I have a 600 day streak on Duolingo in Japanese. So yeah I know English and JavaScript.
You really cheated like that?
I think they're just saying they don't really speak Japanese despite doing Duolingo lessons
Spanish (native)
Portuguese (fluent)
English (fluent)
Italian (understand 99% but speak very badly)
Russian (very basic and haven't trained in years, but enough that I was able to tourist around Russia a decade ago)
I've also studied some German but I don't think it's at any level worth mentioning. I can also say the phrase "Sorry I don't speak X, do you speak English?" In:
German
Dutch
French
Finnish (I can also say the weather is bad/good and obviously Perkele hahah)
Essentially every country that I've visited I can at least ask the person if they speak English, I consider it rude to ask that question in English.
It's complicated. Short version: Portuguese and Italian.
Long version:
Portuguese - native
Italian - have been learning it since a kid. It's by no means native speaker level, but I feel rather confident in the language.
Venetian - I can speak some but I can't write stuff in the language without pulling out a dic. My knowledge of the language is rusting and it pains me.
English - written only.
German - I can speak and write some. I use it mostly with my cat.
Latin - Classical pronunciation and rather decent vocab. Can read Caesar unaided without too much trouble, Cicero is another can of worms.
French - studied it a long, looooong time ago. Completely forgotten.
Russian, Ukrainian - sometimes I play a bit with both but I don't speak or write either, I just know Cyrillic. I tend to use Cyrillic a fair bit for my personal notes but it's always with Italian or Latin, it's just so people don't snoop on my notes.
Spanish - I never studied the language, my pronunciation is awful, but if I wasn't able to read it I'd seriously question my own basic literacy for Portuguese and Italian.
I love that your cat speaks German. 🇩🇪😸
Yup! And there's some backstory for that.
Back when we adopted Siegfrieda*, I was studying German; and I decided to speak with her in German for my own sake, it's good for memorisation. But then I realised that she and Kika (our other cat) would pay attention to me separately depending on the language, so it was unexpectedly useful.
*the name is also obviously related to that, but partially due to the meaning; it's fitting for a cat that, when adopted, was beaten and starving and pregnant, and now only needs to bother about cardboard boxes and cups of yoghurt. It's like she got her victory peace (Sieg Frieden).
английский и русский
anglijskij i russkij
I love the fact that I can understand this fine without knowing Russian.
Danish
Swedish
German
English
Japanese
French
English, Goa'uld and Tamarian
Kree!
Tek'matte!
Tak'Matat
Essell when the gates fell.
FastIron, NOS, PowerCLI, BASH, PowerSHell, esxcli, ComWare, Enterasys/Extreme, enough of MSSQL, Python, C++ to be dangerous
English (fluent), Esperanto (competent), Spanish (rusty)
Only English fluently.
I can speak a tiny bit of Spanish. Enough to order food, ask for directions etc.
I can also sort of decipher the meaning of sentences in German, but not fast enough to have a conversation.
Perfectly fluent: English
Fluent at talking and reading, but can't write (horrible at spelling): Telugu (in two very different dialects)
Illiterate, but can understand everything spoken: Kannada
Can hold tourist level conversations and can read: German and Hindi
What is a tourist level conversation? Talk slowly, pronounce stuff weird, ask ppl to repeat some things if they go too fast or have an accent that's different than the one I learned.
I've noticed that I only know languages in the indo-European and Dravidian families. Deliberating between whether to improve my Kannada or to learn a new east or south east Asian language next to increase my language family count.
Dutch natively
English fluently
German understandably
Toddler level Korean.
English and bad English.
Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian all on master level,
English learned in school as secondary language.
Can understand all the other balkan languages to some degree.
Chinese (Mandarin) - native
English - fluent
Japanese - still in the very early stages of learning
English, C++; Z80, 6502, and 45GS02 assembly, some SQL, VHDL, a bit of Python and Verilog, BASIC65, bash, CP/M ED, and a few other odds and ends
I get that you're probably joking, but note that calling C++ etc. "languages" is at most synecdoche. A really common one, but still a figure of speech.
