What languages do you speak?

Author Topic: What languages do you speak?  (Read 1481 times)

Sorted from most-to-least proficient:

🇺🇸 I'm a native English speaker, bleh. American to be specific :(
🇫🇷 Je parle un peu français, aussi!
🇪🇸 Soy competente en español.
🇮🇸 Og ég tala smá íslensku.

Any multi-linguals about? Bonus points for fluency.

uhhhh my first communicative language was american sign language if that counts, but i havent been fluent in it nor have i used it since i was 6

Merica
Used to know spanish but havent used it in years.

english

i can pick apart spanish very very roughly

ill have you know i can read most hiragana and like, 3 kanji

Afrikaans
Albanian
Amharic
Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarusian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Burmese
Catalan
Cebuano
Chewa
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Corsican
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Esperanto
Estonian
Filipino (Tagalog)
Finnish
French
Galician
Georgian
German
Greek
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Hausa
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kannada
Kazakh
Khmer
Kinyarwanda
Korean
Kurdish (Kurmanji)
Kyrgyz
Lao
Latin
Latvian
Lithuanian
Luxembourgish
Macedonian
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Marathi
Mongolian
Nepali
Norwegian (Bokmål)
Odia
Pashto
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi (Gurmukhi)
Romanian
Russian
Samoan
Scottish Gaelic
Serbian
Shona
Sindhi
Sinhala
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Sotho
Spanish
Sundanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tajik
Tamil
Tatar
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Turkmen
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uyghur
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
West Frisian
Xhosa
Yiddish
Yoruba
Zulu

Sorted from most-to-least proficient:

🇺🇸 I'm a native English speaker, bleh. American to be specific :(
🇫🇷 Je parle un peu français, aussi!
🇪🇸 Soy competente en español.
🇮🇸 Og ég tala smá íslensku.

Any multi-linguals about? Bonus points for fluency.
i always thought it would be cool to be at least bi-lingual but it is so hard to keep disciplined. what motivates you to learn these languages?


i always thought it would be cool to be at least bi-lingual but it is so hard to keep disciplined. what motivates you to learn these languages?
My motivation is usually derived from a variety of different places, and it depends on the language I’m learning as well.

French and Spanish are spoken broadly across the globe, making them useful to know, and I also want to connect to my Cajun and Cuban heritage in particular. Other than that, both languages are relatively easy for me because of my liturgical Latin studies, I’ve had some exposure to them from a young age, and I’m a very curious person who likes to know what random words mean.

Icelandic is just an utterly fascinating language to me, and is surprisingly easy to pick up on. It has a reputation for being monstrously difficult, but the real difficulty lies in finding the resources to learn it.

In all cases, my motivation pretty much boils down to fascination. When I was first starting out, I was a mono-lingual native English speaker, pretty much, and the idea of speaking a different language seemed incredibly abstract to me. At first my brain kind of organized new foreign language words into the same mental dictionary as English words, which made it seem impossible.

Eventually I found my way of thinking about it. You kind of learn to “label” words subconsciously as being English or non-, and things get smoother from there. Eventually you’ll be ready to get familiar with different grammar rules, and you can slap together all the words you know in the correct order.

And I’d say to feel daunted or discouraged is a complete and total motivation killer. If you let yourself believe at any point that you’re hopeless and doomed to never be bilingual, you’ve only killed your chances by giving up. If you’re having trouble staying consistent, try taking smaller bites of language learning at a time. Sometimes it’s worse to try to be a juggernaut. You may not remember it well, but you learned English a little bit every day while making LOTS of mistakes.

If you’re patient with yourself and stay curious, you’ll feel like you’re learning secret info that no one else knows while having a blast doing it. And hey, life gets in the way; we can’t immerse ourselves in foreign languages constantly. Not unless you’re rich and can do an immersion program thingy to live in another country for a year. Don’t be surprised if it’s difficult to make time in your day to study a language. Sometimes there just isn’t time.

All that being said, a little bit adds up to A LOT over time. It’s worth it if you’ve got the right mental disposition.

finnish english and a bit of swedish

english and german. i want to learn Russian after i get more proficient in German.


Icelandic is just an utterly fascinating language to me, and is surprisingly easy to pick up on. It has a reputation for being monstrously difficult, but the real difficulty lies in finding the resources to learn it.

I know a little Icelandic. I don't know why.


i tried a few times to learn mandarin but was never able to follow through on it
it's embarrassing when people say "DO YOU SPEAK CHINESE???" when they find out im half taiwanese ... i have no one to speak mandarin to except my mother and she says "don't learn it unless you plan on moving to taiwan" like       Damn let me connect with some kind of heritage i want to talk to my cousins :(