Foreign Languages?

[Tommie ΘΔ]

I have a Spanish presentation tomorrow, so it got me wondering if anyone else on here is bi/multilingual!! I'd especially like to know how you came about learning said second language, whether it be familial or in school.

For me personally, I consider Spanish as almost a second-first language (English being my true first, as a guy from the southeast coast of the USA ), if that makes sense. I've been learning and speaking it since I was around 4 due to my heritage, and my Abuelos tending to speak to each other in Spanish at lot at their house

Spanish has always been a language I really enjoyed, especially since I'm going on almost 11 years' worth of Spanish classes. I'd like to see about learning Italian, since my dad used to know a bit of it when he was younger due to his family being made up of mostly Italian immigrants

Anyway, would love to know if anyone here speaks another language, or if English is your second language!!

[Paprika]

My main language is French, second is English. I have notions of Spanish and German (enough to survive if I'm lost in these kind of countries. I've learned Latin in middle-school but it's really rusty so cinsider notions as well and nobody speaks it around me so there's that.

[pysgodyn]

I'm from Wales and I would consider myself to have two first languages because I grew up with both of them; English and Welsh. I guess you could say that's like you with English and Spanish. Some people in my family are fluent but I would say everyone in my family knows enough to hold up a conversation.

I went to Welsh schools from the ages of 3 to 17 which is just like any other school except you're not allowed to speak English or you get detention. I feel like I took it for granted though because now I miss being around so many people that can speak Welsh!

I've learned a lot of Russian throughout my life too with Duolingo and playing video games and watching movies in the language but I've gotten pretty rusty sadly to the point I think 90% of the language has been forgotten to me... Maybe a refresher would get me back to where I was though.

I hope your presentation went well!

[Misanthropic Monster™]

I was bi-lingual for a very short period of my life (till about age 6) - I've since forgotten all of my second language due to growing up with racist family members.

But needless to say, I could speak fluent English and Greek as a child. (Father is/was a Greek Cypriot)

[mozelle]

my first language is Gaelic    thn I eventually had 2 learn English. my english is sorta bad, but it's whatever.

in 1st grade, I learnt some french for school- and tried again this year, but its not 4 me   

I remember learning Mandarin during most of elementary, but it's very rusty . I know last year I took Indonesian, but i moreso remember the film studies we did. hardly any of the actual language.. 

[tarraxahum]

English is my second language, I've started studying it around fifth grade of school I wanna say

The Internet and occasional fixations on stuff that didn't have subtitles available did the rest. Nowadays I'm actually translating books and comics as part of my job! So dare I say, that went well.

I also technically studied French and Spanish at different points in my life, but for whatever reason they did not stick at all. Guess English is my one and only love!

[RedBird]

My first language is English, but I'm currently learning German through the internet It's a pretty interesting language. I'm also planning to learn Japanese in the future, so I can read Japanese stuff that's not translated to English.

[Cobra!]

I’m bilingual Scots/English. I can speak Italian fluently, and have been learning Scottish Gaelic and Ainu on and off for a few years.

I’ve also began learning Japanese as we are going to go on holiday in Japan in 2026!

[Cyan]

My first language is Swedish which means I automatically understand Norwegian and also Danish to a certain extent. The Scandinavian languages are very similar to each other so it's a "get three for the price of one" sort of deal.

I also know a decent bit of German as I studied it in school for a few years.

And I know English, obviously

[tenkai_no_perusona]

My first language is Portuguese (Brazilian variety, central northeastern dialect). I learned English thanks to being thrown into the internet quite early in my life, when I was 8/9 years old. Spending an excessive amount of time around play-by-forum roleplay boards a few years later helped me with further immersion. Nonetheless, and surely thanks to how I learned it, to this day, I still struggle with speaking it (though not with listening). I also (occasionally) work with English <-> Portuguese academic translation.

I can partially understand written Spanish thanks to some exposure, studying it in school, and the overall partial intelligibility between it and Portuguese. I really like how Spanish looks and sounds like, and just like (or maybe even more than) Portuguese, it's a very diverse language to boot. Maybe someday I'll seriously study it...

Nowadays, I'm trying to learn French and Japanese—to achieve certain research goals of mine and out of genuine interest, respectively.

[BlazingCobaltX]

My mother tongue is Farsi, but technically my first language is Dutch. The plan was for me to get fluent in one language before learning the second one. Both of these I speak fluently now, although for Farsi I speak what's called "heritage fluent", which means I learned it based on (informal) home usage. Formal Farsi is an entirely different beast that I have no competence in at all.

I've been exposed to English from a young age. Dutch TV has a habit of subtitling everything instead of dubbing. I also had family members that were fluent in English that helped, and videogames to learn from. While I was decently fluent at a young age, it took a long time to iron out some pronunciation errors. To this day I encounter stuff I don't know how to pronounce, but I take some misguided pride in not bothering to learn anymore.  

In general I'm pretty good at languages; it's like a puzzle to me. I have like B2 fluency in Spanish from a semester abroad, I learned basic Chinese in a course, and picked up Japanese phrases from years of being a weeb. By virtue of speaking Dutch I also understand German, but I don't like that language at all.

[candycanearter07]

I was bi-lingual for a very short period of my life (till about age 6) - I've since forgotten all of my second language due to growing up with racist family members.

But needless to say, I could speak fluent English and Greek as a child. (Father is/was a Greek Cypriot)

oh man, i'm so sorry you had to go thru that.. do you still have to deal with this today or can you distance yourself from them? also do you have any interest in re-learning greek?

as for myself, i am monolingual*
* i know some spanish and hebrew from school, and am also interested in toki pona which is a conlang (made up lang)

[Misanthropic Monster™]

oh man, i'm so sorry you had to go thru that.. do you still have to deal with this today or can you distance yourself from them? also do you have any interest in re-learning greek?

as for myself, i am monolingual*
* i know some spanish and hebrew from school, and am also interested in toki pona which is a conlang (made up lang)

Thanks I appreciate your words 

Thankfully I haven't had to deal with them in a long time, I ran away from home when I was 16 and I've not seen any of them since (I am now in my 40s) - so that is something positive atleast.

I have considered relearning Greek, heck, I even wanted to learn a few other languages at one point or other but I struggle to learn/retain things like languages because of autism/dyspraxia issues. But it would be super cool if I spoke more than one language - I am really fascinated with the concept of human brains working differently depending on the language they learnt as a child and grew up around. It's beyond fascinating to me to imagine that human minds can conceptually work and think rather differently all because of the way words are used.

[Charbomber]

I'm trying to learn Japanese for retro game purposes but also so I can interact with more nerds from across the web, but I have an awful memory and I'm having trouble staying motivated to learn since my typical way of learning things like languages (learning individual words by first figuring out a sentence) doesn't work because without spaces in Japanese I can't tell what's part of what words or what's a part of the grammar. I'm also just generally bad at learning language stuffs... and Japanese is one of the hardest languages, so I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle

Does anybody have any tips? For learning Japanese or to stay motivated and whatnot.

[nihil0]

Does anybody have any tips? For learning Japanese or to stay motivated and whatnot.

Genuinely get into voiced visual novels and Japanese television/dramas/etc. hearing and reading conversational Japanese is a huge help and a good set of flashcards never hurt. (A lot of JP learners use Anki)

(JP deck search if you're interested)
https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=japanese

I Do Not recommend duolingo for any in-depth language learning (not even mentioning the AI issues but it did help me memorize some of the alphabets.

I can speak basic conversational Japanese, though my pronunciation kind of stinks LOL and I can understand most Spanish from exposure.