Ask Angie: How many languages do you speak? - YouLookFab Forum

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Ask Angie: How many languages do you speak?

deb

Veteran

I was thinking about this after reading (ok, semi-ability to read) the bloggers on todays blog post. I speak 1 language fluently and three partially. I know we have many countries represented here at YLF and it makes me curious what languages are associated.

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38 replies

Latest reply was from

Echo

Veteran

ETA: Clearly, I am not Angie!

I am very sad that I speak one one language well (English), and another well enough that I can understand and/or read it (Spanish), but not keep up in active speech anymore (I was able to at one point). I also understood German as a child (my father and his folks and friends spoke it), but remember virtually nothing now. It was important for me to pretend I didn't understand German as a child because they usually spoke of plans for holidays and gifts. Looking at texts, it is clear that it was pre-reform that I heard/understood. Actually, I can still make general heads and tails of it now, but the reformed spelling/pronunciation is tricky. I don't know when that happened, but my dad was born in 1917 (he was 22 years older than my mum, as I am "only" 49) and obviously his folks were born much earlier than that.

I took Spanish, French and Latin in high school and continued with Spanish and Latin in college. It is likely that I could still read both Spanish and Latin, and could likely muck my way through the basics of French now (Romantic languages are similar enough, and with the background in Latin, I can still usually recognize the roots of most verbs and many nouns).

I very much feel that I have/had (since language acquisition deteriorates over time) an affinity for languages when I was younger, but had no situation in which to pursue that. So here I sit at my age, feeling I could have learned a number of languages, but never had/made the opportunity to do so for myself.

Still, I wonder if I couldn't pick up on another Germanic language (German) and relearn the Romantic language (Spanish) I once knew. And once I had Spanish back, French is just a hop and a skip away. Other Germanic languages, specifically Icelandic, would be far too complicated for me to learn (isolation makes languages grow ever more complicated, so Icelandic is probably one of the hardest to learn).

And now this thread has me wondering what resources there are for adult language learners around here!

rachylou

Veteran

English is really my only language. I am, tho, more than fluent in it (and let me say as a tech writer, there are a lot of native speakers not that versed in their native tongue - there is more than fluency). I did six years of French, where we were starting on literature but we never trained to speak. I did a year of German in college, which was enough for me to be able to translate technical documents to English, but I could never go the other way. And I have ten years of bakery Spanish.

I do feel, maybe because of being a technical writer, language and communication are slightly different. Or maybe because my one grandma really only spoke Cantonese and all my Cantonese I learned from a menu. But, for example, I remember once going to Mexico with my old British boss. I thought he was gonna cry and he wanted to turn back. We went thru a rinky dinky border crossing where you had to go next door and make xeroxes and what not. There was a lady at a window and then signage in Spanish. I could tell what the signs said and what the lady meant without even the Bakery Spanish I have now. Anyways, yes, I’m mean - I made him go on.

Of course, experiences are richer the more you can say and understand on your feet... but I do think go for communication first, language will follow more and more with communication...

rachylou

Veteran

Also... where is Bernard? He helped me expand my French more by texting here in French!

Liesbeth

Veteran

Echo, you do seem to know quite a few languages even if you're not fluent in them.
Dutch is my mother tongue and I learnt French and English in highschool. Because I went on to get a masters degree in English I'd hope I'm pretty fluent. French is a different thing: as it has gone almost entirely unpractised for years I have trouble writing more than basic e-mails and would struggle in a conversation.
I have some notions of German and Spanish, both of which I took for about one year.
When I have more time I'd like to learn more Spanish and travel South America!

Synne

Veteran

I have to chime in too, becouse I was always so puzzled that many native-english speakers only learn ONE language. In the rest of the world, mostly, english is "forced" upon us from an early age. It isn't even labeled a "foreign language" in our school curriculum. It is just expected as a paralell language, and kids pick it up from a very early age. Every student in Scandinavia also has to learn a "real" foreign language (lol), at least partly. Mine is German. Und ich spreche sehr schlecht Deutsch, aber ich verstehe meistens.

I would love to learn more languages, but it gets harder with age (at least demands more effort). I will never forget meeting a Romanian friend from college, who said she wanted to learn my language after reading Hamsun. She wanted to read his words in his .. own words?

I'd love to learn polish, russian, arabic, japanese, spanish. But for now I'm focusing on other communicative skills: STYLE

Synne

Veteran

And slightly off topic. I remember back in the day, when Jennifer Lopez first broke through. She was always referred to as latina, but didn't speak a word of Spanish (she even admitted it in many interviews). Now I see she posts in Spanish on IG all the time. Maybe it is an identity thing? It's gotten more trendy to seek out ones roots, or expand ones horizon with different languages?

deb

Veteran

Echo, I envy your list of languages.

