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What language can you speak?

English (fluent in broad Yorkshire, Liverpudlian and Manchester accents)
Australian (Comes from 30 years of watching Neighbours)
Basic French (Can still remember bits from school)
Very basic Spanish (Que?)
Basic Klingon
I can say hello (Konichi-Wa) and goodbye (Sayonara) in Japanese.
 
SnowTiger20 said:
English fluently
Afrikaans fluently
Click to expand...

African sounds so incredibly funny if you're from the Netherlands, no offense. It kinda sounds like somebody knows most of the Dutch words but forgot that grammar was a thing and then just fills in the gaps.

Afrikaans klinkt echt ontzettend grappig als je uit Nederland komt, niet vervelend bedoelt. Het klinkt namelijk een beetje alsof iemand wel de Nederlandse woorden kent, maar vergeten is dat grammatica ook nog bestaat en de gaten dan maar gewoon invult.
 
Libecht said:
Some Aspies are particularly interested in languages (like me), so I'd like to know what language you guys speak :)
Please make a list with the languages you speak and how good you are at them.
Proficiency level: Mother tongue/Fluent/advanced/intermediate/beginner
Also, list the ones that you'd like to learn!

I go first,
Chinese: Mother tongue
English: Fluent~Advanced
Taiwanese (a dialect of Chinese): Advanced
Japanese: Intermediate
German: Beginner~Intermediate (learning)
Cantonese (biggest dialect of Chinese): Beginner (learning)

Languages I want to learn the most: French, Swedish, Italian, Polish
I'm a language nerd so I'll definitely learn much more than these in the future :p
Click to expand...


I am currently working at learning Swedish, which I have ancestry for. Once I move to Sweden this
ambition may become somewhat easier, but while here, I do not seem to encounter native speakers
very often. I will become fluent, it is really just a matter of when for me, and not if.
 
American English: Mother tongue

Mandarin: Beginner (my mother is from Taiwan, but didn't teach me. I picked some up from listening her talk to her sisters and by reading some textbooks)

Spanish: Beginner (I grew up in a neighborhood where many people only spoke Spanish. Also, my childhood best friend was from Puerto Rico and only spoke Spanish at her home, where I frequently stayed)

French: Beginner (I took a few years of it in high school)

I'd really like to improve my Mandarin. My mother makes fun of me for sounding "too American" when I speak it, but won't help me get better. My biggest issue is conversations. I can read basic stuff just fine, and can understand a good amount when overhearing someone, but when it comes time to actually talking to someone, my brain freezes up and I lose my entire vocabulary. I think it may be because I am so self-conscious about my accent now.
 
English - native
Indonesian - advanced
Balinese - beginner
Sasak - beginner
Russian - beginner
Italian - beginner
German - was intermediate but not practiced for nearly 20 yrs
Makaton - intermediate

Want to learn: more Italian, Sanskrit, French and loads more Russian
 
English - mother tongue
French - intermediate
German - intermediate
Italian - intermediate
Swedish - basic
 
English is my only language sadly. I'm from Wales, so we had to have Welsh lessons, but they weren't that great and I have a hard time with new languages. I also did German in high school, but I wasn't good at that either, despite my love of Rammstein :tearsofjoy:
 
Only English.

When I lived in Japan for 6 years, I had very basic conversation skills. It's been lost now. My mom was Thai, so I've been trying to learn it. With a tonal language and no one to really practice on, it's just too hard.
 
I was - am? - supposed to be "good at languages", whatever that means. I'm old (or young!) enough to remember the high hopes of the late 80s, with all the hype of 1992 and the new European era that year was supposed to usher in. Despite this promising future, my teachers advised me against continuing my languages (French, German and Italian) beyond GCSE because I was (allegedly) so gifted there was no need to - "you can always pick them up later on". Unfortunately I've made little use of them since.

The one chance I had to really use my languages was the Erasmus programme at university (St Andrews, BSc(Hons) 1998, Logic & Philosophy of Science - Mathematics), but I foolishly blew the opportunity on a disastrous semester in Stockholm. Having believed the hype about how good I was at languages, I naïvely believed I could become fluent in Swedish, no problem. Furthermore I - equally naïvely - believed that the words "approved Erasmus exchange" meant that it had been checked out, audited or suchlike by a bureaucrat from Brussels/Strasbourg/Luxembourg/wherever. In fact no such auditing had ever taken place: I ended up attending lectures on maths and philosophy in Swedish with only a basic-level language course to assist me, and even that didn't even start until half-way through the semester.

The longest job I've had to date was 7 years in a branch of the scientific civil service where the furthest I ever travelled on business was London. Apart from three isolated tasks (a presentation to visiting French meteorologists, translating German comments in a Fortran program for a colleague, looking at an email message in Italian which proved to be a phishing scam) the only use I made of my linguistic skills was a weekly lunchtime French conversation class (as well as a German conversation class before that was axed owing to falling numbers).

So all that leaves is holiday vocabulary - asking the way to the post office, listening to announcements at railway stations and the like. Shouldn't there be more to using my languages than that?
 
OK, learned a few over the years. First non-native was Russian, then Danish (neither to proficiency).

Then learned Latin and Attic Greek, Koine, and Homeric Greek because I love the Classics :) Did a lot with these as Classics was my major. Even did some Latin poetry! Hehe. Greatest fun was reading Homer's Iliad in the original Greek. WOW! And also first time I was able to read the Bible in Greek.

If I am church and have the Greek Bible, people are so funny because they talk about a Greek word, throw one out there but because I have autism, they would just laugh if I said they were actually misusing that word. So I use all the restraint I can to just sit there and smile while they absolutely hammer a verse. But that would be rude and I like people, even those who don't really like me.

But People could learn a lot from Auties and Aspies if they just asked.

So Ancu, I encourage you---YES to the Greek! :) It's so beautiful.

Next? Perhaps hieroglyphics. I like to go backward with languages to learn things about the past.
 
Kupu2 said:
English - native
Indonesian - advanced
Balinese - beginner
Sasak - beginner
Russian - beginner
Italian - beginner
German - was intermediate but not practiced for nearly 20 yrs
Makaton - intermediate

Want to learn: more Italian, Sanskrit, French and loads more Russian
Click to expand...
http://

Cali Cat said:
English - MT

German - Used to be intermediate, but now rusty.

Spanish - Beginning
Click to expand...

Skylark said:
Oh... I forgot to mention British and American Sign Language, both beginner level.
Click to expand...
 
English(of course) some basic Indonesian and a few words in Japanese. Funny story about that last one; I met a Japanese school group on holiday a few years back. I became good friends with them over the week and I helped them learn english and in return they taught me some japanese.
 
English - native tongue
Greek - fluent
German - fluent
Romanian - near fluent
French - intermediate
Spanish - beginner
Italian - beginner

I also know some Polish and Russian, but only a few words and phrases.
 
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