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How many languages do you speak?
How many languages y'all speak? From how many different language families? How many scripts can you read? Any special grammatical quirks that your languages have?
It doesn't matter if it's A2 level or C2 level, share it with us!
Pretty much just English, unfortunately. I took two years of Spanish in highschool, so I know some vocabulary, very rough grammar, have a decent understanding of how to pronounce Spanish words, and that's about it. I'd love to speak it fluently, but there's really no pressure to so I simply never committed to it. I envy Europeans (and others, of course) that have a compelling reason to be bilingual. There's just no practical reason for it when you live in the rural areas of the US because everyone speaks English.
That being said, I do love listening to different languages and I've gotten good at differentiating a few languages by ear and I've gotten pretty good at differentiating different writing systems. None of which means I have even a basic understand of those languages, but there's certainly a part of me that's fascinated by language, yet I've never indulged it beyond that.
If we include programming languages, however... ;)
:D alright feel free to show off, lemme see your programming languages list
Well it's not too impressive, but it's certainly more than 1! :D In order of familiarity: Javascript/Typescript, PHP, SQL, TI-83 BASIC. Then there are ones that I'm somewhat conversational in and can at least create headaches for myself in: go, python, whatever the variant of C that arduino uses is called.
Reasonably fluent - Japanese
Intermediate - French, 12 years of school
Beginner - Italian, Mandarin
Can read the script - Korean, Russian, Greek, Cyrillic
I think Korean writing is the most logically coherent. Japanese is an insane system built from borrowing sounds and symbols across thousands of years from China and shoehorning them into a language that just doesn’t fit.
How hard would you say it is to learn Japanese? I was considering trying to pick up a bit of it after a brief stay in Tokyo recently, it seems like it would be a nice place to visit for a longer stay if I was able to communicate. For context I am a native English speaker with some experience in German and French (my math background has encouraged me to learn a little bit of each of these).
I would say it's not easy. Things it has going for it:
Things that are not great
My kid and I both using the Renshuu app and greatly enjoying it. Me, as a third language learner who started with Chinese writing system, and my kid as a second language with only English background. I would say my kid has reached first second high school level Japanese proficiency in a short time.
Edit: the app comes with a writing tracer so you can practice writing katakana / hiragana / kanji easily. They also have an excellent click-to-read for vocab/ sentences and a built in dictionary with pictures
I'm pretty early in but so far in duolingo the grammar isn't very difficult. The writing system is a bit tougher (hiragana/katakana isn't too bad, I read that there is a list of approximately 2000 commonly used kanji that one should eventually work on learning). I bought myself a physical workbook because I think physically writing the characters will help me.
Picking up enough Japanese to help with a longer stay as a tourist is likely very doable for you, especially if you have the time to invest in having an actual teacher or tutor. Japanese is difficult af for native English speakers, but quite a lot of that difficulty is not strictly necessary for you as a foreign tourist, even one having a longer stay.
It will not be easy if it is your first (learned) language.
It will not be easy if it is your second (learned) language.
That being said it is a deeply rewarding language to learn, and a realistic approach would be to go slow. Depending upon who you ask, Japan can have something like 5+ scripts to the language. Stick to one script for a certain block of time, and focus only there, starting the focus on Hiragana first then Katakana second. Probably take a year learning those two inside-out while drip-feeding oneself only the most essential of Kanji.
I never got past being able to memorize and read Hiragana. It was a truly impulsive, "fuck it why not" college course. The teacher made the effort to impress upon the class that this would be very much a "crash course" as far as the subject matter is concerned, condensing things down by semester. If I had the time to make a "proper" second attempt at Japanese, that would be my approach, but everybody's different, too.
The FSI has difficulty scales for language acquisition by native English speakers. The easiest, like Spanish or Swedish, take 600-750 hours to achieve B2/C1 levels of proficiency. The most difficult take ~2,200 hours for the same. The difficult languages are Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, and Japanese, with Japanese being considered the hardest.
Those five languages are all considered the "super-hard" languages for native English speakers, with the FSI program taking 2200 class hours, but I'm not aware of any part of the FSI system that compares between those five languages and determines Japanese is the hardest of them. It's certainly not reflected directly on their website. In any case, all five languages in that category are extremely difficult for native English speakers in various different ways. Imo they are also all very rewarding to learn (perhaps because they're so difficult).
