I’m from the US and English is the only language I speak fluently.
India - Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, and English
Mexican here:
Spanish & English - Fluent
Japanese - Intermediate-advanced
French - Still learning but it’s so similar to Spanish it feels like cheating 😅
French was more confusing than Spanish was to me. I’m trying to learn Spanish actually. It’s a beautiful language.
United States and I speak English and a little Spanish but I wish I knew more Spanish.
I’m part Scottish, part English. I speak:
English - idiomatically
French - conversationally
Italian - I just want to reply to people in French all the time
German - I can ask where the station is
Japanaese - I can say ‘I do not understand’I can say “I do not speak French” in six languages!
Mexican American. I speak English, Spanish and some Japanese.
Same here! But I’m Mexican from Mexico.
Last year I’ve gotten to reading full-length Japanese news articles with little to no help with the Kanjis.
It’s funny how many Latinos are naturally drawn to Japanese. I always blame the loads of anime we got throughout the 90s.
From Mexico Magico, and I speak Spanish, English, enough French and enough Portuguese brasileiro to get by. And I am currently working on improving my Korean because I live in a city that has a huge community.
From Germany and know German and English. I can read Dutch and understand snippets but speaking it is beyond me.
Lithuanian.
I speak Lithuanian, English, some Swedish and traces of Russian.
The UK.
I am fluent in English and good enough in Mandarin to get by.
Earlier in life I was passable at French in France, but I have lost that now. It’s been overwritten by the Mandarin from having spent a few years in the PRC teaching English.
Depends what you mean.
By country of birth: I’m from PRC
As in “Where are you posting from?”: USA
I speak Cantonese, Mandarin, English, and the the basic words of Spanish such as: ¡Hola!, Uno, Dos, Tres, Bruenos Dias, Muy Bien, ¿e tu?, Me habla pizza (Thanks, Spanish class. Still can’t get the Spanish alphabet song out of my head lol 😅). And I can read like English (obviously), most basic Chinese characters, I think I know the top 100 of them, I’m more confident in identifying the characters if its in simplified. And techically, I can read the Kanji parts of Japanese (since they are basically Chinese). I hear some Japanese and Koreans words and can make out some of the words because they are so close to Cantonese. (I think Cantonese, Korean, and Japanese, decended from a common language). I could only write in English, after 10+ years of never using Chinese, I can’t write shit beside like few basic words and my name in Chinese.
South Africa and pretty much just English. Apparently I was fairly fluent in Zulu when I was little kid, before starting school and losing it. And we learnt Afrikaans in school but Afrikaans kids went to Afrikaans schools and I grew up and lived in English speaking areas so it was never used. If I tried to speak Afrikaans now, I would embarrass myself but I can mostly read it and understand someone if they’re talking slow enough and I’m concentrating hard enough.
Honestly something that pisses me off is that despite going through school in the ‘new’ South Africa, the new government never bothered making sure we learnt to communicate with each other. So instead of learning Zulu and being able to freely communicate with the majority of the population, we learnt Afrikaans because they never fucking bothered to change it.
I can also understand very small bits and pieces of written and spoken German from high school but that’s barely worth mentioning. Also, I can kinda sometimes understand a little bit of written Dutch because it’s remotely similar to Afrikaans.
Zulu is an awesome language! I’ve heard it spoken before. It seems difficult to learn from an outsider. Maybe I’m wrong. Afrikaans is interesting to me because it’s a Germanic creole language. I’ve heard it’s the easiest to learn Germanic language in the world.
Yeah, Zulu is a different beast to European languages. I suppose as different to English as certain Asian languages would be. It also borrows from English and Afrikaans though, for certain Western words and concepts that weren’t in the vocabulary before. And there’s still nouns and verbs and tenses and shit, so it follows the same basic rules / concepts as any language.
As for Afrikaans, funnily enough I’m actually living in a part of the country now where some fluency would’ve been useful. Luckily you seem to be able to get by with just English just about anywhere though.
Polish living in Poland, I know English, I don’t speak it much though, currently learning Japanese
American, I speak English, Thai, and Korean.
I wish I knew how to write Korean nicely. Is definitely easier to speak for me than to write it lol.
Italy: Italian, English and a local language
You can’t just tease us like that, what’s the local language? The less common a language is the more interesting.
That’s true! I love less common languages. Well I can speak Neapolitan, a language spoken in Southern Italy.
Thank you, I had never heard of your language before. How similar is it to Italian? Is your language taught in schools and is it common?
Italy is a fairly a new country (it was born in 1861) and before that each part used to speak a different language which, just like Neapolitan, they are still alive. These languages and dialects are not taught in school so the only way to learn them is by listening to those who passed it on which I think it’s pretty cool.
In our day-to-day life we speak a mix of Italian and Neapolitan but we try to use only the former when we speak to people from other parts of the country who wouldn’t be able to understand us. Nowadays our local language is getting “italianized” a bit but it’s still different from it, just like Spanish and Italian or other Romance languages.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to let Lemmers know about it :)
Thank you for teaching us. I love learning about languages.
From the UK originally, which is complicated enough. To foreigners I tend to say “England”, which (a) is true and (b) everyone understands. But I consider myself British, not English, and certain not a “UK person” (ugh).
I speak French near-natively from having lived there for a big chunk of my life. Spanish: intermediate, because it’s like French. German: got an A at GCSE decades ago, so not very good. Tried learning Russian a few years ago and, wow, that was hard. I cannot speak Russian. But being able to decipher the Cyrillic script is definitely a cool party trick.
I usually refer to England as Great Brittan? Is that generally preferred? Are there many Spanish speakers in Great Brittan?
I usually refer to England as Great Brittan? Is that generally preferred?
No, because it’s wrong!
- Great Britain = England + Scotland + Wales
- UK = Great Britain + Northern Ireland
- British = citizen of (careful!) UK
You’re welcome.
Are there many Spanish speakers in Great Brittan?
Far fewer than there are English speakers.