(Language has multiple functions; referential, directive, expressive, phatic, metalinguistic, poetic, metalinguistic etc. Those instruction sets used when programming are at best directive speech only, as they're basically issuing commands to something.)
I am fully aware, I speak nerd and computer.
The computers speak back. It's a good time.
I might be going insane?
I'm also ripping off being inspired by another comment.
Poe's law strikes again?
I got that you were probably joking. However, I've seen so many times people equating the human systems of communication with the computer instruction sets that... well, sorry for the knee-jerk reaction.
(Last time that I saw someone genuinely thinking that C++, Fortran, Python etc. were the same deal as Mandarin, English, Spanish etc., the muppet in question brought up code comments for an "ackshyually lol lmao". Yup.)
I... I...
I have no words.
How someone could genuinely believe that is beyond me.
This was in r/linguistics, by the way. And the moderators there were doing jack shit to inform the users. Even if one of them works with NLP, so you'd expect the person to be somewhat well versed in both Linguistics and basic programming.
The worst part? It wasn't even the only time that I saw this conflation. I think that people get caught in the words, and miss that they're referring to different concepts.
English natively, enough Spanish to make friends, enough French to stay out of trouble, and enough Italian to get into trouble. I also have some transactional German (groceries, tickets, coffee, etc). I'm American.
It would take me a few months of daily practice to prepare and get comfortable with anything but Spanish. I haven't studied the other languages formally, only independently, for travel.
English
Spanglish
Some SQL
English and enough Spanish to get by if I was lost in Mexico.
Though many words in many languages have a similar root word, so even signage in languages I don't speak but at least use the same alphabet are usually understandable.
English and French fluently. English is my mother tongue. French I learned in an immersion program in primary school. I didn't study french at all in highschool or postsecondary, and always hated it during primary because my parents put me in immersion to "challenge" me. I started working for the Canadian federal government after uni, and they have pretty robust training programs for getting to full french fluency from any starting skill level. Plus, there's a bit of a glass ceiling for monolingual public servants in the federal government.
Recently started dating a Chinese girl and so I'm trying to teach myself a bit of Chinese. It's not as hard as I expected it to be, but it is very hard. In many ways it's the opposite experience of learning French relative to English. Learning French, the vocabulary is pretty easy and the grammar is very hard. Learning Chinese, the grammar is dead easy but the vocabulary is really hard.
I'm fluent/native-level in English + my native language (not disclosing)
With Japanese I'm semi-fluent in conversations, and intermediate-advanced in reading and comprehension
German I understand at an intermediate level but very bad at speaking
And I know some beginner-intermediate level Chinese.
I also hope to learn Norwegian and Korean on top of that.
Cantonese, English and Mandarin, ordered by confidence.
I sometimes feel special for being a Hongkonger who speaks Cantonese and writes Traditional Chinese, as they are not very common.
I feel that extremely when people think that I'm an American and accuse me of thinking "dollar" is the only currency unit in the world. (Sorry for the rant)
English is my native language. I have a smattering of Malay from early childhood (my mother's first language), and have limited proficiency in ASL, German, Spanish, Italian, Irish, French, and Finnish (my proudest language moment was purchasing an apple from an old farmer in Helsinki who spoke no English). I also know a tiny amount of Japanese.
I'm contemplating whether to work on my existing proficiency or add a con-lang to the mix like Esperanto or Belter Creole.
English (fluent)
Dutch (bad)
French (basics)
Japanese (basics)
Standard German (native)
Lower Austrian German (fluent)
Bavarian German (fluent)
Saxonian German (fluent)
Vienna German (good)
Hamburgian German (OK)
Berlin German (OK)
Northern German (OK)
Swabian German (OK)
Platt German (bad)
Tyrolean German (bad)
Swiss German (worse) - Yes, for me it's easier to understand Dutch than Swiss German
Are all those Germans really different enough to count separately?
Like, I wouldn’t know how to distinguish my fluency in American English from British English. And that’s not even getting to Canadian, Australian, Irish… the differences are far more cultural than linguistic.
Yes, German dialects can vary greatly for example here's the same sentence "I have an apple." in different German dialects:
Standard German:
"Ich habe einen Apfel."
Northern German / Platt:
"Ik hab en Appel."
