What language do you speak and/or write?

[Till]

Bilingual in English and German.
Completely out of practice in Spanish, but the basic gramattical knowledge is still there, vocabulary is mostly lacking.
Can read and write Latin, and understand when spoken by someone else (one of my profs can actually do this).
Can read Ancient Greek (voted Greek on the poll).

In the near future, I'd like to polish up my Spanish and then learn the modern version of one my ancient languages, i.e. either Italian or modern Greek. Can't be bothered to learn anything which is completely new or sounds stupid (i.e. French).

EDIT: @Fifty: Wow, I'm impressed with what a linguist you are! What languages do you speak which aren't on the poll?

It always amused me, how most of my lecturers couldn't make conversation in Latin. (A very hard thing to do, i admit, but they are the experts!)
Looks like this is quite common, even on university level!
I can make myself understood in German and English. My Latin never was any good and it's been 4 or 5 years since my last lesson. There probably isn't much left by now. Over the next few years, i plan to learn a little Spanish, but haven't made much progress lately.

 

[Sidhe]

English and a little French, that makes me unusual in England, most of us are lazy about language, sadly.

My linguistics skills aren't great though so I'm glad I learnt a more universal language, although I'm not proud of my lack of skill even if some of it is part of the culture.

 

[CaptainF]

English fo sho.

I'm also able to carry on a skeletal conversation in Spanish.

 

[Elrohir]

I'm only fluent in English. I know tiny bits of Spanish (IE, "No habla espanol!") and German, and I'm learning Latin now.

 

[Rossiya]

WTH???? No Italian?

 

[CaptainF]

I'm only fluent in English. I know tiny bits of Spanish (IE, "No habla espanol!") and German, and I'm learning Latin now.

Its "No Hablo Espanol."

If you say "No habla Espanol", you're literally saying "You don't speak spanish!"

 

[Rossiya]

I know English, Italian, some German, some Latin, and bits of French.

 

[Aramazd]

My native language is English and I am fluent in French.

 

[Mr. Dictator]

07h3r, |3375p34k

 

[Trajan12]

Mother tongue is English.
Fluent in english and Arabic.
Can understand Spanish but room to improve.
Beginning to learn polish.
Anyone ever tried to learn two languages at once?

 

[puglover]

Only English presently, but I've started learning Spanish.

 

[Solver]

Native languages: Latvian and Russian. I am obviously fluent in both, but can only type in Russian, not write by hand, curiously enough. Also, my spelling can be a little bit off in Russian. In Latvian, however, my writing skills are actually very good.

I'm fully fluent (or consider myself to be) in English - I understand, read and write with no difficulty at all. I also talk without any difficulty, albeit it's rare for me to actually do that.

I understand German well. Can also express myself verbally or in writing, but that will have many mistakes, although understandable.

And there's a bunch of languages that I find I can understand texts in - languages I don't actually speak but that I can figure out based on similarities with other languages and my general linguistic knowledge. For example, Polish, Ukrainian, Czech or Dutch. No advanced understanding of course, but I can get the basic meaning of the text if I need to.

On my wishlist, though, there's a bunch more languages I want to have a good level of ability in, and I actually don't really have an excuse for not knowing 2-3 more languages. I'm pretty good at it and can learn a language fast, and have also had sufficient time to do so.

 

[Trajan12]

I hear German is the most overly complicated language in the world. How can a woman be feminine but Wife is nueter?

 

[Solver]

And how can a girl be neuter, that's also amazing.

German grammar IS annoying. It has a ton of exceptions to its rules. Many of the same annoying ones as English, but then it also has many more. Of course, it's funny how both in English and German the past form of verbs is constructed in the same way for all verbs - supposedly. Then you have non-standard verbs with different words for their past and present forms, and of course all the most commonly used verbs are non-standard. Great.

 

[willemvanoranje]

Fluently:
Dutch
German
English
Portuguese

Reasonable level:
Spanish

Marginal:
French

Understand tiny bits of other languages as Italian and Scandinavian languages because of the similarities with other languages I speak.

 

[SuperBeaverInc.]

The only language I speak is English. I took Spanish in high school, but don't remember most of it.

 

[willemvanoranje]

Who else noticed that Fifty thinks he speaks every language?

 

[Pasi Nurminen]

English, some Russian and Lao.

 

[Trajan12]

English, some Russian and Lao.

Russian has some really wierd letters, so does arabic, but arabic looks cool. Russian looks like a huge typo.

 

[Pasi Nurminen]

Well I can't really read or write Russian, I just listened to a whole bunch of those Pimsler lessons so I can speak enough to carry on a basic conversation. Ask me to read Russian and I don't know what's going on. I mean I know a few of the characters that differ from English, but not enough.