My father was a US diplomat who both studied and taught there, so it may be a little insider information. :)
Fair enough! I studied Mandarin in undergrad and I definitely thought Japanese was harder at the level we studied at -- at least most characters only have one reading in Mandarin and the lack of inflection is helpful there. That said, Japanese does have a couple advantages, since there's not really an equivalent to hiragana/katakana and Japanese has WAY more transparent English loanwords.
The equivalent to hiragana is bopomofo, although at this point only Taiwan uses it.
I don't think zhuyin is used remotely as widely even in Taiwan as hiragana is in Japan, though. Moreover, it is never used in the course of normal writing the way Japanese uses hiragana to write inflectional endings and either hiragana or katakana to write some whole words.
Hangeul (the Korean writing system) really impressed me the first time I learned about it. The creator showed sharp linguistic insight into phonetics, even 5 or 6 centuries before our modern-day field of linguistics. It also impressed me that the Korean people adapted to a new writing system. That seems to me really unlikely for a culture to do, given how human psychology naturally wants to maintain status quo, and not put in effort to learn and change, no matter how superior the alternatives.
Tbf the writing system was invented because of illiteracy. Most people weren’t adapting to a switch because they weren’t switching from anything.
It’s surprising though that the upper class would be willing to switch.
Humanity has done elite language switches before, switching from Greek to Latin, from Latin to English, and maybe music and science also switched from German to English?
Also, French to English. French was once the international language of diplomacy, law, and contracts.
Hangul is a bit different though, as it was a switch of a writing system within a language rather than a cultural takeover that brought its language with it.
Funny enough French might become more of a powerhouse again, with the way things are going
I know it's a tongue in cheek comment but these days English is so ingrained that the only thing it will ever be replaced by is the universal translator from Star Trek.
It's the lingua franca in the European Union despite the only native speaking country being Ireland making up a bit more than 1% of the population, which is a bit funny.
I, for one, welcome our new French overlords. Means I'll finally have the opportunity to make French sounds unironically.
While the lingua franca has switched many times throughout history, it's much rarer for languages themselves to drastically switch writing systems. All of the languages you cite, except Greek, use the Latin alphabet and have for more or less their entire existence (and the Greek and Latin alphabets are quite closely related anyway). Korean changing from writing in Chinese characters to an entirely newly invented writing system doesn't actually have much historical precedent, as even the introduction of hiragana and katakana to Japanese was both gradual and derived the new writing system from Chinese characters.
A little research tells me that there was indeed some resistance from those who were able to write with Hanja (Chinese characters). I didn't dig deep, but there may have been some kind of class divide, where those going from, as you say, illiterate to literate-with-Hangeul were writing certain kinds of works (say, popular novels), whereas the Hanja-literate were writing more higher-education stuff, in domains like law, government, and philosophy. We can imagine Hangeul spreading around simply due to greater numbers of users.
English - native
Chinese - pseudo-native
Japanese - enough to get around
Korean - enough to get around
Spanish - technically something I took during high school
Apart from my native - Czech, I can speak English to fair degree. I certainly can go through normal conversation and I understand spoken word well (not some unusual words, but I'd still say 100%). I'm rusty though, I need some time to get used to speaking English and then it's better.
I also read books in English, which helps to get to know new words or even to freshen up - I recommend this!
I learned just a tiny bit of German, but I don't understand nothing nowadays. I also learned French and I can make a tiny bit out of a written text, but I lack vocabulary a lot. I don't use German on French at all.
English - fluent (technically my second language but it's better than my native language at this point)
Flemish Dutch - native (I was born in Belgium, I live in the states now)
Spanish, French - enough to get around, barely
And a smattering of words and phrases in another half dozen languages.
Native English speaker. I don't speak or read any additional languages, but I did take 2 years of American Sign Language in high school and could probably still remember enough to get by in a situation if one ever comes up.
Spanish and Latin are my main ones. Little bit of Hebrew too. I'm looking to learn some Arabic if I get the chance. I like reading religious texts in the original language
I am a native Canadian English speaker. I am proficient enough in French to go to la belle province Québec and not have people switch immediately to English. I have "resort Spanish" - enough to get by in case of emergency if Spanish was my only recourse. In my youth I was somewhat conversational in Greek (ancient and modern, spoken and written), Welsh, and Cantonese (spoken only), though all of those have suffered from many years of non use, though one of my kids and I are trying to revive the Welsh. It is no longer a spoken language, but I did do a couple years of Latin.