Middle German / Saxonian:
" 'sch'habm Abbl." ( 'sch is pronounced like sh)
Southern German / Bavarian & Austrian:
"I hob an Opfü." (I is pronounced like the single letter E)
The Southern Germans are the ones with the Schwarzenegger accent.
French (native), English (fluent), Spanish (a bit less than fluent). Started learning Japanese at one point and quit. Can still speak and understand some, but I've given up on learning kanjis. Understand a'd speak some Haitian creole (also less than fluent).
In order of fluency: Dutch, English, German, French, Mandarin.
Whoa, lady, I only speak two languages, English and bad English.
English
A very tiny bit of French, I can understand more than I can speak if they talk slowly, my French education was kind of shitty and it's been well over a decade since high school since I've really used it so
I've been learning Esperanto on Duolingo, it's been going pretty well, I'm just about at the point where I can confidently read a book without having too look up too many words. I'm far from fluent, but I getting there.
Spanish, English, French and some very basic Japanese.
اللغة الأم: العربية
Other languages: English (obviously), French (non fluent), Dutch (still really really bad at it, not well enough to communicate with it yet)
First language was Spanish, English is my daily language, self taught enough French to get by on a trip about a decade ago.
In all reality I could probably only sus out enough in Spanish or French to barely get by if really had to. I do still have all my training material and would like to continue learning. But low on my priority list
Spanish as native language, and I'm proficient in catalan and English.
I'm quite confident in german, i'm cuarrently taking lessons to pass the B1 exam next course.
Beyond these languages, the ones i have enough confidence to say i can speak them, I also speak some japanese and I plan to take the japanase JPLT N5. No rushes though. It's the introductory level.
Romanian and english can speak well
I can translate, write and speak in toki pona and latin if i have a dictionary(i couldnt memorize the words)
I'm fluent in Spanish and English, speak like a first grader in Japanese, and read Italian and Portuguese a little. I can even read Greek and Russian a little but that's more because I used their letters all the time in engineering and math stuff.
Danish native
English fluent
I can pronounce German quite well imo
In Finnish i can say "my bunny is cute"
what's the story behind that one finnish sentence? :D terveisiä suomesta
Nothing interesting really, I might get the opportunity to move to Finland for a year, so I've practiced Finnish through Duolingo if that becomes a reality :)
English and viet I speak well
Learning spanish and german
English and some of the essentials in Thai, such as how to tell someone they're beautiful. (Khun suay mak krap)
Spanish (native), English (fluent).
Edit: Me emociona leer que tantas personas están aprendiendo español 🫶...
German, English, a tiny bit of French since I had that in school but forgot most of it. And a bunch of computer programming languages.
I have a 600 day streak on Duolingo in Japanese. So yeah I know English and JavaScript.
You really cheated like that?
I think they're just saying they don't really speak Japanese despite doing Duolingo lessons
I've also studied some German but I don't think it's at any level worth mentioning. I can also say the phrase "Sorry I don't speak X, do you speak English?" In:
Essentially every country that I've visited I can at least ask the person if they speak English, I consider it rude to ask that question in English.
It's complicated. Short version: Portuguese and Italian.
Long version:
I love that your cat speaks German. 🇩🇪😸
Yup! And there's some backstory for that.
Back when we adopted Siegfrieda*, I was studying German; and I decided to speak with her in German for my own sake, it's good for memorisation. But then I realised that she and Kika (our other cat) would pay attention to me separately depending on the language, so it was unexpectedly useful.
*the name is also obviously related to that, but partially due to the meaning; it's fitting for a cat that, when adopted, was beaten and starving and pregnant, and now only needs to bother about cardboard boxes and cups of yoghurt. It's like she got her victory peace (Sieg Frieden).
английский и русский
I love the fact that I can understand this fine without knowing Russian.
English, Goa'uld and Tamarian
Kree!
Tek'matte!
Tak'Matat
Essell when the gates fell.
FastIron, NOS, PowerCLI, BASH, PowerSHell, esxcli, ComWare, Enterasys/Extreme, enough of MSSQL, Python, C++ to be dangerous
English (fluent), Esperanto (competent), Spanish (rusty)
Only English fluently.
