The Languages Thread

Native in English. Did four years of Spanish in high school, I'm not really conversational though. I am conversational in Urdu/Hindi, and can understand it pretty well, but my grammar is terrible. I can read and pronounce Arabic, and somewhat understand the words, but conversation is well beyond me.

I've focused more on pronunciation over other aspects of language, so I've dabbled in Japanese and to a much lesser extent Mandarin and Bahasa. My pronunciation is still probably terrible, but I'd really like to try and one day be able to pronounce a decent majority of the world's most popular languages. The obvious flaw of this (beyond the effort required) being the existence of dialects. Aside from actually becoming conversational in the five mentioned languages, I'd also like to learn French and Portuguese. Swahili, Russian, or Turkish would be nice to be able to pronounce at the least.

So yeah, native in one, conversational in another, sub-conversational in two more, and a whole lot more with just aspirations. Potential travel would likely be the catalyst to actually get to it and properly learn some of these languages.
 
It's kind of interesting to see a decent amount of people here seem to be interested in linguistics, as well. I can't believe I'm not the first person in this thread to mention a conlang.
 
Fluent in English and Portuguese, learning French and Spanish. I can also understand Gallician (though I do not speak it) and a bit of Catalan, Dutch, German, Italian, Latin and Romanian.
 
Enzo said:
Fluent in English and Portuguese, learning French and Spanish. I can also understand Gallician (though I do not speak it) and a bit of Catalan, Dutch, German, Italian, Latin and Romanian.
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I've heard before from Spanish speakers that Spanish and Portuguese are generally mutual comprehensible, have you found that to be the case as well?
 
birdsandbats said:
I've heard before from Spanish speakers that Spanish and Portuguese are generally mutual comprehensible, have you found that to be the case as well?
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Yes, they are. In fact, they are so mutually comprehensible (though not perfectly) many Brazilians speak "Portunhol/Portuñol" (usually an incorrectly Hispanicized version of Portuguese) to communicate with Spanish speakers. Sometimes this leads to a few embarassments, though. As an example, "embarazado" does sound like a reasonable translation of "embaraçado/envergonhado" ("embarassed" in Portuguese), but it actually means "pregnant" in Spanish.

I believe a few variants of Spanish spoken alongisde the border with Brazil have adopted a few sounds from Portuguese. "Llamar", as an example, can be pronounced in at least four different ways.
 
I'll bring my contribution to this thread.

My first language is French.
  • For my English, I wouldn't use the term 'fluent'. I speak and understand it well, but there is still a big gap with natives English speakers. Also, I have a weird pronounciation.
  • With Japanese, I have advanced level but am far from fluent. I have good reading and hearing comprehension and decent written expression, however I speak like a 6-year-old child, because I never got that much of a chance to interact with native speakers IRL.
Lately I've been trying to get back to German, which I learned in middle and high school but mostly forgot. I think I realistically do have a chance to make significant progress.

There are many, many other languages I wish to learn, but realistically I don't think I will: Mandarin, Thai, Hungarian, Farsi... There is only so much I can do in one lifetime haha. But I do think learning a non-Western language is an extremely valuable skill and experience, and I invite anyone to give it a try, each at their own level and pace.
 
Wanderer said:
I'll bring my contribution to this thread.

My first language is French.
  • For my English, I wouldn't use the term 'fluent'. I speak and understand it well, but there is still a big gap with natives English speakers. Also, I have a weird pronounciation.
  • With Japanese, I have advanced level but am far from fluent. I have good reading and hearing comprehension and decent written expression, however I speak like a 6-year-old child, because I never got that much of a chance to interact with native speakers IRL.
Lately I've been trying to get back to German, which I learned in middle and high school but mostly forgot. I think I realistically do have a chance to make significant progress.

There are many, many other languages I wish to learn, but realistically I don't think I will: Mandarin, Thai, Hungarian, Farsi... There is only so much I can do in one lifetime haha. But I do think learning a non-Western language is an extremely valuable skill and experience, and I invite anyone to give it a try, each at their own level and pace.
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@Wanderer -- Your English is excellent and I can assure you that it's far better than much of what I often hear and read on social media here in America. As for my language background, English is my native tongue and I have also studied Latin extensively in high school and college, both as an undergraduate and graduate student. I participated in a Latin immersion graduate program where the class was conducted in Latin and all assignments were written in Latin. With this knowledge, I'm often able to recognize roots in Romance languages that help me get the general gist of written communications, as well as having a keen appreciation of Latin's influence on English.
 
What a fun thread!
I only speak 3 languages fluently, and they are english, french and spanish. I've tried to learn other languages, but it's literally imposible for me to talk any other, and I' ve tried quite the time with german. Speaking the tree languages at one point in my life has certainly helped.
 
lowland anoa said:
And the Greeks say Χαίρετε for hello. What a interesting way of saying hello. Chaírete is used for talking
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Well, though Χαίρετε isn't incorrect, it's the formal version... Most people say Γεια, and just use Γεια σας if they want to be polite.
As for me, I speak greek and english fluently, German semi-fluently (though I have already started forgetting them:oops:) and a bit of French (just the basics from school).
 
I’m fluent in English (first language)

One of my direct relatives is from the Netherlands, and taught me Dutch (fluent) and Frisian (almost fluent)

Furthermore I can understand Spanish as I’ve taken it for years, and I can understand a little bit of Catalan as my music teacher was from Barcelona and tried to teach me.

I can also pronounce texts in the Russian Cyrillic and Arabic script
 
Dutch is my mother language, French is supposed to be my second language, but actually my English is much better. My French was good at some point, but I didn’t maintain it and it got very rusty.
 
My mother tongue is Dutch (Flemish).
I wanna say I'm "decent" in French. When in France, I'm always surprised at "how well" I actually can speak/understand it.

Kind of fluent in German, just haven't used it for many many years, so it's gone quite rusty.

English, which I taught myself when I was 11 because I was bored, and I live in England now, and people can't tell it's not my first language, always fun conversations, because my accent is American, so I get asked a lot from what state I am, lol.
 
CMP said:
I think being an animal nerd means just being a nerd in general :p
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I think animals can really be a gateway drug for other studies.
I have found that studying birds in more detail has improved my ability to appreciate studying the field of geography. This is where the species lives, so why not learn more about the region of the world, countries, history?
 
My mother tongue is Frisian. But since the province of Fryslân is part of the Netherlands, I am also fluent in Dutch. And like many other Dutch people, I speak English as well. Furthermore I can also understand German quite well.
 
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