Synne, I do not understand why we are not taught a second language here in the United States. I was fortunate to have the same teacher in first and second grade that spoke Spanish and she taught us. Not sure if that would be allowed now-a-days.

deb

Veteran

Rachy, my Chinese is from menus also, but not sure what dialect. Oh, I want to hear from Bernard, also.

Sisi

Veteran

Interesting question! I am Italian therefore my mother tongue is Italian. At school I studied English, Russian, French and German. Not that I speak them all well ! At school they also made us study Latin because it is the origin of Italian and I liked it. Of course it is no longer a spoken language but it is still used occasionally to celebrate some Catholic solemn masses. I have a passion for languages. I generally pick up easily the language of a place - be it a language or a local dialect.

rachylou

Veteran

I’m not sure what’s up with England, but in the US foreign languages ARE offered and required on the college bound track. The one thing, tho, that always struck me as difficult... the country is ~1500 x 2600 miles: you drive and drive and drive, and it’s the same country, same language. I actually had a little bit of Spanish in grammar school, but it wasn’t until we reached that immigration tipping point where I could hear it all the time that I started to be able to process on the fly in any way. And then everyone does seem to learn English - and learn it better - so you travel the world and everyone wants to practice their English with you.

China I found sort of a parallel situation in a funny way. The country is huge. Mandarin is the official language, but it’s amazing how many people do NOT really speak it in China. They also learn it as a foreign language.

Synne

Veteran

It fascinates me that it was voted over whether English or German should be the national language in USA as late as the 1800s. Or is this a myth?

Cardiff girl

Veteran

Language tuition in Britain is notoriously poor and getting worse.In the school my daughter goes to they have just closed the German department so French is the only foreign language tuition on offer.Then they wonder why British pupils don’t speak another language!.Here in Wales welsh is compulsory up to the age of 16.If you go to a welsh language school they will only speak welsh to the children for the first 2years of school and of course at that age they pick it up so quickly

Anonymous

Spanish (though sometimes I forget words), a bit of Portugese, a few martial arts related words in Japanese.
My mom and grandmother are/ were fluent in 4 and 6 respectively though.

Kathie

Veteran

Synne, thankfully, that’s a myth. There is no statutory “official” language in the United States. Some individual states may have taken votes, and there is debate in some school districts, even today, as to whether to offer certain courses in languages other than English for recent immigrants, but there has never been a vote to make English the official language across the country.

As for the original question, I’m based in the US, and took 4 years of Latin and 5 years of French. Sadly, I don’t have much chance to practice the French, so while I can still read a bit, my speaking is very rusty. I have cousins in Denmark, Greece, and Italy, and they all speak multiple languages. Though, the Danish ones will say that they have to, since it’s such a small country.

My children have conversational Spanish in elementary school, and can then choose between Latin, Spanish and French for grades 7-12. My casual observation is that many of the better funded school districts offer Latin in the US (not sure if this is the case in other countries.) Among the kids, Latin is perceived to be the harder choice, so there’s a bit of self-sorting. I’ll never forget a tech networking event I attended in Seattle. A ballroom full of people, all very well educated, and one of the panelists asked how many in the audience had taken Latin, and nearly half the hands went up. But, that’s a lot of people who didn’t likely take a spoken foreign language.

I’m nodding along with everything Rachy wrote. My husband is fluent in Mandarin, which was quite helpful when we were traveling in the larger cities in China, but less useful in a couple more remote areas.

RobinF

Veteran

Interesting Kathie, I went to public schools in California and Michigan and never saw Latin offered. My kids went to Catholic schools and could take it in high school though.

Languages don't seem to be stressed here, I guess for obvious reasons, geography and all that, but it's too bad. We were required to take two years of a language in high school so I learned French but never enough to be fluent.

I was also an exchange student in Finland in high school and learned Finnish well enough to get around but most of my Finnish friends wanted to practice their English on me so I didn't learn it as well as I could have and now it's been so long that it has totally left me.

Helena

Veteran

This is a great question! Besides English, I speak some French (horrifically) and understand it well enough to get by in a pinch. I did take Spanish in high school as well, but besides a few words, I don't remember much of it.

I think one of the challenges is that, without opportunities to practice, it's hard to really learn a new language properly. I took French for 12 years (including immersion), but you can't really learn it properly unless you are truly immersed (not just in school). My SIL, who is a native French-speaker, had the same experience in reverse - even with English pop culture infiltrating her part of Canada (no one speaks English first language there), it wasn't until she moved to Toronto as an adult and was forced that she really learned to speak English (now she's a translator!)

That said, I have it on my list for 2020 to get Duolingo going to try to brush up my French this year, and maybe pick up a few words of a third language (Spanish? German? Mandarin?)

UmmLila (Lisa)

Veteran

English, obviously. Arabic is my good foreign language. I can muddle around in French, and I'm learning Spanish at the moment. I studied Chinese for a couple of years in high school, but it didn't stick.

