How many and what languages do you speak?

[mitsho]

It's very interesting, alexa, siri and google assistant are really not spread here in Switzerland, since it's not worth the effort to program them for our dialect which is a) quite different from high german and b) in itself composed of many local variants. We kept these dialects since they are used on TV and the Radio and are really really strong in federalism- whereas the whole of Germany and Austria coalesced around a standard language. But yes, even swiss german now starts to become one dialect - it's still our secret language. Other people think they can put a German there to listen and translate - no chance.

 

[Ranger0001]

Using a desktop browser yields "Not if the other uses local syntax or idioms."

Indeed, they have become a lot better, very fast.

I wonder if we can ever reach a point where this could be understood:

 

[Birdjaguar]

I wonder if we can ever reach a point where this could be understood:

maybe @Lemon Merchant can make sense of him.

 

[Kyriakos]

I can understand the other farmer (and the reporter) fine, but only a few words of the first farmer.

 

[Ranger0001]

I can understand the other farmer (and the reporter) fine, but only a few words of the first farmer.

I can get about 1/2 of what the first farmer said but the second and reporter completely make sense. But the YouTube, antosubtitles are really funny with the first one. I only got 1/2 because I have watched that one like 15 times.

 

[Snowygerry]

It's very interesting, alexa, siri and google assistant are really not spread here in Switzerland, since it's not worth the effort to program them for our dialect which is a) quite different from high german and b) in itself composed of many local variants. We kept these dialects since they are used on TV and the Radio and are really really strong in federalism- whereas the whole of Germany and Austria coalesced around a standard language. But yes, even swiss german now starts to become one dialect - it's still our secret language. Other people think they can put a German there to listen and translate - no chance.

We have the same here with the Flemish dialects, our own Navajo code...

Couple years back some foreign trolls descended on local political forums and social media pretended to be malcontent Flemish posters, they stuck out like a soar thumb because they wrote perfect Dutch, no one does that here.

They were tracked and countertrolled very effectively

 

[warpus]

I am fluent in English and Polish and used to be fluent in German, as I spent about 2 and a half years in the German school system.

These days I can understand most German if it's spoken slowly, but if I turn on a German TV station or movie, it's a bit more challenging. Usually I'm able to figure out the meaning by filling in the blanks and paying attention to the intonation and the way things are said and the context.. but some of what's said does elude me. Back in 2012 I was in Peru and met a French girl who spoke German and didn't mind using it to communicate with me so we could both practice. That ended up being a horrible idea, as she would just talk and talk and talk and I was always wayyy behind trying to understand everything.. and when it came time to respond, I had trouble finding the words for what I wanted to say, and could not help it but stick to the same words over and over.. my vocabulary is very lacking. And that was a decade ago. I bet that if I moved to Germany for a month or two, a lot of it would come back. When I hear German being spoken, it sounds very warm and familiar to me.

My Polish is getting a bit rusty too, but I am still functionally fluent in it. I can easily hold a conversation in Polish with my parents and other relatives. Polish is also a somewhat flexible language, so if I forget a Polish word it's very easy to slide in a modified English word without skipping a beat. For whatever reason I'm pretty good at Polish grammar and spelling, so when I decide to sit down and write things out, it's pretty easy for me.. although my vocabulary is not really that impressive either. We left Poland when I was in grade 3, so a lot of the recent pop cultural references and changes to the language have not been on my radar... there's a lot new words - thankfully (??) a lot of them are straight imports from English... So it's a mixed bag, but if I moved back to Poland today I would easily be able to interact with everyone. If I moved back to Germany right now, it would probably take me a month or two to get back up to speed, and at first I would have slow interactions with people, pausing to remember a lot more words than I would in Polish.

