How many languages ? Parliamo Burdseye as they say!

[Nightcrewman]

This months National Geographic carried an article that states that one in three of people using the net log on in English.
How many if any other languages do you speak, fluently or otherwise.
I can get by in German, I am fluent in local Scottish dialect but thats it I'm afraid.


National Geographic is also online nationalgeographic.com (http://ngm.com)

[LIP]

Cockney Rhyming slang. I talk in it all the time in real life - just not on here coz only the other cockneys would understand me.

That's it - the other languages i can speak are just words here and there, im only fluent in english [just about LOL] and cockney.

[mattmao]

english welsh and thai strugle with the latter but i get by.

[ericwt]

English and Spanish.

Not bad for a Gringo.(USA white dude)

[birdgirl73]

English and Spanish fluently. I'm a gringa, too, but I was raised by a Spanish professora mother and a Spanish-fluent father, and we lived in Spain when I was a kid and traveled to Mexico a lot, too. Spanish facility comes in very handy in Texas, even Castilian.

Enough French to conduct basic business and/or get by as a tourist. I don't practice Francais nearly enough. Would like to do some sort of immersion study to maintain and develop my skills.

I can read Latin. Understand simple Italian and Portuguese (thanks, mostly, to Spanish). I'd like to study something different one of these days, like Japanese, Urdū, Arabic, or Mandarin Chinese.

[LIP]

English and Spanish fluently. I'm a gringa, too, but I was raised by a Spanish professora mother and a Spanish-fluent father, and we lived in Spain when I was a kid and traveled to Mexico a lot, too. Spanish facility comes in very handy in Texas, even Castilian.

Enough French to conduct basic business and/or get by as a tourist. I don't practice Francais nearly enough. Would like to do some sort of immersion study to maintain and develop my skills.

I can read Latin. Understand simple Italian and Portuguese (thanks, mostly, to Spanish). I'd like to study something different one of these days, like Japanese, Urdū, Arabic, or Mandarin Chinese.

I have a friend who is as fluent in Mandarin as he is English and he is English. It's amazing. .

[onefourninezero]

I can talk about my work experience fluently in french haha; I'm studying french at A level next year 'cause I have a natural flair for it, apparently. I can also count to twelve and say thankyou in german which I'm sure would be really helpful if I was ever in germany.

[BizzleLuvin]

YAY!
well i speak besides english, i am nearly fluent in spanish, i have been studying it for about six years and spent a month in spain with an immersion program. i am also majoring in spanish. i love it. i feel sometimes that things make more sense in spanish than they do in english. i even have dreams en espanol.
i believe learning another language teaches you to become a far more open, rounded, communicative and understanding person. plus its a very useful commodity and sure makes you a more interesting person.
sorry guys, but english is not the number one language.

[halo]

English and spanish although im not fluent in spanish. I'm going to Spain tomorrow!! I speak enough spanish that i think i'll be able to get around alright.

[jdub61]

english, and i know the basics of spanish but i've never taken a class in it or studied it... i've just kinda picked up words and structure based on my work experience... i wouldn't even call myself conversational in spanish though :/

[Blowboy]

my mother tongue is dutch, and in the other part of belgium they speak French, which I also speak, (nearly) fluently. In high school I also had German, but I'm not that good at it. Now I'm studying English, which is pretty easy, that's my most fluent learnt language, and Russian, but with that I'm still in the beginner fase.
I live in a small country, so it's best to learn a lot of languages, plus I'm better with those than I am with science and shit.

[blazed_babe]

english, and i took spanish for 6 years when i was younger, but stopped after 6th grade, so i don't remember it to speak it, but i can understand a little, not much. i'm double majoring and one of those majors happens to be french (the other is international studies with a thematic and regional concentration on the social and cultural identity of europe) and so i have taken french for the past six years, and will be studying in montpellier, france for 8 months starting in january...so excited!!!

________________


chillin' with the bong :hippy:

[Skink]

If I moved to another country I would learn their launguage... I believe everyone here should speak English,,,for us to be forced to speak another language to accommodate immigrants is pure bullshit... in fact I don't think I could handle being in another country without knowing what people were saying...

[delusionsofNORMALity]

english is my second language and i don't speak another one. i am, however, fluent in silence.

[surreys princess]

i speak some spanish and am fluent in hebrew....

[Reefer Rogue]

English fluently obviously and I continue to study French at an A2 level, so we'll see how it goes. I'm alrite.

[psteve]

English, and a little bit of 'Espanol de la calle'.
Ik sprecht niets en Nederlands, maar Ik wilt te leren!

[LIP]

i speak some spanish and am fluent in hebrew....

Fuck, i didnt think of that! I can talk some Hebrew, but not fluent. I cant belive that completly forgot about it. Damn.

Thankyou for reminding me!

[LittleLefty90]

English Espanol und Deustch
I can understand italian portuguese french and dutch
But only barely no conversations
Warum muss ich in der Kuche bleiben? ummm, weil du ein Madchen bist! haha
Hoffentlich konnen keine Frauen Deutsch sprechen oder verstehen.

[Blowboy]

^ Lol

~psteve: Ik spreek geen Nederlands, maar ik wil het wel leren (I don't speak Dutch, but I want to learn it though)

[napolitana869]

I only speak english. I took 4 years of french but I dont remember much of it. I can understand basic sentences spoken slowly. I want to start taking classes again. I loved the language when I took it in middle school, and even when to france with a school group, but once I got to high school I had a really slime ball teacher so I stopped taking it.

