How many languages ? Parliamo Burdseye as they say!

[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.

napolitana869 Reviewed by napolitana869 on 05-31-2007. How many languages ? Parliamo Burdseye as they say! 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 Rating: 5

[Oneironaut]

I am fluent in English, have a pretty good command of French, Spanish, German, and 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.