I have learned some French, but the level of French education in Canada is not very high (from my personal experience), so I have basically learned "jack squat". In grade 9 I got the highest mark in French class, but that's just because the communist education system and my own kind of personality made it easy for me to memorize things. So.. For French tests.. I just memorized all the verbs and how to conjugate them duh. Super easy to get all 90% and some 100%s. At the end of the year I knew exactly zero French, but had the highest mark in the class. My counsellor convinced me to take the advanced version of French for next year, which was an incredibly spectacular failure. On my first test, on which I big time cheated on, I got just barely 30%. I basically didn't know anything, as the test was written in a language I could not speak at all - French. There was this girl sitting beside me who I got along with, so I just copied off a lot of her answers.. filling in some of my own, so it wouldn't be obvious. Well, it turns out she didn't know any French either, because her answers were mostly wrong. I quit out of that class the day after getting my test back. I will also never forget how we had to go around the class and say something about ourselves (in French) on the first day, so I just memorized parts of what other people said, and ended up yammering out something about "Mon ami jouer le basketball" or something stupid like that. So yeah, I wish I knew more French, but I know no French. It's written on everything here, so I have picked some up, but if you said French stuff to me it would be all Greek to me, aside from the short popular phrases everybody knows. If I look at written French I can figure out some of the meaning, as there are many familiar words, and I have learned some of the other ones over time due to cereal box, etc. presence

I have learned some Spanish during my travels to South and central America (and Mexico), but I'm not anywhere near fluent. I know more Spanish than French, but it's basically just words that help me navigate my way through restaurants: pollo, cerveza, carne, bano.. Not a very long list at all, just the basics. My knowledge of Spanish is very tiny super un poco, just some functional words that helped me navigate Chile, Argentina, etc. I made my way about 35% into a Pimsler intro to Spanish "class" a while ago too, a set of lessons in .MP3 format that you listen to and sort of interact with. I should probably go back to that one day and complete it, it seemed to be a good way to learn Castellano

Other than that I can tell you that "Gem-Gem" (completely butchered spelling but that's what it'd sound like) means "It's time to go right now, let's go!!" or "We are going now!" or something like that in Sherpa or Nepali. My guess is Sherpa, but the Sherpa seem to use different languages or words for different aspects in life, depending on the context, so I don't want to say it's Sherpa for sure. This word is what we would hear when our bags were already packed and everybody was standing around waiting for the word to start the next stretch of the hike. Once the guide has checked to make sure everybody is ready to go, the last thing he'll say is: "dzem dzem" as he starts walking to lead the group in whatever direction. Or during a break it's what I would say once I was ready to go, if we were taking a break at my initial request. From what I remember him telling us, this word might have a double meaning related to a panther or puma or something like that.. but I can't really remember.

I've also picked up some words in Japanese and Kiwinglish, just random or basic words you pick up or learn before flying somewhere, like sayonara or thongs. There used to be Vietnamese and Cambodian words I knew at some point, but I've since forgotten them all. I also wish I could remember some Quechua words that our guide in Peru shared with us, but unless it's something you keep using, you will just forget it..

 

[BenitoChavez]

English is my native language. I can read and write reasonably well in french. I can understand most spoken french if the speaker doesn't talk too fast, enunciates clearly, and doesn't use too much slang. I'm not so good at speaking it though. I fumble over my words and have bad pronunciation. I know some very basic Spanish but nowhere near conversational. I took Latin in high school and college but I'm sure I've forgotten most of it.

I wonder if we can ever reach a point where this could be understood:

That must be what English sounds like to people who haven't learned it.

 

[amadeus]

English, Japanese, and as a byproduct of the latter I can kinda read some Chinese but not aloud.

 

[mitsho]

We have the same here with the Flemish dialects, our own Navajo code...

Couple years back some foreign trolls descended on local political forums and social media pretended to be malcontent Flemish posters, they stuck out like a soar thumb because they wrote perfect Dutch, no one does that here.

They were tracked and countertrolled very effectively

Oh yeah, good example. I was in no way saying we were unique in that regard.

I had an acquaintance once from Ireland, who had trouble talking to his Siri, while it listened without a hitch to the American who was a guest at that evening as well.. It was very funny.