I can speak a tiny bit of Spanish. Enough to order food, ask for directions etc.
I can also sort of decipher the meaning of sentences in German, but not fast enough to have a conversation.
Perfectly fluent: English
Fluent at talking and reading, but can't write (horrible at spelling): Telugu (in two very different dialects)
Illiterate, but can understand everything spoken: Kannada
Can hold tourist level conversations and can read: German and Hindi
What is a tourist level conversation? Talk slowly, pronounce stuff weird, ask ppl to repeat some things if they go too fast or have an accent that's different than the one I learned.
I've noticed that I only know languages in the indo-European and Dravidian families. Deliberating between whether to improve my Kannada or to learn a new east or south east Asian language next to increase my language family count.
Dutch natively
English fluently
German understandably
Toddler level Korean.
English and bad English.
Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian all on master level,
English learned in school as secondary language.
Can understand all the other balkan languages to some degree.
English, C++; Z80, 6502, and 45GS02 assembly, some SQL, VHDL, a bit of Python and Verilog, BASIC65, bash, CP/M ED, and a few other odds and ends
I get that you're probably joking, but note that calling C++ etc. "languages" is at most synecdoche. A really common one, but still a figure of speech.
(Language has multiple functions; referential, directive, expressive, phatic, metalinguistic, poetic, metalinguistic etc. Those instruction sets used when programming are at best directive speech only, as they're basically issuing commands to something.)
I am fully aware, I speak nerd and computer.
The computers speak back. It's a good time.
I might be going insane?
I'm also
ripping offbeing inspired by another comment.Poe's law strikes again?
I got that you were probably joking. However, I've seen so many times people equating the human systems of communication with the computer instruction sets that... well, sorry for the knee-jerk reaction.
(Last time that I saw someone genuinely thinking that C++, Fortran, Python etc. were the same deal as Mandarin, English, Spanish etc., the muppet in question brought up code comments for an "ackshyually lol lmao". Yup.)
I... I...
I have no words.
How someone could genuinely believe that is beyond me.
This was in r/linguistics, by the way. And the moderators there were doing jack shit to inform the users. Even if one of them works with NLP, so you'd expect the person to be somewhat well versed in both Linguistics and basic programming.
The worst part? It wasn't even the only time that I saw this conflation. I think that people get caught in the words, and miss that they're referring to different concepts.
English natively, enough Spanish to make friends, enough French to stay out of trouble, and enough Italian to get into trouble. I also have some transactional German (groceries, tickets, coffee, etc). I'm American.
It would take me a few months of daily practice to prepare and get comfortable with anything but Spanish. I haven't studied the other languages formally, only independently, for travel.
English
Spanglish
Some SQL
English and enough Spanish to get by if I was lost in Mexico.
Though many words in many languages have a similar root word, so even signage in languages I don't speak but at least use the same alphabet are usually understandable.
English and French fluently. English is my mother tongue. French I learned in an immersion program in primary school. I didn't study french at all in highschool or postsecondary, and always hated it during primary because my parents put me in immersion to "challenge" me. I started working for the Canadian federal government after uni, and they have pretty robust training programs for getting to full french fluency from any starting skill level. Plus, there's a bit of a glass ceiling for monolingual public servants in the federal government.
Recently started dating a Chinese girl and so I'm trying to teach myself a bit of Chinese. It's not as hard as I expected it to be, but it is very hard. In many ways it's the opposite experience of learning French relative to English. Learning French, the vocabulary is pretty easy and the grammar is very hard. Learning Chinese, the grammar is dead easy but the vocabulary is really hard.
I'm fluent/native-level in English + my native language (not disclosing)
With Japanese I'm semi-fluent in conversations, and intermediate-advanced in reading and comprehension
German I understand at an intermediate level but very bad at speaking
And I know some beginner-intermediate level Chinese.
I also hope to learn Norwegian and Korean on top of that.
Cantonese, English and Mandarin, ordered by confidence.
I sometimes feel special for being a Hongkonger who speaks Cantonese and writes Traditional Chinese, as they are not very common.
