How many languages do you speak?

[Geist 0]

I speak German and English fluently. I'd been wanting to learn German since 2nd grade and finally managed fluency after being a foreign exchange student there. My folks always expected me to bring home a German, but I decided to fool them by bringing home a Finn instead

Got to add Finnish to my repertoire next.

[Minya's wife 24]

I speak German and English fluently. I'd been wanting to learn German since 2nd grade and finally managed fluency after being a foreign exchange student there. My folks always expected me to bring home a German, but I decided to fool them by bringing home a Finn instead

Got to add Finnish to my repertoire next.

If its anything like my 'mother tongue' (and it should be since the two along with Estonian make up their own branch of the language tree ) I hear its quite difficult to learn...something about this language family seems to make them especially difficult to master. When I hear it spoken I always think I'm hearing my own language, but if I pay closer attention I realize it only 'sounds' very similar....I can't understand a single word.

I don't think its the same w/ someone who speaks Spanish for example....they can probably understand more than a few words in Italian (same language family).

-P

[jodee 30]

I speak, read, and write English fluently. Have lived in Germany past 3 years, in an American community, but have managed to pick up a splattering of German. I can read more of it than speak it though. Can order meals in german, and ask for the check, the basic courtesies, and numbers, and can go into a German grocery store, and pretty much know what the names of things are, when the prices are not directly above the product. That helps a lot too, when trying to read menus. High school German, came back to me slowly once I was here, I think that helped a little, and made the transition here a lot easier.

French, I have a very slight understanding of, enough to get by when I visited Paris last year. Thanks to high school French.

Can speak Australian slang, Read, write and understand Ebonics (thanks baby!), and even have great understanding of the new language of TEXT(sms) speak, that kids like to use these days. My kids think they are writing in a language i dont understand when they get online with their friends after school,..little do they know I understand everything they are saying,....lol

Have just started to self teach myself Spanish, through books, and dvds, and cd's.

Jodee

[Dwarf_Ogress 0]

2 for me, English and Spanish. I use Spanish on a daily basis as I administer ESL exams as well as the Spanish G.E.D.

[broma25 2]

When I say I am fluent in English, I mean that I read perfectly, write perfectly (well, everyone is entitled to mistakes, even native English speakers), understand perfectly (unless in some very weird accent) and speak decently (as in I'm not native in the language and my accent will sound funny and some will say I pronounce some words wrong, still, I know the words and can convey what I want to speak). That to me is being fluent in a language.

Fluent isn't the same thing as perfect. I think your standards for 'fluency' are too high.

Then this is confusing me. If fluently is too much for your native language, for example, what would be the definition of speaking it? To me it has always been fluently as well.

And by perfect I mean perfect for a non-English speaker.

When I did Spanish in college, you passed if a native speaker would understand either what you had written or spoken even though it may not be grammatically correct. I imagine the definition of fluency of a language being the same.

[Zee Bee 61]

Two fluently, English and Mampruli (language spoken in Northern Ghana where my family is from). When I was younger my parents spoke both at home and mixed them up so that is how I learned them.

Unfortunately, I also spoke them as my parents did, ie, mixing my languages so when I was sent to day care they would not understand what I would say. One day I wanted water and the simple request of "I want water" became "I want kom (water in Mampruli)". When my mom came to pick me up I was crying and when she finally got around to what was wrong she realized that I was mixing my languages and from that day on my parents only spoke English to my sisters and I until we were old enough to distinguish when it was OK to mix languages and when not .

I also kinda sorta speak Arabic. I am ashamed to say that after spending 14 years of my life in Saudi Arabia my Arabic is deplorable. I can read and write it better than I can speak it. I also took Arabic in college and I got it all back after the first semester but since then...zilch .

Shame on me

[Geist 0]

If its anything like my 'mother tongue' (and it should be since the two along with Estonian make up their own branch of the language tree

It has a lot of the same grammatical structures, like a zillion cases, postpositions, and only one word for he/she. But other than that a lot of the vocabulary is different from Hungarian and there are only some words that make you go "hey, that sounds familiar!" (learned this from a finnish girl I knew who spent a lot of time in Hungary and learned their language too).

But other than that, it's not too bad. It has enough words that it stole from Swedish that are similar to German that the vocabulary isn't too hard to pick up and it's quite pretty. The hard part is the grammar, which unfortunately important

[rizthomson 3]

hi ........ i am fluent in ENGLISH,HINDI and My Mother tongue MALAYALAM.

riz

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

none

[homesick_american 1]

When I did Spanish in college, you passed if a native speaker would understand either what you had written or spoken even though it may not be grammatically correct. I imagine the definition of fluency of a language being the same.

Yep. You don't have to speak error-free Spanish in order to speak it fluently, but if you can communicate pretty easily in a language, it's safe to say that you speak it fluently. Native fluency is something entirely different; few people can ever acquire a language to native fluency simply by sitting in a classroom, or by even living in a country for several years. It's the holy grail of language acquisition.

Guess that B.A. in French/Applied Linguistics does come in handy sometimes.

[Kang Lang 7]

english and cantonese fluently, and conversational spanish. (now trying to learn more thai so i can speak to my future in laws and my fiance)

[Anna C. 4]

I speak German and English fluently. I'd been wanting to learn German since 2nd grade and finally managed fluency after being a foreign exchange student there. My folks always expected me to bring home a German, but I decided to fool them by bringing home a Finn instead

Got to add Finnish to my repertoire next.

That's where my hubby succeeded - he schlepped me home after a year in Munich

I think I should probably take some Spanish classes since I understand most written Spanish anyway (French, Italian) and it seems to make sense to be able to speak it in the US.

Wow Finnish/Hungarion language group, friend of mine studies Finnish, it's really hard with a ton of grammatical cases!!!

Edited May 14, 2007 by Anna C.

[athena_ny 1]

2 ... Spanish and English (native English speaker)

We speak a lot of Spanish with my mother in law (she doesn't speak English) so yeah...I use it on a daily basis.