Exactly this for me. And I don’t feel guilty about it. Generally I think speaking another language is overrated. If I could have lunch in another country id probably speak multiple languages, but I live in a sea of English speakers, so I don’t and I’m OK with that.
I speak English (natively), French (badly), and Esperanto (reasonably fluently).
I’m a little surprised nobody has indicated they know Cantonese yet. It’s very widely spoken among Chinese immigrants and their descendents. There are thousands of Cantonese-speakers in San Francisco, for example. My wife speaks Cantonese and she was born in Chicago. (Her parents are Chinese immigrants.)
I know English pretty well, if I do say so myself.
And I know a little bit of German. (Two years of college classes so far.) But I’m not exactly fluent.
There’s nothing to feel guilty about, but speaking another language is incredibly useful. Just in my career I’ve had extensive business dealings with people in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and China, and I’ve had to travel to all those countries; it would have been helpful to speak those languages. That’s not even counting traveling to other places for purely recreational reasons.
English, Spanish, Hebrew not listed except as other.