How many languages do you know fluently?

I admit it - only English. I took Spanish in high school and college, but once I got to my second Spanish course in college (an all-Spanish speaking course,) I abandoned it. Would like to try again.

Plus a good bit of French, some Spanish, some sign language... I like languages :D

I took 5 years of Spanish in middle/high school, followed by two years of German in high school/college and... Well, they kind of canceled each other out.

I'm pretty good at Spanish, but not great.

Mostly due to German's use of the gerund and not sharing many root words.

:toast:

I kinda like it here.

Welcome. :hi:

Me and case-inflected acticles simply don't mix. And getting the grammatical gender of nouns right is much harder than in Spanish. MADCHEN is NEUTER!?! REALLY!?! :wtf:

I failed it in school for two straight years...then hung out at a pool with beautiful german girls.....well, when the need arises, you learn quickly.


funny though, it has been years since I left, and now I can only speak it well when I'm drunk :shrug: :beer:

:)

I can read German with proficency as well.

I can read Spanish, Italian and Dutch to varying degrees.

Get yourself a bit torrent (Google one) program, download it, unzip it, and install it. Then search for Rosetta Stone on a site like torrentz.com. Select the "Rosetta Stone 27 Languages" torrent. Download the program, unzip it, and follow the instructions in the text note. I made three disks for it - one with the installation and accompanying pdf files, then I split the languages into eastern and western dvd's. When I want to take a lesson I just insert the language disk and the program opens up with a list of languages on that disk. If you need some help with anything just ask.

I was educated here in the states so I speak perfect English. My Latin heritage manifested in fluent Spanish, though my vocabulary is a little limited since I wasn't educated in Spanish. I can almost read French, I speak it horribly and I don't understand the spoken form of this language in conversation.

Coming from Spanish to French I get confused as there are no silent letters in Spanish, while the written French is heavily embedded in contracting words and not pronouncing the end of words. Also, reading literature is helpful. I read "Don Quixote de la Mancha" by Miguel Cervantes to brush up on Spanish. Kind of like reading Shakespeare if you want to learn English.

Incidentally, Cervantes and Shakespeare - considered to be the greatest English and Spanish authors of all time - both died on the very same date.

Whereas 16th century English was quite different from present-day English

English and (spoken) French seem to have been changing over time much faster than Spanish, German. and Italian. It's freaky. Italian schoolkids can understand Dante just fine, I can't really understand Chaucer without a translation into modern English.

Chaucer's English was still heavily influenced by pre-Norman English. By Shakespeare, it had evolved a lot.

Spanish may have a lot to do with geography. When the Moors left in 1492, Castilla was still surrounded by
the Catalan-speaking Reino de Aragón in the East and Portugal to the west. Catalan is also pretty much
unchanged since the Middle Ages.

In the last 200 years "gonna" has emerged as a new grammatical particle indicating the near future, one says "I'm gonna go to the store, but one cannot say "where's he gonna" for "where's he going to". "-'ve has lost it's mental connection with "have", as shown by people, myself included, accidentally using "of" instead, resulting in a suffix marking perfective aspect on verbal modal auxiliaries "woulda, shoulda, coulda...". "Shall" has utterly disappeared except in intentionally archaic speech or very formal speech. Over in the UK the Subjunctive is dying out.

Some of the slang my younger daughter picked up with in school in Hawai'i and DC needed to be
explained to me, and her native language isn't even English.

One guy I know from Guatemala visited Spain for the first time, and asked at Barajas airport where
he could rent a "carro." He wanted to rent a car, which would have been a carro in Guatemala. In
Spain, however, a car is still a "coche" and a "carro" is a wooden cart drawn by a beast of burden.
The Madrid rent-a-car staff laughed at him and told him there was a farm nearby that might have
some donkeys and "carros" to rent him.

Looks like we and the Brits aren't the only people divided by a common language! :rofl:

You must, if you speak Spanish and understand French. I can squeak by in Spanish and some Italian, but the problem with traveling to Europe is they all want to speak English to you and you can't practice! Even in Paris.

Spanish and Italian aren't so mutually intelligible, though I remember carrying on a discussion with an Italian and it wasn't until mid conversation that I realized he was speaking Italian and I was speaking Spanish. I was 11 at the time.

:)

I used to know Italian really well (won an award in high school and everything) but I lost it over the years. :(

See post #12 for more info on how you can download a program to learn Italian.

Sorry about the mix up.

I'm a cunning linguist.

But I'm working on it.

am nowhere near fluent in speaking or understanding the spoken word in them. I know enough words in German
and Italian to figure out what I want to eat, how to follow signs to get somewhere and that's about it.

Telugu is the language of the Indian state my family hails from.

i am sorry to say that i am a very poor communicator in spoken words, which is all the odder because in days gone by for a decent period of time i actually worked as a writer

i used to joke and say that my brains were in my fingers (think i stole this from madeleine l'engle)

as a child for several years in most situations i didn't speak at all which was interesting

language is the main language. Communicating with your writing could be a gift. :hi:

for a discussion of what "fluency" means.

I'd like to learn German, though--my dad's ancestors were from Germany, and my great-great grandfather, great grandfather, and grandfather all spoke it fluently. (My great-great grandfather emigrated from Germany and spoke no English at all when he arrived in the U.S., in fact.)

