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How many languages can you speak?


xZoneHunter

PSNP language poll  

270 members have voted

  1. 1. How many languages can you speak?

    • Just my mother tongue
      48
    • I can speak 2 different languages
      117
    • I can speak 3 different languages
      67
    • I can speak 4 or more languages
      38
  2. 2. Which languages do you speak?

    • English
      257
    • French
      40
    • German
      48
    • Spanish
      68
    • Dutch
      15
    • Portuguese
      28
    • Japanese
      34
    • Mandarin
      9
    • Russian
      15
    • Arabic
      10
    • Swedish
      17
    • Finnish
      12
    • Italian
      13
    • Other
      76


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I always had a knack for foreign languages and tried to learn as many as I could throughout school and college, so I know about 7, though I'm not fluent in all of them.

 

- My mother tongue, Portuguese (100% fluency)

 

- English (100% fluency - though I'm still very slightly limited by the way I process information in my head, which is still mainly in Portuguese)

 

- Spanish (75% fluency - it's extremely easy for any Portuguese to learn Spanish since both languages are extremely similar. The remaining 25% refer to differences in sentence structure, expressions and vocabulary).

 

- French (50% fluency - it's been getting more and more rusty, but I can still manage pretty well, especially considering it's also very close to Portuguese).

 

- Japanese (About 40% fluency - I'm currently studying it and know enough to have a simple conversation, though sentence structure is so different from what I'm used to that making the conversion makes my head hurt if I try to speak for more than 5 minutes at a time [though it doesn't happen when I'm talking to my sensei, for some reason]. I do speak reasonably fast and can talk about almost any everyday aspects, though, even if it does feel like my brain just ran the marathon. My speaking capabilities are a lot stronger than my writing ones, though),

 

- German (10% fluency - I studied it in high school and can pick up a few words here and there, but it's gone extremely rusty by now)

 

- Latin (5% fluency - same as German, studied it in high school, but since I can't possibly use it with anybody - except perhaps extremely knowledgeable priests - it's also got extremely rusty by now. It has a few similarities to a lot of other languages I know, but since grammar is extremely hard, I would only be able to say extremely simple sentences and only after thinking for a few seconds).

Edited by jrdemr
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Only English.

 

I've tried taking courses in high school and college to learn Spanish and German, but nothing ever stuck.

 

I feel like people probably look at Americans and scoff when so many of us aren't multi-lingual, but other languages really take a back seat here.  Maybe if you go south a bit more, with the border to Mexico, there's a bit more influence and a need to hone your Spanish... more likely immigrants learning English out of necessity and becoming "multi-lingual Americans"... but in the northeast?  For those born and raised here, the best we have is a French-Canadian influence and that's pretty much non-existent on the States side.  They keep to themselves, outside of when the Montreal Canadiens come into town. xD

 

Language courses aren't really a way of life in school (at least not when I went), the teaching is very lax and there's absolutely no reason to ever use it outside of the classroom.  Not to say you can't find an American native that is multi-lingual, but you have to REALLY want it.  It isn't something that you get exposed to at a young age (unless your parents/family speak it at home) because there's no need or urgency to it.  Basically you have to buy yourself some plane tickets, travel to a country that speaks it and immerse yourself for a few months... which isn't quite the same as the border hopping that goes on in Europe or the push elsewhere to teach English to the youth on top of their native tongue.

 

Not sure why I felt a need to explain all that. xD  I'm guessing some will disagree too, which makes me wonder even moreso why I wrote it up... but that's just the ways I see's it.

Edited by PleaseHoldOn
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Programming languages: 7 Javascript (nodejs), HTML, CSS (less), C#, PHP, SQL, Delphi (pascal)

Niiiiiice. :awesome:

But... you know... Only C# and Delphi + barely Javascript can be considering programming languages...

PHP is a scripting language, SQL is a database language, HTML is a markup language and finally, CSS is a style-sheet language (in any case, the least programming programming language of all these =D)

 

But I'll forget it because you know C# and not that ugly unpolished C# called Java :awesome:

Edited by Satoshi Ookami
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Niiiiiice. :awesome:

But... you know... Only C# and Delphi + barely Javascript can be considering programming languages...

PHP is a scripting language, SQL is a database language, HTML is a markup language and finally, CSS is a style-sheet language (in any case, the least programming programming language of all these =D)

 

But I'll forget it because you know C# and not that ugly unpolished C# called Java :awesome:

 

Yeah I guess you are right about HTML & CSS ;) SQL, PHP and Javascript are definitely programming languages! You can further define them into sub-groups like Procedural, Object-Oriented, Declarative or Functional but that's not the point here :D

 

I'm a big fan of Javascript! And not a fan of Java ;) Which languages do you like?

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  • 3 weeks later...

Korean is my mother language, but i was basically raised in the States. My dad also challenged me to learn a new language and said that Koreans have an easier time learning Japanese than others, so I took him up on that challenge. I can read all hirgana and katakana at this point and know enough to have a conversation with someone now. Kanji is challenging though.

Do you have any advice? I really wanna learn Japanese but I don't know which/what/where to start...

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Do you have any advice? I really wanna learn Japanese but I don't know which/what/where to start...

 

i suggest you check out this book: Japanese from Zero. i really liked their progressive approach to learning hiragana and basic sentence building. the hardest part for english speakers learning japanese is sentence structure, it's basically flipped. so if you want to say "where is the store?" in japanese, you have to say "store" at the beginning of the sentence, kind of like yoda speak. following up my post you quoted, japanese was easier for me to learn as a korean because the sentence structure is essentially the same, so i grew up with it, it was just memorizing vocabulary. i'm still a student of the language myself, and i still find it so fascinating. good luck :D

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i suggest you check out this book: Japanese from Zero. i really liked their progressive approach to learning hiragana and basic sentence building. the hardest part for english speakers learning japanese is sentence structure, it's basically flipped. so if you want to say "where is the store?" in japanese, you have to say "store" at the beginning of the sentence, kind of like yoda speak. following up my post you quoted, japanese was easier for me to learn as a korean because the sentence structure is essentially the same, so i grew up with it, it was just memorizing vocabulary. i'm still a student of the language myself, and i still find it so fascinating. good luck :D

Those books look pretty awesome, thanks! I'll probably get one for Christmas and make it my new year resolution :P

Edited by Makise Kurisu
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Those books look pretty awesome, thanks! I'll probably get one for Christmas and make it my new year resolution :P

 

awesome! がんばって (ganbatte; good luck!) only stipulation i'd say is learning from a book on your own prevents you from practicing speaking with another person, which is really the best way to learn any language. next best thing i'd say is watching/listening to japanese shows and anime with subtitles, but it's not like i need to explicitly suggest the latter to you anyway  ;)

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awesome! がんばって (ganbatte; good luck!) only stipulation i'd say is learning from a book on your own prevents you from practicing speaking with another person, which is really the best way to learn any language. next best thing i'd say is watching/listening to japanese shows and anime with subtitles, but it's not like i need to explicitly suggest the latter to you anyway  ;)

I have enough confidence issues talking to people in English xD but yeah I see where you're coming from. Haha the few words I know are from anime and things like that, but obviously it's no way to learn properly

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awesome! がんばって (ganbatte; good luck!) only stipulation i'd say is learning from a book on your own prevents you from practicing speaking with another person, which is really the best way to learn any language. next best thing i'd say is watching/listening to japanese shows and anime with subtitles, but it's not like i need to explicitly suggest the latter to you anyway  ;)

We seriously need to start a Japanese talking thread xD

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