How many and what languages do you speak?

[Hygro]

English, Spanish, and a dash of Dutch. And a lot of French words without the ability to use them.

My Spanish is way too good to dismiss but I can’t realllllly understand people unless they are trying to be understood.

 

[uppi]

Other people think they can put a German there to listen and translate - no chance.

Give a German two weeks to get used to it and they can. Faster, if that German had previous exposure to Allemanic dialects. In the end, Swiss German is just a dialect of High German.

 

[elmurcis]

My native (Latvian), English (actually thinking in it whenever I'm on games&stuff) and Russian (most times can't get a "simple" job if not speaking it at all).

 

[sophie]

Native: English
Fluent: Spanish, German
Highly proficient, but not enough practice/experience to call myself "fluent": Dutch, French
Pretty good, but very little practical experience in the wild: Italian, Latin
Learning, still early stages (~A2): Russian

 

[mitsho]

Give a German two weeks to get used to it and they can. Faster, if that German had previous exposure to Allemanic dialects. In the end, Swiss German is just a dialect of High German.

There's some variants even I have problems with. When you go deep into the Alps... ;-) But yes, comprehension may be achieved after some time, of course.

 

[uppi]

There's some variants even I have problems with. When you go deep into the Alps... ;-) But yes, comprehension may be achieved after some time, of course.

Well, if you go into the depth of the Bavarian Forest, the dialect is incomprehensible to anybody else as well. I was more talking about the "standard" Swiss German of the kind that is spoken on TV and Radio.

 

[Kyriakos]

I hardly see any german in that

 

[Tee Kay]

Thai is my first language, I'm more fluent in English, acquired a smattering of German and Mandarin over the years (probably enough to ask for food, directions, etc if pressed, never tried it)

 

[Gori the Grey]

I remain hopeful that I'll one day get English right.

I've studied French, Italian, Latin and ancient Greek, but don't speak any of them. I come closest with French.

 

[tjs282]

Native: English, most variants (notable exceptions: Glaswegian, Geordie)
Now-just-about-passable: German
Used-to-be-much-better: French
Limited to polite greetings/ simple food-orders: Arabic, Spanish

 

[really]

English as a native, though some would have trouble understanding my accent or idioms.
Irish - fairly well but only use it when I don't want my kids to understand. My daughter is learning it so now can pick out bits.
French - well. Have worked and studied in France (Erasmus). Try to listen to French radio or browse the news to keep it current.
Italian - basic - worked there and picked up some
Spanish - basic from the above languages and knowing lots of Spanish people over the years.
Hungarian- I work with a lot of Hungarian documents and people for years. It might as well be klingon as I've only picked up a few words.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

I barely know English.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

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.

French is complicated in Canada due to the fact that the French taught in school in Alberta is not the same French that's spoken in Quebec. We're taught the French spoken in France, and while much is the same, there are some words that have a different pronunciation and some phrases/expressions exist in one, but not the other.

A few months ago a Radio-Canada journalist wanted to ask a question and get an answer in French, from one of the Alberta MLAs. Since French is not an official language provincially here, no interpreter was made available. So the MLA stumbled through an answer, and while I did understand both the question and answer, it was ear-hurting to listen to.

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.

A Second Chance

Sorry, but I mixed up the chapter count with a different story. This one's 307 chapters (still pretty long; there's another long one I'm reading that's 339 chapters; it's an AU in which Hermione is sorted into Slytherin and some of the main events of the novels go sorta as written, except Hermione did them (Voldemort still wants to kill Harry, though).

One thing I should warn about A Second Chance: It's NSFW, for several reasons.

Oh, and in addition to the problematic French words and phrases, there's an English-related tic in this story that drives me up the wall, as well.

Quick: What's the past tense of "to lay" (as in when you go to bed, or you are otherwise horizontal on something like the floor or on some other piece of furniture or object, not setting something else down)?

It's not "lied." Yet time after time, someone "lied down" to sleep or look up at the sky.

And this person has a beta reader...

 

[Kyriakos]

I barely know English.

Me too.

 

[stfoskey12]

The only language I'm fluent in is English.

I know some French, to where I can read it and understand most of it. When I took it in high school (2012-16), I was be able to carry on a conversation. I remember conducting an interview with someone who was a missionary in the Congo, and I remember reading books in French. But I would need to practice more to be able to do those sorts of things again effectively. When I went to France in 2019, my French was about as good as a lot of French people's English, where we'd each know some of the other's language and muddle our way through a situation. If someone gave me instructions in French, I would understand them. But one time some tourists started speaking to me in French, and they had to repeat themselves for me to understand.

I took a year of German in college, and know basic stuff.

I also know some Esperanto. It's never come in handy, but I like the idea of a rational language.

I learned some Spanish in elementary school, and picked up a bit of it from cereal boxes, the radio, signs, and other things that are sometimes in Spanish in the US. Also, I can pick out some things when it's similar to French. But I'm useless with speaking anything more complex than Donde esta al bano?

I tried learning some Russian, but never really got into it. I can roughly transliterate Cyrillic, and that's about it.

 

[Kyriakos]

I did learn greek Braille 1,5 years ago.
Don't recall anything by now.

 

[warpus]

French is complicated in Canada due to the fact that the French taught in school in Alberta is not the same French that's spoken in Quebec.

Erm.. Why would they ever do this? Doesn't make any sense. I wonder if I learned French French or Quebecois French here in Ontario...

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Erm.. Why would they ever do this? Doesn't make any sense. I wonder if I learned French French or Quebecois French here in Ontario...

Vocabulary would be an indication. There are definitely differences between the two.

Alberta has been gradually becoming more "French-friendly" over the years, to the point where most cities have at least one immersion school and there are some communities that can be considered francophone, rather than anglophone. But you still can't expect translation services to be automatically available for provincial matters.

I honestly don't know why Quebecois French isn't taught here, at least in K-12. I'm not sure about post-secondary, and I had two years of French in college. Without knowing more about the policies of other provinces, I couldn't say (education being a provincial rather than a federal responsibility).

Thing is, though, English has a bazillion dialects and accents (a wee exaggeration, but not too much of one), and French also has a variety of dialects and accents. For example, I remember waaay back when Karla Homolka was released from prison after serving a mere 12 years, and gave her first media interview in French. Someone on the RPG forum I belonged to at the time mentioned that the French she had learned in prison (Joliet, in Quebec) was "low-class" - presumably not a standard accent that might be used by most people. I listened to the interview, and while I did think her French was a bit sloppy, I just chalked it up to the fact that she would have had to learn it to get along in a francophone prison. I never thought about the idea that it's a whole different dialect she was using.

 

[NovaKart]

I recently read that she moved to Guadeloupe in the Caribbean for awhile and now she lives in Quebec. She has kids and takes then to school and some people are upset about her being there, the school that is.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I recently read that she moved to Guadeloupe in the Caribbean for awhile and now she lives in Quebec. She has kids and takes then to school and some people are upset about her being there, the school that is.

Homolka? She's a predator who should never have gotten out of prison. I have to wonder at the sanity of whoever fathered those kids, as he must have known who she is and what she did. Living her life in francophone communities can't erase any of that.