I speak German at home (live much of the year in Germany, and my wife is German), lived and
went to school in Spain (Spanish school), work a lot and am on the phone every day with my
offices in Belgium, France and Geneva. So that covers German, French and Spanish. Also, while
in Spain, I lived in Barcelona with a Catalan family, and so picked up Catalan. Studied Swedish
and Russian pretty intensively in college, and just by frequent contact and/or presence in both
Italy and the Netherlands picked up both Italian and Dutch. I don't know about "fluently," but
have passed for natives in all of them (once, in Sweden, a Swede told me that after a few more years
of living there, I might lose enough of my accent so it wouldn't be so obvious I was from Norway. Go
figure!).

Oh, yeah, I forgot: southern. I do speak passable English, too, but it's rusty.

I also know a few phrases in Turkish, Polish, Romanian, Japanese, Hungarian, and Basque, but don't
really speak them, much less with any fluency. Zuec euskera aitxutendosue?

I took a Spanish class in high school, but that was 11 years ago, and I don't know enough to get by. I really want to learn with Rosetta Stone but just can't afford it right now.

Makes for "interesting" conversations here in Pennsylvania!

:)

I'm only fluent in English.

I can work my way through written English, maybe even write it, but as soon as people start talking I'm toast. I watch television with the sound turned low and the subtitles on. At noisy parties I don't know what the hell is going on. I nod and try to look like I understand what people are saying. Hopefully I'll figure it out before I look stupid.

enough to request the cut of beef I want at Rodizio's grill, but I'm far from fluent in it. Everything wants to come out Spanish.

And a tiny smattering of everything else under the sun (German, Japanese, a few words of Arabic and Hebrew, wanna learn Tamil and Zulu). I love language!

Znaet kto-nibud' esli ya by smog pisat' po-Russki na etom forume? Ya zabyl kak pisat' v Russkom alfavite s moey klaviaturoi.

Hope I got the cases right there...

"Look lady, I only speak two languages. English and bad English."

;-)

;-)

"I accept this point in gratitude of my nerd son who has taught me so much.
So very very much.....sigh"

She has a nerd son too. ;-)

1. Ability to meet one's needs as a tourist?

2. Ability to carry on polite chit-chat?

3. Ability to function as an adult in the culture?

4. Ability to pass as a native?

Actually, language teachers use "fluency" to refer how fast a person can talk. They prefer the term "proficiency" to gauge what FUNCTIONS a person can perform in the language.

If you ever take a conversational proficiency test, the examiner will start a conversation that consists of a few simple greetings and comments. Then the conversation will become more complicated in a structured way. At some point, you will be unable to continue the conversation, at which point the examiner will "back down," simplifying the conversation. Then the examiner will give you some cards describing situations to role play at your presumed level of proficiency. For example, the simpler ones might have you buying postcards at a souvenir stand. A more complicated one might have you telling a foreign visitor about your town. A still more complicated one might have you asking your boss about finding a job in the company for your friend. The most complicated ones ask you complicated questions about current events.

Anyway, by those standards, I'm a native speaker of English, a "3" in Japanese, a "2" in French and German, and a "1" in a bunch of different languages.

and get by. Fluent means more than just able to carry some conversation.

I'm fluent in four, but by my definition I'm fluent in two. My spoken French is understandable but sucks. I learned German from my father but lost a lot of it through lack of use, so that leaves Russian (which I learned from my mother) and English.

fluency you listed, and I imagine a great many people don't think about that when they respond here or in RL about fluency in languages.

n/t

It's actually more of a mix of street hippie, odd references and techoneese (not the music, but the machines).....but I'm sure I understand perfect English well enough to call it "fluent".....

Español es un poco dificil. Es mucho trabajar por me.

para mi

Don't worry. You'll get the hang eventually.

How often do you get to converse with native Spanish-speakers?

I have a friend who is a native Spanish speaker.

way to really get good at a language, is when you HAVE to speak it with a native. You'll make TONS of mistakes, but it's okay, they understand, they can correct you and you'll use it again. You get to listen to their accent, the rhythm of their speech, the lilt, the cadence, etc., and you can imitate it back to them.

My two suggestions for learning Spanish well are:

1) Learn the verbs. At least all the commonly-used irregular verbs (ser, estar, ir, etc.) and a bunch of regular ones that you can use in most everyday conversations. Memorize, memorize, memorize all the conjugations for the present, past, imperfect, future and subjunctive tenses until you're comfortable using the right one at the right time. Verbs are the toughest thing about Spanish. Once you nail them, you're golden. (Get the book "501 Spanish Verbs.")

2) Speak with native speakers all the time. As much as possible.

With those two things, you'll be speaking very well in 6-12 months, depending on your effort. Everything else will fall into place--vocabulary, grammar, etc.

In English we use the Past Progressive where the Romance languages use the imperfect, and the Subjunctive mood in English is vestigial.

Another thing that drives me crazy is getting English's comparatively odd usage of the Present Progressive out of my head because other European languages use the Simple Present. so we say "I am not going" but it Spanish it is "No va"

and I believe that my English is pretty good - you be the judge ....

I had a GREAT teacher junior and senior year. He had us talk only in Spanish, talked to us only in Spanish, had us read books in Spanish, had us write essays in Spanish, etc. We also went to a Spanish language retreat. This was 25 years ago.

I've lost a lot of the lesser used tenses/irregular verbs, etc., but I can carry on a conversation if I need to.

I can understand a little bit of Spanish if it's spoken slowly.

is my first language.