I was in ESL during the grades where we learned French ;_; so I never picked up any amount of our other official language at all. Wonder if it's too late....
Edit: are we the only Cantonese speakers on Tildes? surely there must be more
It's never too late!
I imagine there are more people who speak Cantonese, though I should really stop trying to claim any Cantonese any more; I watched Table for Six last year and I caught very little and relied entirely on the subtitles.
Their subtitles are fantastic though, top tier.
Table for Six is also written to be as densely witty as possible, and then improv'd upon by our very own Dayo Wong, so yeah it's got a higher threshold than regular conversations for sure.
Hmmm maybe I'll Duolingo or something :p I don't know, I always felt too shy about French but watching the federal leaders debates this year has got me feeling all patriotic.
Great movie, by the way, thank you for the recommendation.
Duolingo is so interesting. I know a lot of people who have used it for a long time, and they don't really know the languages that they've been learning at all. But my oldest kid has been doing it for years and is conversational in Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and is picking up Swahili. So I think it's a "you get out what you put in" sort of thing.
I'm so glad you gave it a chance! (The sequel, btw, is nowhere near as good. Skip.)
:[ I'm waiting for someone to buddy up with for French because I know regardless of app choice I'll forget it within the week.
I am in the category of "understand food words and temperature words" of Cantonese, and a language traitor by learning Mandarin later in life lol.
I would be so down to do some language learning with safe people like yourself. I have also always wanted to dapple in French soooo....
ADHD people need mirroring buddies, and people understanding of rejection sensitivity/failure.
Gasp!! Want to be ADHD French learning buddies?!
Which apps these days are decent for free?
Yes! Vive La France!
someone posted this one a little while ago on Tildes haven't vetted it.
I've heard Duolingo works for getting into the habit and building vocabulary? I have never had luck, but am enjoying it for Dutch right now.
Add in dirty words and counting to 20 and we are in the same boat with Cantonese. I have lost a lot over the years.
Only English with any level of proficiency.
re: your second bullet point about French, do you feel you can read French outside of the mathematical world?
Not really? Like I could probably get the through navigating a French city or reading a menu. But The Little Prince was about the extend of my ability. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was slow going because of vocab.
Aside from English, the only language that I am truly proficient in is Mandarin Chinese. I used to be proficient in French and Japanese, but it has been so long since I used them regularly that I'm too embarrassed to speak them. Given enough time, I can still read them, but it's draining. Time permitting, I'd really like to re-learn Japanese for fun, and maybe French for more practical purposes.
Recently, however, what I'm most interested in is learning a conlang or an English neography. I marvel at the clever ideas people have had for creating their ideal language/orthography and all the cool linguistic features they used to do it. In particular, I've been tempted to learn the Shavian alphabet (but I'm hoping to find something more dyslexic-friendly), Anglish (maybe more of a what-if alternate-history version of English), and Occidental-Interlingue. If anyone has experience with the above, or suggestions for other interesting ones to look into (yes, I know about Esperanto), I'd love to hear it.
Have you considered, Toki Pona ? I have always been interested in it because it tries to be a "minimalist" language, so to speak? I don't know where you sit on sign language, but PISL might also intrigue you.
Personally, I like the idea of "easy to acquire" languages, and also languages that have very few building blocks.
If you go on a language learning adventure with these and want a buddy, please consider me :p
English: Native
French: Spent several years learning it while living in France. When I left I was around high B2 or C1. However, it’s been some years since I left and I don’t get much opportunity to speak it. I read or listen to things occasionally but it’s not enough to stop it from degrading. I think that if I went back to being in a francophone country or if I had a francophone partner it would come back though.
German: Studied a bit in highschool and lived in Berlin for a few months. At one time I could get around in it okay enough. These days I can say a sentence or two and occasionally read a word or two.
Spanish: Grew up in an area where it’s common, plus the time studying French kinda helps. Can’t really speak it. Can kinda read and understand some basics.
Polish: Can tell you I can’t speak it and say “you’re beautiful” and “thank you”.
Danish: Can say “lamp/light”.
Mandarin: Had one year worth of classes in middle school. Can barely remember how to ask how you’re doing.
Latin: Had a semester when I was 12. Remember absolutely nothing.
I speak English natively and am currently learning French. I can hold basic conversations so long as my partner speaks slowly/is patient. I took Spanish in school, but never got over that intermediate bump. I'm hoping to get both French and Spanish up into C range.
