Brazil. Fluent in Portuguese and English, though I understand a tiny little bit of Dutch. I can understand Spanish sometimes because of similarities between it and Portuguese.
I'm from The Netherlands and I speak Dutch, English, a bit of German and no French at all even though I had French in school for 13 years.
But The Netherlands has 2 official national languages, Dutch and Friesian, although English officially isn't a foreign language anymore due to the quality and quantity of English speakers and there are discussions to make English the third national language.
I wish I knew more languages, but sadly I'm really bad at learning any. Some people learn languages so fast, I'm better at math and such. I wish I knew Russian, Chinese and Spanish because I'd love to travel to old USSR republics, China and other Asian countries and South America. Knowing the most spoken languages in the world would be amazing I imagine. And I wish I knew Norwegian because I love the language and the country so much. Plus, you can communicate in Denmark and Sweden too. But luckily now we have Google translate so I could communicate even though I don't have shared languages with where I want to go.
although English officially isn't a foreign language anymore due to the quality and quantity of English speakers and there are discussions to make English the third national language.
Do you have a source for this? I'm Dutch native too, and have never heard of this.
The majority of Dutch people speak English at a decent level, but there are no non-immigrant native English speakers.
From Mexico Magico, and I speak Spanish, English, enough French and enough Portuguese brasileiro to get by. And I am currently working on improving my Korean because I live in a city that has a huge community.
Hungarian, so beyond that that i speak english (duh) swedish, though i mostly read books on it, not a lot of swedes around, and i am trying to pick up some chinese now
I’d say fluent in Norwegian, English and German. German because I lived there for a year and the missus is German.
I can make myself understood in Spanish.
Swedish and Danish come for free as they are so close to Norwegian. I don’t need to speak them as we understand eachother mostly.
English - idiomatically
French - conversationally
Italian - I just want to reply to people in French all the time
German - I can ask where the station is
Japanaese - I can say 'I do not understand'
Not completely, there are 2 Korea's. But since internet access in one is extremily limited, I can make an educated guess in which one you live right now.
From the UK originally, which is complicated enough. To foreigners I tend to say "England", which (a) is true and (b) everyone understands. But I consider myself British, not English, and certain not a "UK person" (ugh).
I speak French near-natively from having lived there for a big chunk of my life. Spanish: intermediate, because it's like French. German: got an A at GCSE decades ago, so not very good. Tried learning Russian a few years ago and, wow, that was hard. I cannot speak Russian. But being able to decipher the Cyrillic script is definitely a cool party trick.
South Africa and pretty much just English. Apparently I was fairly fluent in Zulu when I was little kid, before starting school and losing it. And we learnt Afrikaans in school but Afrikaans kids went to Afrikaans schools and I grew up and lived in English speaking areas so it was never used. If I tried to speak Afrikaans now, I would embarrass myself but I can mostly read it and understand someone if they're talking slow enough and I'm concentrating hard enough.
Honestly something that pisses me off is that despite going through school in the 'new' South Africa, the new government never bothered making sure we learnt to communicate with each other. So instead of learning Zulu and being able to freely communicate with the majority of the population, we learnt Afrikaans because they never fucking bothered to change it.
I can also understand very small bits and pieces of written and spoken German from high school but that's barely worth mentioning. Also, I can kinda sometimes understand a little bit of written Dutch because it's remotely similar to Afrikaans.
Zulu is an awesome language! I've heard it spoken before. It seems difficult to learn from an outsider. Maybe I'm wrong. Afrikaans is interesting to me because it's a Germanic creole language. I've heard it's the easiest to learn Germanic language in the world.
Yeah, Zulu is a different beast to European languages. I suppose as different to English as certain Asian languages would be. It also borrows from English and Afrikaans though, for certain Western words and concepts that weren't in the vocabulary before. And there's still nouns and verbs and tenses and shit, so it follows the same basic rules / concepts as any language.
As for Afrikaans, funnily enough I'm actually living in a part of the country now where some fluency would've been useful. Luckily you seem to be able to get by with just English just about anywhere though.
American, English only but I need to learn Burmese as that's where my daughter-in-law is from. Can't have hypothetical grand kids speaking a language I don't know.
US. Fluent in English but I can speak enough spanish to do most everyday things. I am learning Japanese, and while I can read and understand about half of it, I can't pronounce shit and haven't bothered practicing since I just want to read it.
I am fluent in English and good enough in Mandarin to get by.
Earlier in life I was passable at French in France, but I have lost that now. It's been overwritten by the Mandarin from having spent a few years in the PRC teaching English.
