Languages, Sprachen, Lenguas, Langues

[SnoopDog]

Hey everybody,

I'm in the middle of studying for my exam in Spanish next Wednesday. And while I have spent the last two years learning this awesome language, it still gives me a hard time. In order to catch a break, I thought I'd ask you about your "language-skills".

So, what languages do you speak and how well? What languages are your natives, which ones did you learn? And for how long? At what age? Do you use them on a regular basis? Do you plan on learning new ones? Do you use them in your stories?

Just tell me everything.





I'm bored, so gimme a break for such a thread.



Snoopy, woof-woof (wau-wau)

 

[rgraham666]

I know just enough to get my face slapped in six languages.

 

[SnoopDog]

I know just enough to get my face slapped in six languages.

Well, that's quite impressing. Even though sometimes, it doesn't need words at all to get your face slapped. =)

I myself only learned 3 1/2 languages.

German is my native.
I learned English at school and am fluent written and spoken.
I learned French for three years but can't speak a bit. Only read some.
I'm currently learning Spanish.

And the 1/2 would be Latin, since I learned that at school, but of course I'm not exactly fluent with that. =)


Snoopy

 

[R. Richard]

I speak a little American.

I read and write fluently:
Ada
C++
FORTRAN (several dialects)
Pascal
PL/I
Visual Basic
Ultra 16
Ultra 32

 

[TheEarl]

Hey Snoop; nice to see you again.

I speak English fluently. Everything else has gone downhill over the past couple of years.

I used to be comfortable in French, German and Bislama (Vanuatu), and able to hold a simple conversation in Japanese. It's all atrophied through disuse.

When I win the lottery, I'll have the time to get it all back again.

The Earl

 

[3113]

I took Latin in college to get through the language requirement without having to actually learn a language. That should tell you everything

I do know a bit of Spanish, but my language skills are crap. I don't think I even speak good English. I can write it well (evidently), but I rely on my husband to translate for me when we're out with stranger and engaged in conversation.

I got gypped out of that part of the brain that allows some people able to pick up languages. It just ain't there.

 

[oggbashan]

I speak British English, Cockney, Estuary, Devonian and ancient Strine (Australian). I can read Chaucer in the original and some Anglo-Saxon.

I speak French with a Strine accent (which makes native French speakers either wince or laugh) and late 18th/early 19th Century grammar. I can read French, ancient and modern, nearly as fast as I read English. My wife speaks crystal clear Parisian French as taught at the Sorbonne.

I studied Latin to age 18 and can still manage to work out the sense of most classic Latin texts - but not Medieval Church Latin.

I used to speak Spanish as spoken by dockyard workers in Gibraltar and I am trying to learn Spanish again.

I can get around in German and Italian with the help of a phrasebook. I can do the same to a lesser extent in Serbo-Croat.

I used to be fluent in IBM 1401 machine code and their basic level programming language but machine code was more efficient. I still have my notes so I could re-learn both.

I was reasonably competent in CP/M and DOS 3.3.

I can negotiate the internet in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and sometimes Polish.

When I'm stuck I can ask wife, daughters and friends. Between them they cover most ancient and modern European languages including Esperanto, Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese, some Indian sub-continent and SE Asian languages and Pidgin.

Og

 

[Palba_Noruda]

Oda del libro

Libro, cuando te cierro
Abro la vida

(Book, when I close you
I open life)

My good friend Pablo Neruda wrote that.
Also:

Oda de la tormenta
Anoche
Vino
Ella,
Rabiosa,
Azul, color de noche
Roja, color de vino
La tempestad
Trajo
Su caballera de agua
Ojos de frio fuego
Anoche quiso
dormir sobre la tierra

Shit, I'm beginning to forget that one...

 

[cloudy]

I'm fluent in Spanish, close to fluent in Ojibwe and Cherokee, and I can find my way to the bathroom (if nowhere else) in Danish.

 

[Over_Lord]

To answer the OP fully waere fuer mich leider ein bisschen difficile parce que je ne peux jamais me rappeler exactement ile jezykow obcych znam...

... but one of these days it will come to me...

 

[Salvor-Hardon]

I can be polite (a greeting formal or informal, ask nicely, say please and thank you) in 6 languages, any my russian and ukranian friends love watching me try to get around we go out.

I'd do better in formal classes, but finding them and making time is rough.