 

[Angst]

Danish, English.

Know German well enough for some conversation, it usually lights up and becomes useful if done over a few weeks. Tiny traces of Spanish.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Όχι αν ο άλλος χρησιμοποιεί τοπική σύνταξη ή ιδιωματισμούς.

I think I understand one of those words.


Let's see... English. I'm better at reading French than I am at speaking it (my grandfather, whose first language was Swedish, said that to really be fluent in a language you have to be able to think in it, and I can't think fast enough in French to carry on a conversation beyond the basics, though I can usually understand what other people are saying if it's not too complicated).

Learning cat language means not only vocalizations, but also body language.

Lolspeak. I remember having to force myself to type "the" as "teh" as my editor-self resisted.

Other human languages... a bit of Swedish - I really had to argue, cajole, and persuade my grandfather to teach me anything at all, since he'd decided that in Canada we speak English, not Swedish, and he had a hard time understanding that I just wanted to be able to read the letters and cards his sister sent him.

Thanks to the multilingual chat during the Wuauquikuna livestreams, I can recognize words and phrases in Spanish, Quechua, and Polish, as those languages, in addition to English, are the ones most commonly used. It's been a learning experience for the musicians, too - they like to be able to communicate with their fans in their own languages, so learning a little basic French was one of the things they did over the past year and a half.

Speaking of French... I was reading a long Harry Potter fanfic. I'm talking 338 chapters long (and still going). The author decided to insert French into the conversations pertaining to Fleur Delacour.

Well, the author tried. But the mistakes kept on and on and on, chapter after chapter, and I finally wrote and sent a list of corrections, because it was driving me nuts. I don't fault the author for not using French letters, but rather mangling the grammar in some really basic phrases.

 

[amadeus]

If I were going for a third language I’d try my hand at some Russian. I did very briefly try learning how to read Cyrillic but that kind of fizzled out. I’m not good at reading the phonetic alphabet, so I was going Japanese→Russian, like this page.

 

[mitsho]

Speaking of French... I was reading a long Harry Potter fanfic. I'm talking 338 chapters long (and still going). The author decided to insert French into the conversations pertaining to Fleur Delacour.

Well, the author tried. But the mistakes kept on and on and on, chapter after chapter, and I finally wrote and sent a list of corrections, because it was driving me nuts. I don't fault the author for not using French letters, but rather mangling the grammar in some really basic phrases.

You're a hero. While i normally advocate to not overcorrect people and just let them speak as that's the way not to make them sick of the language, on a written form, absolutely correct the language. It's been getting easy with all the software, so no excuse for not trying (to get the basic mistakes out, it doesn't have to be perfect). But yeah, the best way to learn a language is to go to a place where it is spoken and stay there for two months without contact to your mother tongue. It's amazing how fast you can get into it when you (r life) depends on it.

 

[Verbose]

I am thinking able to communicate with speakers as much as is needed for average things. I guess maybe like a B1 in the language is what I would think.

OK, fair enough (had to google B1).

I am interested in languages (sympathizes with Mitsho above in that regard). But I would rate myself as really speaking only Swedish and English. I mostly don't bother with fluency or mastery in my own speech – I go for understanding, and mostly as much passive language understanding as possible, and active language use be damned most of the time.

As a consequence I can read literary or academic text in French and German just fine, understand both languages when spoken (dialects, it varies), but tend to mangle both a fair bit when stringing sentences together.

By virtue of being Swedish i also understand Danish and Norwegian (and am an atypical Swede for not thinking Danish all that incomprehensible – nothing much going on there not also not going in fx French). I actually like having a go at speaking both Norwegian and Danish by myself, since it helps with understanding (the challenge for Swedes is how close, yet not the same everything is) but tend to absolutely not try that with natives (they might think me taking the piss). I did actually end up speaking my home-made Norwegian once in Brazil, encountering a Brazilian-Norwegian guy who was happy to see other Scandinavians, spoke Norwegian to us, but was completely non-plussed by Swedish, so I screwed up the Norwegian inflection and started lumping in Norwegian vocab as much as possible, and that worked.