From Germany and i speak German, English and Spanish. I can survive daily life in French and Catalan, but its pretty rough. Currently, i am learning Persian :)
From the Netherlands. I speak English and Dutch pretty much on the same level. I can work my way around German if I've been in a German speaking country for a couple of days. I can speak French if I really need to and I'm currently learning Portuguese. Understanding Portuguese has made me also understand Italian and Spanish a bit better.
Önskar att vi hade ett lite mer aktiv community på lemmy, men ałła som kan svenska kan tydligen också engelska och behöver tydligen ingen svenskspråkig community eller så ^^
Jag gör mitt bästa för att hålla lite liv i [email protected]. Jag är inte jättebra på att posta annat än nyheter jag bryr mig om dock, vilket leder till lite enformighet.
Just saying you'll probably have a better time asking this in a casual conversation community. To answer the question though I'm Egyptian and I speak Arabic, English, Japanese and a bit of Chinese.
From Croatia, can speak Croatia/Serbian/Bosnian at native level.
Know english decently enough, can somewhat understand some small amount of german ( cousins that live in germany ), and can understand most balkan/slav languages.
Dabbled into japanese with duolingo back in highschool almost 7 years ago and stopped cause tf is up with their writting system.
I'm from the UK and speak English and am fluent in British Sign Language. I can speak enough French and Spanish to navigate a short holiday, which means I suck at both.
I took a few years of French in middle and high school, not much of it stuck. A couple basic words and phrases, and if they speak slowly and clearly I can usually get the gist of what someone is saying and fake my way through some reading.
The story of my French education is a mess, full of long term substitutes, substitute-substitutes, a sad lonely man whose spirit was absolutely broken by the kids who had him first semester before I had him and got fired a couple weeks before the end of the school year, and a lady who was absolutely baffled by the fact that her French 3 class barely spoke any French because the first 2 years of our French education was a total waste.
A handful of Spanish words and phrases from middle school "exploratory" Spanish class for a couple months and working in a warehouse for a few years where I was one of only a handful of native English speakers, but nowhere close to conversational.
And I've been teaching myself Esperanto, which has been going rather well. It's hard to say how conversational I am because there's not a whole lot of esperantists running around to chat with, but I'm reading at probably about a 2nd grade level, which is something I suppose.
I speak Cantonese, Mandarin, English, and the the basic words of Spanish such as: ¡Hola!, Uno, Dos, Tres, Bruenos Dias, Muy Bien, ¿e tu?, Me habla pizza (Thanks, Spanish class. Still can't get the Spanish alphabet song out of my head lol 😅). And I can read like English (obviously), most basic Chinese characters, I think I know the top 100 of them, I'm more confident in identifying the characters if its in simplified. And techically, I can read the Kanji parts of Japanese (since they are basically Chinese). I hear some Japanese and Koreans words and can make out some of the words because they are so close to Cantonese. (I think Cantonese, Korean, and Japanese, decended from a common language). I could only write in English, after 10+ years of never using Chinese, I can't write shit beside like few basic words and my name in Chinese.
Born & raised in the US, lived in Poland for the past several years. Speak a good bit of polish, enough to navigate most interactions with strangers but not enough for deep conversations with the father-in-law.
I’m from the US and English is my native language. I took French in high school and minored in it in college and was actually pretty fluent in it for a while. A decade after graduating I married a native French speaker from Quebec, but our semiannual trips to Quebec to visit her parents now remind me just how much fluency I’ve lost. I’m still fine in common daily tasks but get into a deeper conversation and I start floundering.
I used to work in a technical role at a Spanish-language TV station and picked up some, but that’s also disappearing now ten years on.
I’m from England and I only really speak English. I speak a little French because I lived in Morocco for a few years but it’s really not that good.
One thing I learnt while living overseas is that while English people aren’t very good at speaking other languages, we’re really rather good at understanding foreigners trying to speak our language, even when they get half the words wrong and use a really thick accent.
we’re really rather good at understanding foreigners trying to speak our language, even when they get half the words wrong and use a really thick accent.
This is actually something I only realized after coming to Japan. It's surprising how much English tolerates mistakes when a small-ish mistake can completely throw off a Japanese speaker from what you're talking about. I wonder how other languages compare.
Czechia, speak Czech and English fluently. Russian moderately well and a tiny bit of German. I understand a few more languages due to my interest in linguistics.
From the US. Fluent English, conversational+ japanese, and used to know basic German and french though I've mostly forgotten those. Also used to have survival level and very basic conversational Spanish. I've studied Albanian and Norwegian a bit, but don't remember enough to say anything anymore properly