Runcarla

Veteran

English and French. I worked for a bilingual organization on the French side. I had some conversational German as a child, after 2 separate 6 month visits to Oma and Opa, but no further exposure, so have lost it. If music counts, my biggest ‘language’ accomplishment was learning to read music in my 40’s while I was learning to play the piano.

L'Abeille

Veteran

Oh what fun. I have several languages at different levels of proficiency.

English is my first language.

French, started in school in grade 7, mandatory at that time in my part of Canada. (Now they start it much earlier.) It didn't click for me as a spoken language until a few years later, when on a school sponsored trip to Rome, something went wrong about our accommodations, and the only common language for sorting it out was speaking French with the native Italian students. That unlocked something in my brain! Currently my French is good enough to talk with patients and read medical reports, but not up to doing official handover to CCU in the Acadian dialect.

My grandparents spoke German so I learned it in the home, mostly "kitchen Deutsch". Supplemented by two years of high school German. I can talk to a patient in German but afterwards my brain hurts.

High school Latin, which is useful in choral singing and for medical terminology. Also has helped me understand bits of Italian and Spanish.

While living in South Africa I learned the Zulu family of languages so I could do my work. So, Swazi and Xhosa. My vocabulary is very limited but I can follow the grammar! So watching Black Panther was extra fun

I picked up some Nepali on a medical elective but all I can remember is "Is the baby getting enough milk?"

My kids use Duolingo to learn new languages. I started it for Scots Gaelic just before Christmas then got distracted.

JAileen

Veteran

I grew up in Northern California. Latin was offered in high school, but my mother insisted I take French. In college I switched to Spanish. Maybe because I had suffered through French, but Spanish was a breeze. I almost became fluent. Now I can read menus in both French and Spanish. I wish I had taken Latin, but I read one of those 30 days to a better vocabulary books. It helped me see the roots of words.

Bonnie

Veteran

One of my granddaughters chose to take sign language as her second language for the four years she attended high school which was one the the options for university bound students. I speak only English but had two years of Spanish in high school and have always lived where many Spanish speaking people live but they usually choose to speak English. I can understand a bit but really haven't had much opportunity to practice. I live in the US.

nuancedream

Veteran

I'm conversational in Spanish and can also speak a little bit of French and Italian. Learning new languages has always been something I picked up easily. One of my goals for 2020 is to commit to language study, including American Sign Language, which I haven't studied since I was in graduate school in 1985.

SarahD8

Veteran

I live in the US and I’m fluent only in English (my mother tongue). I also have conversational Spanish, basic Swedish, and very, very beginning Dutch (the only one of those languages I’ve never studied in a formal classroom setting).

Nodding along with the comments above about context of learning languages and how it shapes your vocabulary. At one point I was probably close to fluent in Spanish, but boy all my tropical forest field work vocabulary sure was useless when I volunteered to help out at an event for ESL (English as a second language) families at my daughter’s school a while back.

Staysfit

Veteran

In addition to English, my primary language, I have rudimentary skills with both Hebrew and French. I admire anyone who can write well, especially in English, since I find it painfully difficult.

When I went to summer camp as a teen, I learned “naughty” expletives in Spanish. Then when I worked in California I could tell when one of my Spanish speaking patients was rude or angry! However, I needed a translator for everything else!

Gaylene

Veteran

I live in Canada so speak English and reasonably fluent French (although my conversational skills are getting weaker since I’ve had fewer opportunities to speak French since I’ve retired.) I’ve also picked up a smattering of conversational Danish and Norwegian from spending time with my husband’s relatives in those countries.

Oddly, I also seemed to have retained a vestigial understanding of Hungarian and Ukrainian from spending time with grandparents as a child. I think the sounds were imprinted on my brain because, when I travelled to those countries a few years ago, I could understand quite a bit of what was said to me even though I couldn’t respond very well. Fascinating how languages we learn as a child can stay dormant for decades until we are in a situation where the language once again surrounds us.

I also know a few simple greetings, as well as bit of vocabulary, in Cree, Mandarin, and Japanese thanks to my students.

deb

Veteran

Synne, the German language situation is a myth.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-german-vote/

Anonymous

English is my first language. Then Spanglish and Franglais, which I've picked up in school and in my work and travels.

Suz

(website)

Veteran

I live in Canada. My mother tongue is English. I studied French all through high school but not via immersion (which makes a huge difference) and thus, my conversational skills in French are abysmal; I was never truly fluent. I do read French a bit, and understand more than I can speak.

I took one year of German in high school and then travelled there for about a month in my late teens. I picked it a smattering of the language relatively easily, but it is so long now since I have used it that I am not conversant any more.

I've also studied Mandarin Chinese, but again, I can't honestly say I speak the language. For me, it is all about practice in real life, and without opportunities for that, it falls off quite quickly. I would dearly love to live in another country and become fluent in the language. Some day.

Cee

Veteran

I speak fluent Australian and some English !

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