How many other languages do you speak?

i.e. not your mother-tongue

Not necessarily to a high level - but more than a flick through the phrase-book.

I spent at least 2 years on the following:

Latin,
French,
German,
Russian.

I'd like to brush up on the Russian and Latin - and I'd like to add Arabic, Greek and Malayalam.

I've tried hard to learn Spanish, Hebrew and Sign Language. I was not even introduced to reading until I was 5 years old so I've always had a hard time with languages. I'm far more fluent in English than I probably have a right to be.

I've always wanted to be able to speak another language. :(

Whilst I was learning them I wasn't too bad at all - but once I stop using them frequently it all vanished immediately. So I can still read Russian in the sense of pronouncing words written in cyrillic - but I've got basically no idea what any of it means. :grr:

We all have our different skills though - and you've got plenty of things which make up for it. :hug:

:blush:
Have I mentioned recently how awesome you are? :hug:

I took seven years of it in school, but have forgotten much of it. I'd be able to get by in a Spanish-speaking country, though (maybe).

my reasoning is that "gin and tonic" is pretty much the same in any language, and waving my credit card usually deals with paying for things...

Actually, Italian is one of my better ones at the moment - simply because I've used it in Italy fairly recently, even though my formal study of it was limited to one semester in my first year of university.

:P

until I went to law school and it all leaked out my ear. (no, really...I think it may have)

Now that I live in SoCal, I'm hoping to pick it back up. :)

I mean - learning a foreign language by meeting people from other cultures, that's just not the right way.

:sarcasm:

They move here, they learn English. Cuz I'm too fucking lazy to bother with their crappy language, which is obviously inferior to mine.

:sarcasm:

So that I can be understood? None.

Read, write, translate,fuddle through well enough that people don't laugh at me?

Russian
Latin
Japanese
Hindi
Greek
French
Spanish
Italian
Arabic
Gaelic (Irish)

I'm no linguist and have no facility for acquiring languages. I just do the best I can. Languages fascinate me, but I really have no talent for them. I can't even speak English fluently.

Khash.

But I'd expect nothing less of you.

I would have loved to be a linguist. But I just don't got it.

Khash.

I would find that very useful. But there is still time...

I still know a few. But memorization isn't the same and know what you're saying. :(

Hindi, now that would be cool.

I know a few slokas also. But being able to converse with people beyond "nai hindi!" or "na bangla!" would rock.

other than that, um, does Yiddish count? Since I've been dating a Jewish girl, I've gotten a few words down of that. But not well enough to participate. When two people start speaking Yiddish, I just make myself nisht visadich (yeah, I know. terrible spelling. I only know it spoken)

I also know a little esperanto, which is only slightly more useless than Latin

Or Portuguese + English with Spanish being the mother tongue, I'm not sure.

Would love to get fluent in Poirtuguese, and add Arabic or Tagalog.

with varying degrees of fluency:

Spanish (with a pretty high level of fluency, good cadence, accent, etc.)
Norwegian (fairly well in terms of vocabulary but my accent isn't so hot)
Irish Gaelic (enough to get myself in trouble a bar fight)

:D

I'm a flop at languages. I've taken Spanish, French, Latin and German in HS and undergrad. Flunked them all!

Had to take German 11 semesters to pass just four, failing seven!!

How I hated to be called upon in class.

:rofl: (only it wasn't funny at the time)

One does not, <i>repeat</i>, <em>not</em> "speak" hypertext mark-up whatever-it's-called. &emdash; and I mean it!

Well.... <sarcasm> PTHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH </sarcasm> :P

:rofl:

I'm quite comfortable with English.

Err, more like American Standard.

I struggled like Hell and tried to learn Spanish and French. I find that I can now read enough in either one to travel but I have a real hard time understanding it when spoken

Well....

I am pretty good at French. I'd better be, since it was my major field of study in college!

OTOH, it has been more than 40 years since I studied it. However, I have gone to Paris a couple of times, and after about 3 days, I do find that it comes back.

The second language is Spanish. This was my college minor. I am nowhere near as fluent in this as I am in French....but again, once I am around people who speak it, it does come back, a little!

:hi:

But, I'm supposed to start lessons in Farsi soon.

ANd I work with tons of french people so I want to start speaking it there more.

I think I could probably get by with a few phrases in a spanish speaking country (I took 4 years of it in HS) but I understand it better than I speak it

Works just fine with vineyard workers and housekeepers--all of whom are legal, of course.

and passable on written translation of Latin.

Semi-fluent in German and Spanish.
I have forgotten a lot of German, though.

:hide:

so I guess my second language is English. And arne't I as gud at it as any moran freeper?

Mans vectevs bija Latvietis. He was born in Vecpiebalga and came to the U.S. in 1905.

Very interesting that your grandfather came here in 1905. Most of the Latvians didn't come until WWII, as my folks did. Have you been there? Beautiful country and Riga is an amazing city.

He went to teacher's college in St. Petersburg, was drafted into the Imperial Russian Army and deserted. He wandered around Europe for a few years, joined the French Foreign Legion, deserted that, got a job on a German ship, and sailed back and forth to America five times before getting off. He spent his first night in America on a park bench in Hoboken, New Jersey.

He found out that there was a small group of Latvians in Boston, so he went up there and stayed until he had learned some English, which was his fifth language (after Latvian, Russian, French, and German).

Eventually, he earned an American B.A., an M.A., and a law degree. When all the Latvian refugees came after World War II, he was the only Latvian-speaking attorney in Minneapolis, and he became the man to go to when the refugees had trouble with their landlords or employers or the government.

He died when I was 11, but I remember that there always seemed to be Latvians in the living room when we went to visit.

I have never been to Latvia, and I would love to go, but I've been busy going to Asia in the past several years.

Been studying since last November.

http://radio.echo.msk.ru:8000/listen.pls

That's what I'm doing too.

Japanese, which I use professionally as a translator, but I've also studied German, French, Spanish, Russian, Latin, and Chinese and dabbled in Norwegian and Latvian.

Not enough to have a coherent conversation with anyone older than five or six in three of them, but definitely better than just a phrase book.

In order of fluency:

German
French
Italian
Spanish

and phrase book level:
Dutch
Russian

Rusty in all of them.

:hi:

when I was in high school. Can't remember much of it at all though. That was a long time ago and there aren't a whole lot of opportunities to practice it in Colorado.

I get more use out of pig latin and gibberish and teen-speak.

and only have any sort of fluency in Latin, at least for reading it. I can't express myself fluently in any language - including English.

Redstone

English - my mother language
German - I learned it when I lived in Germany for almost 4 years.

Only one....

Perl
VB
Python
IDL
MatLab
R
LabView
C++
Assembly
and, I'll write it for you: FORTH!!!!!

not the right kind of languages?

English, Spanish and trivial Latin. Im boring.