I barely speak english alone.
Iay ancay alsoay eakspay iglatinpay.
I barely speak english alone.
Iay ancay alsoay eakspay iglatinpay.
English, Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian. French. Some reading knowledge of German, that is fading fast. Martial arts terminology in Japanese. A few words in Russian. I’m listening to Turkish language tapes, but not often enough so that very much has stuck yet.
I would like to properly learn Japanese, because the grammar is interesting, and Turkish, becaus it’s distantly related to Finnish and I’d like to go back to Turkey.
I don’t know how old you are, but you can still learn. you just have to put more time and effort into it than you did when you were younger. Learning a new language is good for the brain.
English and hillbilly.
Honey Boo Boo has subtitles.
As a young child I could speak Japanese. I translated for my mother when we lived there. I tried to pick it up again in college (got an ‘A’), but never pursued it. I took through German III in high school, and German IV in college. Got 'A’s in those classes. I know enough Spanish to order food and beer, and to ask where the toilet is. (I have the Fluenz Spanish course, but haven’t started it yet.)
Sadly, there’s no one to speak Japanese or German with, so I’ve forgotten most of it.
You can’t teach where I’ve taught for 15 years and not pick up Spanish. (Well, at least not in my case. I have coworkers who have lived and worked in the community for 20 years and can barely speak a sentence.) Granted, my vocabulary is very classroom-centric; I was chatting with the lady who came to help clean my house yesterday, and found I’d long forgotten the words for things like bedroom and sink. But if she needed help with order of operations or if her parents asked how she was behaving, I SO would have nailed it.
Don’t know about Japanese, but I have found that in most large cities, you can find something similar to a German/American club - where people gather to speak German. I found one in Chicago way back when, there was one in LA and there is even one in Las Vegas. Very unstructured - gather at a bar or wherever and just speak German and meet various people. At the few events I went to, lots of Americans who had German or lived in Germany and wanted to keep fresh with the language, plus lots of Germans who just wanted to meet others who spoke the language and chat every once in awhile. Interesting mix. If you don’t find one - put an ad in a local free rag and start your own!
BTW, in answer to a previous comment upthread, yes - I knew Kannada is not the official language of Canada. I mean, come on - everyone knows Canadians speak Canuckian, especially when they Canoodle at the peak of Maple sap season.
I was born and raised in the U.S.; English is my mother tongue.
Ach tha beagan Gàidhlig agam. Chan eil mi a’ dol a ràdh gu bheil mo Ghàidhlig glè mhath, ach is urrainn dhomh a tuigsinn agus a bruidhinn.
日本語を勉強している、面白い言語だらから。でも、まだ上手じゃないです。
Minor adjustments…
日本語を勉強しています。面白い言語ですが、でも、まだ上手じゃないです。
I’m just puzzled by the 5% who claim not to know English. They know it well enough to comprehend the OP question, don’t they? Or did they have someone translate it for them? In a message board community that’s formed of 100% text in English, are there actually any non-English-knowers participating? I never would have thought so.
I’m a native speaker of English, and I speak near-native French, fluent Esperanto, relatively good Spanish, and adequate Italian. I speak a some German, but barely understand it spoken. Between French, Spanish, and Italian, I can read Portuguese and Catalan despite no training, and some Latin, but I can’t speak or write any of them or really understand them spoken. And I know enough Danish and Czech to say jeg taler ikke dansk and nemluvím česky.
I know for a fact you’re better at Japanese than me, but isn’t it redundant to use (です)が and でも next to each other, since they both roughly mean “but”? It’s just that one is a conjunction and the other is a sentence-beginner (similar to the distinction between “but” and “however”). I don’t know, ですが、でも just seems odd to me for some reason.
As for the thread – I speak English (natively), Japanese, and very badly atrophied German.
I think it’s more that people interpreted the title to mean FOREIGN languages and didn’t bother to look for and check English in the poll.
Spanish and English. When I was a kid starting at age five - I had a German stepmother. My mother died when I was 2. I was sent to German schools (in Barcelona) and she spoke to me in German, and my father in Spanish (my first language). After they divorced when I was eight, he never spoke to me in German again. I did continue German school in Lima, Perú until I was 10. Somewhere along the line after I learned English in Toronto at age 12, I lost the ability to speak in German. It’s in there, somewhere, I suppose.
I think it’s somewhat a question of interperting the OP… I didn’t list French, although I can understand French texts fairly well and I can generally make myself understood in basic French (and would understand what they’re saying if they just slowed down!!! ) – because it didn’t ask what languages we understand but what languages we speak.
I can easily see a non-English-speaker who reads and writes well enough to participate here but feels that they don’t know English well enough to list it as a language they “speak.”
Cast votes for English, Spanish, and (European) Portuguese. I picked up several other languages working in other countries, so I feel confident I could regain a reasonable level of proficiency in a few others on the list - Russian, Arabic, and Kazakh.
The wording of the OP and the poll was maybe ambiguous enough to cause uncertainty as to what was meant. The thread title says “speak” but the poll question says “proficient in” and proficiency can cover written language as well as spoken. I have far more extensive proficiency of written languages than spoken because I’m shy and don’t get out and talk much with others. But I’ve always been at home and in my element in a good book. But everybody seems to take “speaking” a language as synonymous with knowing a language. Not necessarily.
Yeah, apparently I can write quite decently in French (I have problems with the accents and the double/single letters, mostly, and with conjugations of some verb tenses which I actually never studied), but… speak it? When I’m speaking it I don’t have time to chase the right word! And I pronounce it like a Spanish cow, damnit!
Nava, who should be writing yet another computer manual in French but who needs an explanation from another coworker before she can do it.