I feel that extremely when people think that I'm an American and accuse me of thinking "dollar" is the only currency unit in the world. (Sorry for the rant)
English is my native language. I have a smattering of Malay from early childhood (my mother's first language), and have limited proficiency in ASL, German, Spanish, Italian, Irish, French, and Finnish (my proudest language moment was purchasing an apple from an old farmer in Helsinki who spoke no English). I also know a tiny amount of Japanese.
I'm contemplating whether to work on my existing proficiency or add a con-lang to the mix like Esperanto or Belter Creole.
English (fluent)
Dutch (bad)
French (basics)
Japanese (basics)
Standard German (native)
Lower Austrian German (fluent)
Bavarian German (fluent)
Saxonian German (fluent)
Vienna German (good)
Hamburgian German (OK)
Berlin German (OK)
Northern German (OK)
Swabian German (OK)
Platt German (bad)
Tyrolean German (bad)
Swiss German (worse) - Yes, for me it's easier to understand Dutch than Swiss German
Are all those Germans really different enough to count separately?
Like, I wouldn’t know how to distinguish my fluency in American English from British English. And that’s not even getting to Canadian, Australian, Irish… the differences are far more cultural than linguistic.
Yes, German dialects can vary greatly for example here's the same sentence "I have an apple." in different German dialects:
Standard German:
"Ich habe einen Apfel."
Northern German / Platt:
"Ik hab en Appel."
Middle German / Saxonian:
" 'sch'habm Abbl." ( 'sch is pronounced like sh)
Southern German / Bavarian & Austrian:
"I hob an Opfü." (I is pronounced like the single letter E)
The Southern Germans are the ones with the Schwarzenegger accent.
French (native), English (fluent), Spanish (a bit less than fluent). Started learning Japanese at one point and quit. Can still speak and understand some, but I've given up on learning kanjis. Understand a'd speak some Haitian creole (also less than fluent).
In order of fluency: Dutch, English, German, French, Mandarin.
Whoa, lady, I only speak two languages, English and bad English.
English
A very tiny bit of French, I can understand more than I can speak if they talk slowly, my French education was kind of shitty and it's been well over a decade since high school since I've really used it so
I've been learning Esperanto on Duolingo, it's been going pretty well, I'm just about at the point where I can confidently read a book without having too look up too many words. I'm far from fluent, but I getting there.
Spanish, English, French and some very basic Japanese.
اللغة الأم: العربية
Other languages: English (obviously), French (non fluent), Dutch (still really really bad at it, not well enough to communicate with it yet)
English mostly. A little French.
English (American SW) and learning Finnish.
English fluently, Spanish poorly.
English polish, if esolangs count, toki pona
This one.
Same, plus seven more.
First language was Spanish, English is my daily language, self taught enough French to get by on a trip about a decade ago.
In all reality I could probably only sus out enough in Spanish or French to barely get by if really had to. I do still have all my training material and would like to continue learning. But low on my priority list
Spanish as native language, and I'm proficient in catalan and English.
I'm quite confident in german, i'm cuarrently taking lessons to pass the B1 exam next course.
Beyond these languages, the ones i have enough confidence to say i can speak them, I also speak some japanese and I plan to take the japanase JPLT N5. No rushes though. It's the introductory level.
Romanian and english can speak well
I can translate, write and speak in toki pona and latin if i have a dictionary(i couldnt memorize the words)
I'm fluent in Spanish and English, speak like a first grader in Japanese, and read Italian and Portuguese a little. I can even read Greek and Russian a little but that's more because I used their letters all the time in engineering and math stuff.
Danish native
English fluent
I can pronounce German quite well imo
In Finnish i can say "my bunny is cute"
what's the story behind that one finnish sentence? :D terveisiä suomesta
Nothing interesting really, I might get the opportunity to move to Finland for a year, so I've practiced Finnish through Duolingo if that becomes a reality :)
English and viet I speak well
Learning spanish and german
English and some of the essentials in Thai, such as how to tell someone they're beautiful. (Khun suay mak krap)
Spanish (native), English (fluent).
Edit: Me emociona leer que tantas personas están aprendiendo español 🫶...
German, English, a tiny bit of French since I had that in school but forgot most of it. And a bunch of computer programming languages.
Igpe atinle