I'm also starting to learn Japanese again. I have basically have the hiragana down, katakana is a bit more elusive. With Japanese the goal is to be able to consume media easily, but it'd be nice to get super conversational in it as well.
English native speaker.
Spanish. I've done several classes plus immersion studying in Guatemala. Basic conversational skill but still don't know many words.
French, four years in highschool. I can read mostly.
In order of proficiency:
English (native)
German (heritage speaker, some formal study)
Russian (pretty basic)
Arabic (extremely rusty, and never got beyond A1-2)
Have studied/dabbled in, but cannot speak in any meaningful way:
Spanish (can't be avoided growing up where I did, but not quite to heritage speaker level)
Old Norse
Latin
Swedish
Czech
Icelandic
Greek
Ingush (a small language from the Caucasus. It was for a linguistics class in college, specifically looking at the morphosyntax, so the goal wasn't to speak. Probably doesn't really count, but.)
Dutch - born in the Netherlands
English - fluent, lived in the US half a year, and well, am terminally online lol
German - Very rusty, tiny bit. I can get around as a tourist but that's about it.
French - native
English - read & write ok (or I wouldn't be there, I guess). Can understand 80% of it when listening, absolutely unable to speak it intelligently.
I learned Dutch in school, like almost all French-speaking Belgians. And like almost all French-speaking Belgians, I can only state my name and where I live.
Just English. No plans to ever learn anything else.
What do you call someone that speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call someone that speaks one language? American :D
English: Fluent
Bengali: Fluent
Hindi & Urdu: I can understand enough to to know 80% of what is being said, but my brain freezes when I try to speak.
American: Fluent
I speak English, Swiss German (and by extension Standard German), and Hungarian fluently. I know French well enough to understand text.
There isn't really an order of preference, as I spent much time in places where these languages are spoken, but certain aspects are easier depending on the language. My professional language and literary skills are best in English and I feel most comfortable reading in it. However, I haven't spent an extended amount of time in an English speaking environment for more than a decade, so it's my least preferred language to speak.
Swiss German is the easiest for me because of it dominating my childhood and early adulthood, but it's getting a bit rusty as I only use it with family these days. It's not a particularly useful language and I don't think I will ever use it my daily life again, but I plan to speak it with my children as I think multilingualism is not an optional skill to have. It's easier to get stuck in a bubble if you aren't able to immerse yourself into various cultural contexts.
I have the smallest vocabulary in Hungarian but it's the one I think is the most interesting, as there is a surprising amount of depth in it, considering the number of speakers. You have to basically learn the language from scratch as it uses unique grammar and vocabulary. The language went through an extensive reform in the 19th century where many borrowed Latin and Greek words were replaced by native words cobbled together from old stem words, and people often don't understand you if you try to cheat a bit by "naturalizing" a Latin word. This has stuck around to this day, with modern words being usually translated literally (other languages have this too, like French or German). Due to its grammatical flexibility, the language lends itself to poetry quite well too so there is a lot of flowery language that people use in their day to day lives.
Goddammit, am I still the only person fluent in Greek on this website? :')
Pretty much just English, unless you count programming languages and technical jargon. I was pretty decent at Spanish once, but lost that after moving back Stateside.
Though, since I'm putting all of my eggs in that one basket, I try to at least make sure that it's a really strong basket. I try for a large vocabulary, solid grammar/spelling/punctuation (most of my mistakes there come from editing rewrites before posting), and a good understanding of dialects and regionalisms throughout the Anglosphere.
Personally, I think that English steals so much from other languages that simply trying to keep on top of English is challenge enough. Just last night I was telling one of my kids how I thought nychthemeron is a cool word we ought to use more. (And earlier in the evening I'd showed that kid how Middle English looks funny, but can often be sounded out.)
I'm a native Spanish speaker, as well as an english speaker since early childhood. Knowing spanish also comes with the added bonus of being able to read a fair bit of Portuguese, which I've also taken an interest in, both in terms of speaking, writing, and reading it.
I’m on a mission to rephrase this question to, “How many languages do you know?” There are a ton of signed languages out there.
I grew up speaking English only.
I was at about the fluency of a 4 year old in Mandarin 30 years ago. I can still understand it ok if I’m immersed. My reading is hopeless, though I can recognize and get annoyed when characters aren’t right side up. I’ve pretty much lost the tones so I’m not very understandable, I wish I’d learned it with the teaching style the Mormons use. Now I have friends from Hong Kong who use Cantonese.
