What other languages do you speak, if any?
My answer:
This is another thing that I’m sure a lot of you know about me as I write about it a lot and my languages are an important part of my life. But if you don’t, or doon’t remember, so far, other than my native language and obviously English, I can also speak Swedish, I’d say on an upper intermediate or advanced level or thereabouts, and Welsh, which I think would classify as lower intermediate. I also used to learn German at school but my actual knowledge of this language these days is very poor and most of it that I know is by similarity of the words with other languages that I know.
How about you? 🙂
I only speak Dutch and English. I tried to learn some German a while back, but struggle with it. I tend to very much overestimate my abilities too at least when compared to native speakers. I mean, if I look at word of the day prompts on WP, I don’t know a significant portion of the words, even though I can write blog posts in English. My husband at least used to be pretty impressed with my English (writing, that is, my pronounciation sucks).
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I don’t know a lot of words from the word of the day prompts either. But I love to look them up and possibly find new words to have an affair with. It also used to bother me a little though, but at some point I finally thought that, after all, I am not a native, so I don’t have to know all that natives do, though at the same time aiming for it is what I’m trying to do.
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Yes, I understand that. I have the Dictionary.com app on my phone, so like to look up words at times.
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Oh yes, I have a lot of word reference apps on my phone as well.
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I speak some French, a bit Spanish, and a handful of words in a variety of other languages. I like trying to identify languages that I hear. I don’t know many words in Polish, but “tak” is distinctive enough that I think I can usually distinguish it from other Slavic languages.
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I love trying to identify languages as well, can be so much fun. Haha yeah, I don’t know where we’ve got “tak” from, it doesn’t sound similar to any other Slavic language or at least I don’t know of any that would have a similar word.
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English is my native language. I learned Indonesian when I lived there for two years and I learned some French here in Canada.
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Indonesian is an interesting language to know. 🙂 How cool that you had such an opportunity.
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I “speak” what I call pidgin Spanish (broken Spanish which might sound really odd to a Native Spanish Speaker). My own language is English. BUT. I can say “hello and goodbye” in several other languages, ask where the bathroom is, and order some coffee or a beverage. I wouldn’t be lost for finding the loo nor get dehydrated any way IF I ever went somewhere…
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Wow! That’s really great! 🙂 I may know words like hello, goodbye or thank you in a few languages other than the ones I’m especially interested in but I have no idea about things like the loo or coffee! Perhaps because I don’t travel much abroad.
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Really none, but I can recognize Spanish when I hear it, due to having studied it for years. But whenever I encounter Spanish speakers who I’m blessed to overhear (despite my hearing loss), they’re talking too fast, and I hardly remember anything from the language!! Ugh.
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Listening to people in real time when you only have some bits of the language can be seriously a real challenge.
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