 

[EesomeBeastie]

Apart from my native English (with a north-east Scots accent and the occasional Doric Scots dialect word thrown in), my languages are:

• French: reading (quite well), writing (not too bad) and speaking (hesitantly)
• German: basic, rusty, and getting rustier by the year
• Italian: basic, but I had a chance to practice it on holiday last summer
• Spanish: basic and rusty
• MATLAB
• C++
• PIC micocontroller assembly language
• Project manager bullshit: enough to recognise it, at least
• She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed-ish: barely enough to get by, and why oh why do things never mean what is actually said in this language??

 

[oggbashan]

Added...

I can understand, speak and write the following variants of English:

Local Government
UK Government
EU administration
Human Resource Management
Social Worker
Police

They are, of course, all varieties of Bullshit.

Og

 

[sadangel]

I'm fluent in English. I can sign fairly well at least enough to converse with a deaf person. (Or enough to find out where the bathroom is)

I can call someone a bitch or a bastard in one other language. If I recall correctly, it's in Italian. (Maybe Spanish...can't remember which). A friend thought I needed to know those two words.

Other than that....it's all English for me.

 

[ishtat]

Welsh (spoken only)
English including Old, Middle and Australian varieties.
Greek and Latin (ancient varieties)
French as taught in English schools in the 60's and 70's .

 

[Liar]

I can understand, speak and write the following variants of English:

Local Government
UK Government
EU administration
Human Resource Management
Social Worker
Police

They are, of course, all varieties of Bullshit.

Og

You forgot Porn.

Which is, of course, not a variety of Bullshit.

 

[fifty5]

Je parle Francaise, comme une vache espagnol.

Ich spreche nicht Deutche.

Italiano? Nein!

Latin, I did enough to get the GCE.

English: I read many dialects, but speak mostly Tyke and RP.

 

[SnoopDog]

Wow, you guys really impress me.

Do you think there is a correlation between the passion for writing and the passion for learning a foreign language? Seems so. Then again this thread probably isn't representative of the Lit community and/or the Author's Hangout.

Yet, together we seem to cover most of the world's communication variants (that does not include the thousand dialects in each language, esp. the eastern ones).

Well done I'd say.

But if you had to learn one language, that you don't have any skills in, yet. Which one would it be?

For me it would surely be Arabic. Such a beautiful yet challenging idiom.



Snoopy

 

[ishtat]

Most beautiful languages - Farsi (Iranian) and maybe Welsh, with the North Welsh accent.

 

[EesomeBeastie]

But if you had to learn one language, that you don't have any skills in, yet. Which one would it be?

For me it would surely be Arabic. Such a beautiful yet challenging idiom.

Snoopy

I second that. There's a chance I might get to visit Egypt, so I really should try and pick up a few phrases, even if it's only "back off you little ruffians before I box your ears!"

Does anyone know how different Egyptian Arabic is from Standard Modern Arabic and whether I'd need to learn them separately?

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Do you think there is a correlation between the passion for writing and the passion for learning a foreign language? Seems so. Then again this thread probably isn't representative of the Lit community and/or the Author's Hangout.

Actually, the opposite seems true to me. Most of the great writers I know about were monolingual (exceptions that come to mine were jack Kerouac {Canadian French/Englsih} and Josef Conrad, who was a native Polish speaker who learned to write in English. You find more multilingualism in poets

It's interesting to think why this might be so. It could be that writers are just so conversant and enamored of their native language that they have no interest in other languages. It could be that the prospect of learning a language in which you know you won't be as fluent as you are in your native language for decades turns them off from learning other languages.

I took 4 years of German and still remember a little, but I'll never have the command of German I have of English, so why bother? I could never say what I wanted to in German, so it was very frustrating and ultimately turned me off to the whole idea of learning a language. Being able to say, "Hello," "Goodbye," and "May I have the check?" just doesn't do it for me.

 

[al_Ussa]

Most beautiful languages - Farsi (Iranian) and maybe Welsh, with the North Welsh accent.

Hehe, I agree that Persian may be the greatest language ever, though I'm partial to the classical Persian. Then again, the differences between classical Persian and modern Farsi spoken in Iran (as well as Dari in Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, Tajik in Tajikistan) are pretty much nil.

To Farsi harf mizani? Ahleh Irani shoma?

 

[Frank Noir]

My mother tongue is Danish - some of my first sex stories were originally written in Danish, then translated into English. Once I discovered the net, I started writing them in English only.
I'm fairly fluent in English and slightly less in German.
In Paris recently, I discovered that I know more French than I thought.
And I know enough Spanish to read a menu, but not enough to form a decent sentence.
Swedish and Norwegian are so similar to Danish that I understand about 95% of what a speaker of those languages are saying - but I won't attempt to speak them myself.