[Oneironaut]

I am fluent in English, have a pretty good command of French, Spanish, German, and Esperanto (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto), and can understand a limited amount of Russian and Chinese. I can also read Italian and Portuguese very easily because they're so similar to Spanish and French.

[BUZz UK]

English as a language has the most colour and depth of expression, so it's all i need really.

Plus i'm far to lazy and ignorant to learn another languge...

[thcbongman]

I speak a bit of german, I'm better at reading and understanding it. I use to be fluent, but with such little use, Ich vergesse vielen deutsch!

[Gigliozzi]

If anyone here needs any help with Italian, I'm your man. (First-language native Italian.)

Studying German in college. Ain't that difficult. Most of the time.

News flash, people: Italian and Spanish are NOT OH MY GOD OH SO SIMILAR!!! They just sound like it, but there are huge difference just like with any two languages. If you claim you understand Italian because you already speak Spanish and viceversa, I'm sorry to have to put it this way, but you're talking out of your ass. Just be real.

In fact, in my experience, I have found far more cognates between French and Italian than between Spanish and Italian. That being said, I'm not going to go around and claim I understand French, because I don't.

I'm sorry if I'm coming off as an ass about this, but after a decade of hearing people smugly repeat the same myth, I've become a little bitter about it.

[Oneironaut]

News flash, people: Italian and Spanish are NOT OH MY GOD OH SO SIMILAR!!! They just sound like it, but there are huge difference just like with any two languages. If you claim you understand Italian because you already speak Spanish and viceversa, I'm sorry to have to put it this way, but you're talking out of your ass. Just be real.

In fact, in my experience, I have found far more cognates between French and Italian than between Spanish and Italian. That being said, I'm not going to go around and claim I understand French, because I don't.
It's true. Italian is more closely related to French than any of the other major Romance languages (although it could be argued that grammatically it has a lot more in common with Romanian). My ability to read Italian is not entirely based on my knowledge of French and Spanish however.

I am a big language geek, and I love studying the history of languages. The division of Latin into the Romance languages is one of the best documented cases of dialects splitting up into their own languages, and I have spent a lot of time studying how that happened. In the process I have learned a lot of Latin roots and am familiar with most of the sound changes that turned ancient Latin into modern Italian (and modern French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.).

With a good enough understanding of how Latin developed differently in the different regions of the former Roman Empire, it becomes simple to recognize cognates that don't superficially resemble each other, like Spanish "hoja" and Italian "foglia" ('leaf', related to the English word "foliage" through Latin), or French "journée" and Italian "giorno" ('day', related to the English word "diurnal" through Latin). Using such connections, and studying basic Italian grammar, I have trained myself to understand pretty much every word in an Italian text with little effort.

Italian and Spanish are very similar, certainly more similar than English is to its closest cousin Dutch. Italian is a lot more like Spanish and French than, say, Greek or Russian or English, because it is much more closely related to those languages than to the others. Of course there are lots of differences (that's why we call them separate languages), but compared to other languages there's no question that Italian and Spanish have a lot in common.

[Gigliozzi]

Oneironaut, thanks for not getting mad. I was fearing some kind of "wtf r u talking about i understand both perfectly their so similar fuck you" kind of response from some here who have made the claim I criticized, but it's good to see that you're more decent than that.

You should have told us up front you're a "language geek." I can definitely see how in your case, with your kind of knowledge, jumping back and forth around languages becomes easier. What I am sick of is people who know neither Italian nor Spanish, listen to both of them being spoken, have no fucking idea what is being said in either case, but immediately judge them both to be oh so identical simply because the cadence and delivery sounds somewhat the same (which they never do with French and Italian, which we've agreed are more closely linked together, since these two languages don't sound as similar). Or they might look at a few Spanish words, notice that they're spelled just like their Italian counterparts with perhaps an extra 's' at the end, and rashly build their case on that.

If I see/read a commercial/advertisement about a Mexican restaurant or something that is actually in Spanish, I might pick up on the gist of it, but that's only because since I know what it's about, I am quicker to allocate the words and their relevance, and context clues help me out on the rest of it. This is what happens to a lot of people who go on to assume that learning Italian means an automatic mastery of Spanish and viceversa. But if a Spaniard walks up to me and just starts talking in Spanish, and I have no clue what the context is, I am not going to understand much, if anything. The same holds true for if an Italian were to start yapping to a Spaniard. And I've always been very skeptical of those who claim this isn't so, and that they can juggle both interchangeably just because they're okay at one of them.

Latin, of course, is key in all of this. People ask, "whats the fucking point of learning latin no one speaks it lol!" without knowing that if you can master Latin and all its workings, your ease at learning any romance language in the future is upped big time. My mother actually teaches Latin at the university level, and she's always on my ass that I should learn it. I'd like to, and I think I might start taking it next year. If I had stayed in Italy and gone through high school there, it would have been, along with Greek, part of the normal curriculum.

Not so fast, anti-Americans wherever you are. Just because they're part of the curriculum doesn't mean that Italian students are all too ecstatic about learning them, or that they make a particular effort to remember the material once out of high school. I care to specify this because I don't want to inspire any "omg european schools are so much better were so fucking stupid in america" kind of hateful responses.

[weedmaster]

English, also alot of insults in Polish.