I spent a month in Buenos Aires about a decade ago, where my high school Mexican Spanish turned into Argentine Spanish. My pronunciation shifted and a lot of words changed. By the end of it I could string a few sentences together.
I took a couple of years of ASL ata local community college that was taught by a Deaf person and think that was probably the most fun to learn. It is the only language I’ve successfully guessed a word for (going up stairs is exactly what think it is.) I’ve never gotten good enough to understand signing on TV, though I can pick out words here or there. I picked up a little written sign for taking notes. It’s pretty fringe but I thought it was great.
English - native
Irish - I would say "strong conversational". I learned early in life from native speaker teachers, I read novels in it albeit with dictionary use, and I'm now speaking it at home with my newborn.
Toki Pona - conlang time :) I can write and read it unassisted but hearing it spoken, I can't quite keep up. I used to operate a YouTube channel where I talked about news in toki pona specifically to fill that listening practice niche for others.
i can speak/read/write english (for a given value of all of those considering i am american 😂)
im barely conversational in ASL (i sign poorly and if my conversational partner goes too fast i get completely lost lol but if were both slow im.....okayish)
i can read cyrillic, but i dont actually speak enough russian (the reason i learned cyrillic) to know what im reading (so ig it'd be more accurate to say i can decode it?? idk the actual terminology for "i can look at the letters and know what sounds they make, more or less correctly, but idk what the word i just
saidmangled means"i can puzzle my way through reading german, spanish, and french provided i have a translation app for words that arent related enough to english or latin for me to recognise
i know the bare bones of latin. i more or less understand how conjugation works and i can recognise a decent number of words, but i cant actually read anything more complicated than a prayer or a song (and even that might be pushing it) lmao
im teaching myself mandarin, i cant really sight read much other than simple, common internet phrases, but im also not actually learning with any regularity due to who i am as a person
oh and i can pick out a few letters of arabic, i could probably brush up on hebrew enough to be able to "read" hebrew again the same way i can "read" russian (except i know a few more words in hebrew - primarily liturgical tho) and i kinda remember how to read korean, enough to shop at the korean market near me lol.
so basically, my only language is english. i dabbled in enough other languages that im really good at mimicking the sounds, and that i sometimes fuck up my english grammar in odd ways when im speaking, but i cant actually converse in any other language with any degree of reliability
Thai (Native) - Not the most honorable student, though. At least it wasn't one of my leading subjects (English > Math = Science > Thai) in the O-NET scores.
English (IELTS Band 8.0) - C1 - Generally considered not good enough for my line of work as a university employee. Getting constantly prodded to redo my whole pronunciation training, but I find myself changing from refusing to do so because I don't have time, to refusing because I don't want to follow what others tell me to do.
Japanese (JLPT N3) - Still not good enough. Barely passed it and no real motivation to push on.
What's the best language learning app for French?
(Asking with a top level comment for attention, thanks.)
Native : English, Cantonese
Enough as a tourist : Mandarin, Japanese
A couple phrases / vocabs only / missed opportunity / wish list : 潮州話(Teochew), Italian, French, Greek
English - native speaker
French - somewhere intermediate. I'm somewhat conversational though slow/rough, I can read fairly well, and benefit from French subtitles if I'm watching a show in French. I try to keep some exposure to the language through media, and work with translators who humour my questions.
Spanish - I used to be a little conversational, and could bumble my way through spanish-speaking countries, but have mostly lost it.
Japanese, German, Croatian - I learned some basics many many years back with the intent of trying to be a polite tourist (though I never even made it to Japan), but had no need to retain them so now I might recall only a few words.
English - native
Spanish - intermediate? I can carry on small talk and get around on the street. My bad grammar sometimes causes natives to wince.
I am a pretty good parrot, I can make the sounds from language lessons, and have survived in the street in Japan, Poland, and Germany. I could not speak any of these today.
Native English like most people here
But I'm learning Norwegian (so slowly) but at least still making some progress.
It's been a year and I can kinda understand the flow of a conversation but not the specifics unless someone is speaking slowly for me.
It's rough, I think I'll get there though, I see some glimmer of hope lol.
German and English are my only two fluent languages. I did learn French at one point, but I'm not very well versed in it, and the few words of Italian I know hardly count.