I have decent reading comprehension in Latin, and combined with my other languages, this means I am mostly able to read the newspaper also in Italian, Spanish, Portugese and Dutch. (I find I understand more spoken Italian than for the other three languages, with Dutch – or Flemish, or an variations thereof – a particular challenge.

I have a longstanding thing about Japanese – which is a both complex and endless language – moved into JLPT 4 level-ish by now if I self-estimate (totally rubbish at kanji so far though, still favoring trying to get my head around spoken, not written, Japanese at this point). I have also made several starts on Russian, but would in all honesty make no great claims in that regard so far.

Something like: Swedish-(Norwegian-Danish) / English-German-(Dutch) / (Latin)-French-(Italian-Portugese-Spanish) / (...Japanese...)

 

[The_J]

Native German, fluent English, and good-enough Dutch.

I'd not want to have a complicated discussion in Dutch or a group conversation, but 1-on-1 on simple things works. I went for speed dating and had to use it there (not everyone managed English), and it worked, but was exhausing. Dutch at work also worked, but there I can only listen, since talking would be too complicated most of the time.

Now I'm living in France, and while I did a A1 course, it's pretty much stayed on that level (thanks pandemic). I know the right words to slip through some situations like at the counter of my GP, but otherwise it gets complicated . The French sadly love to call on the phone, instead of emailing, not making this easier.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

You're a hero. While i normally advocate to not overcorrect people and just let them speak as that's the way not to make them sick of the language, on a written form, absolutely correct the language. It's been getting easy with all the software, so no excuse for not trying (to get the basic mistakes out, it doesn't have to be perfect). But yeah, the best way to learn a language is to go to a place where it is spoken and stay there for two months without contact to your mother tongue. It's amazing how fast you can get into it when you (r life) depends on it.

All that fanfic author needs is a basic grammar book and a French/English dictionary (print form, not online). "N'est pas" does not mean the same thing that "N'est-ce pas" means. That's one of the things that kept annoying me chapter after chapter. Mixing up "tu" and "vous" in formal and informal situations, coming out with sentences that would translate as "we is" or "you is"... That's actually elementary-level French.

Well, the author has a note on every page soliciting feedback. So I gave it. We'll see if it made a difference next time she cycles back to the characters of Fleur and Bill Weasley.

She also has a lot of Russian and Croatian dialogue in the story but I have no fluency in those languages at all, so I couldn't begin to know if the translations are accurate or if they're a mess.

 

[Ranger0001]

Mixing up "tu" and "vous"

Even I know the difference from just mild exposure through the years and I have not made any effort to study it. But, do you happen to have a link to that fanfiction? I should like to look at it.

 

[really]

That is a particularly strong accent. You can hear the second farmer giving a few orders in Irish to his dog and knowing the area I guess the first farmer doesn't speak or hear much English from day to day.
Having said that I found him hard to follow.

 

[NovaKart]

My native languages is English and I can read and speak Sorani Kurdish, better at reading because like @Verbose I’m better at passive language understanding.

I use Kurdish a lot for work and we do a lot of reporting on security and political issues so I know about vocabulary like IED and high delegation sometimes have trouble with stuff a lot simpler. Some of the people I work with don’t know English either.

Kurdish really has about five different languages: Sorani, Kurmanji/Badini, Hawrami, Zazaki and Kermanshahi. Even between Sorani spoken in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah it can be pretty confusing.

I have a hard time watching TV or following a group conversation in Kurdish too.

I used to know Turkish a lot better but I’ve forgotten a lot of it. I can get by in Iraqi Arabic and understand enough Arabic in writing to know what the article is about but I’m pretty bad at it.

Now I watch more Arabic and Turkish TV shows and movies than I used to. It used to be, I found most Middle Eastern TV and movies to be really melodramatic and with poor production values but it’s a lot better now.