Languages

[Cobra!]

I haven't seen a topic for this on the forum, so I might as well make one.

Languages are one of my biggest interests, and I love being able to speak languages I'm not native in, and be fully immersed in it.

I am bilingual Scots and English (and have been working hard to promote the former), and am learning Italian and Scottish Gaelic.

I feel a huge satisfaction when I learn a new fact or get information in one of those languages without any assistance from a native tongue!

I also plan to learn Ainu, Japanese and Korean one day! Because I'm a bit of a weeb and koreeb. :p

What languages do you guys speak? Do you have any interest in learning more?

[Dojidave]

I have lived aboard for most of my life so I speak English, Dutch and Swedish. I'm planning on learning French in the future since it would help day to day living where I live now.

[cinni]

polish is my second language but im not a very fluent speaker i can generally/vaguely understand what someone says based on context clues but my reading skill is like 1/10 and writing is 0/10 hahahaha

[Cobra!]

I have lived aboard for most of my life so I speak English, Dutch and Swedish. I'm planning on learning French in the future since it would help day to day living where I live now.

Whereabouts do you live now?

polish is my second language but im not a very fluent speaker i can generally/vaguely understand what someone says based on context clues but my reading skill is like 1/10 and writing is 0/10 hahahaha

Keep at it, you'll get there!

[DJoftheCoven]

Oh, this is interesting!

I'm a huge language nerd. Currently, I speak four languages: English, Spanish, French, and Korean, listed in the order that I learned them in. While I've been speaking English and Spanish for many years, it was only in the past three that I've been speaking French and in the last two that I've been learning Korean. As far as fluency goes, I'd say...

English 100%
Spanish 90%
French 75%
Korean 20%

Those are my fluency rates! Pretty good, I'd say.

Korean is my main area of study right now, but I'm also adding Japanese into the mix because I feel like it'd be fun! I actually love to see the similarities between the different languages I speak, especially when it comes to comparing the Chinese roots of Japanese and Korean in both writing systems and vocabulary. There are a few things that I can understand in Mandarin Chinese due to these similarities, which is always a plus!!!

I've also studied a little bit of Thai out of curiosity, since I work at a Thai restaurant with many native speakers. There are only a few words/phrases that I can recognize. But I do find the language beautiful and fascinating!

[Kitchen Staff]

My first language is English and I am currently learning Japanese.I wanna learn Czech, Tagalog, Mandarin and Cantonese in the future, but learning Czech is going to be my priority language because my mom's side of the family is Czech and I only know a few words in it.

[yot]

Well, as someone from Israel my native language is Hebrew and English is my second lang.
I remember that they tried to teach us Arabic in school but that was pretty much a failure
Other than that, I also took a German Class for 1 year, and compared to Arabic I actually remember stuff from it.

[Guest]

hii!

Actually excited to see this here because languages and linguistics especially are my biggest hobby by far!

I started getting into constructing my own languages (conlanging) when I was like 12, as part of my worldbuilding and writing hobby of the time, and kept learning more and more until I noticed that I basically had the basics of one or two years of university down already just by focusing on that hobby.

So I decided that was what I wanted to do with my life and nowadays I am working on my degree in linguistics and computational linguistics And I was right, I really did know most of the intro courses already.

So yeah, this is both my hobby and my job now, lol
warning: this user may infodump about languages at any point

[awawa]

I love language learning and liguistics!! I speak English and Japanese and am slowly trying to learn Spanish as most of my family speaks it. It's also heavily used in the reigion I live in so it's good to know.
The best method I found for studying is a mix of learning to sentence build and a ton of immersion. I was fortunate enough to spend a year abroad in Japan with a host family and attended school, the whole nine yards. Most everyday I spent studying and being immersed helped me retain what I was learning so much more than when I was just studying by myself in the States.

Currently watching telenovelas and trying to speak some Spanish with my family and friends when possible.

[Cobra!]

The best method I found for studying is a mix of learning to sentence build and a ton of immersion. I was fortunate enough to spend a year abroad in Japan with a host family and attended school, the whole nine yards. Most everyday I spent studying and being immersed helped me retain what I was learning so much more than when I was just studying by myself in the States.

I really want to do this with Scottish Gaelic and Italian, I've found colleges for both in their respective countries, and hope to go to them at some point of my life.

I would love to move to Italy one day, too, because as someone who is really into retro tech, Italy is like a gold-mine! Their second hand shops are absolutely amazing!

Currently watching telenovelas and trying to speak some Spanish with my family and friends when possible.

I've been trying to do the same with Italian. My grandmother was Italian, and was always happy to speak her native tongue with family members.

Unfortunately, she passed away during the pandemic, and it seems I'm by far the most fluent in Italian in my family, so I'm stuck with chatrooms and watching videos online.

Though I've begun to notice that I'm now having a much easier time understanding them. I don't rely on subtitles or rewinding nearly as much as I used to!

Do you have Spanish family, then? Or somewhere in Latin America?

[awawa]

Do you have Spanish family, then? Or somewhere in Latin America?

Yes! My mother's parents are from Mexico and some of her family still lives there. I remember going to visit when I was super young and I could speak just a little bit. All of that knowledge has vanished thanks to my refusal to study it when I had taken classes in Middle school.
Hoping to get back on track though.

[NullCertifier]

I work a retail job on the NW side of Houston, Texas, and casually speak Spanish with about a third of my customers. I didn't grow up speaking it, but studied it for a few years in college. And it's very much a part of the local culture in my neighborhood, which I would guesstimate is around 1/3 Hispanic of various backgrounds. Some of the restaurants and food trucks I like have the menu in Spanish only, and those ones are usually the best. I'm not really conversationally fluent, but speak it well enough to do business, even with customers who speak only Spanish. Knowing numbers up to a hundred and what to call basically everything in my store has taken me a long way.

[Cele]

I am bilingual Scots and English (and have been working hard to promote the former), and am learning Italian and Scottish Gaelic.

Speaking Scots sounds super cool.

My first language is Finnish and I know English. I have studied Swedish in the past because it's compulsory here and my level is something like, if I'm reading a news article I can probably understand what it's about. I also studied German but that's on-hold currently because I have dedicated all of my tiny amount of energy into learning Japanese.

[Wobblegong]

I've been trying to learn Spanish, but mostly for the literature. I don't think I could ever be confident speaking it.

Arabic script is really cool I would love to learn to write it

[appleAlc]

I'm an anglophone, but I've been trying to work on learning French, Latin, & Arabic. I know some bits & pieces of French & Latin, enough to hold a conversation in French and figure out vaguely what something means in Latin (and to be a pedant about Latin derived suffixes).
I can read Cyrillic Script (though I don't know a single language that uses it; I wanted to learn Mongolian, but couldn't find helpful resources really. Same story with Pashto, which is why I'm learning Arabic instead).
I love the Arabic script, it's always been something I found gorgeous, so when presented with a chance to learn it (a bookstore having Arabic for Dummies, 3rd Edition), I lept upon it