Languages, Polyglots...

[marqs]

Sorry, Ian, couldn't understand a single word of what they said Are there Latin subtitles by any chance?

My wife has actually used the same tactic to get rid of drunken guys, after some minutes of more polite "please piss off" kind of conversation. It worked almost as well as her "Sorry, I'm a man"-phrase, which took care of the problem under 2 seconds.

Languages:
Finnish (native)
English & French (fluent, able to read academic literature)
swedish (can read newspapers, normal discussions etc)
Japanese (conversational, read 300-500 kanjis)
Hebrew (basic conversational level)
studied some courses of spanish in high school.
Some silly phrases in chinese and farsi.

Have been thinking of improving my hebrew and/or learning chinese. Italian and portuguese have also interested me, Italian partly because it seems so close to french. Farsi mainly for practical reason, as my wife's bilingual and when we get kids, she's planning to speak farsi to them...

[Chanchu]

Speak some Japanese and Tagalog just fair if that used to be OK

Like to learn Chinese, and Thai.

[Darth Rock&Roll]

-english
-a little french
-an even smaller amount of spanish

but i can say hello/goobye/please/thank you and cheers! in several languages, maybe count to ten and stuff like that..

The principal phrase I try to learn first is "excuse me, do you speak english".
Because I live in Canada, and all the French folks are mostly in Quebec, and I don't live there, I don't get to exercise any tongues for the most part
and language isn't like riding a bicycle. You have to maintain it or think in it.

[I-mon]

Japanese and Mandarin fluent enough for good flowing conversations, when I don't understand a word or phrase I say "what does that word mean?" and usually understand explanations. Can't read though, too lazy! Learned lots of kanji while in taiwan but that stuff just disappears if I don't use it, which I don't.

Used to speak Thai to a similar level, but don't encounter many Thai people in my life so it sort of sinks back into the deeper parts of my brain and other languages start coming out of my mouth when I try to speak it. I get my Thai speaking ability back after one decent half-hour taxi ride in Bangkok speaking to the driver.

Some Brazilian Portuguese, and some basic Hindi.

Want to speak Spanish and make my Hindi fluent. Did some French and German in high school so it would be pretty cool to speak them too, especially french so's I could travel in africa and carribean...Italian also.

[Muad'dib]

German, Japanese, English, Spanish, French. Spanish is good enough for me to have convos with people in Italian or Portuguese.

Target Languages:

Arabic and the language where ever else my job winds up sending me.

[Iskendar]

Native Dutch speaker, fluent in English and French, I can more or less read German and speak a very crappy version of it (hey, it's just Dutch with a funny accent, isn't it? ). I did Latin in school, in a long forgotten past. I know some tourist guide phrases in Spanish, Italian, Polish and Swedish, and some anime-Japanese. I also can count to 10 in Japanese and Cantonese (wonder where that came from )

Languages I would love to learn: every one of them. Since that's not possible: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, Turkish and Russian would be neat for a start. Oh, and maybe some actual German

[cdobe]

Dutch sounds like German with a blood alcohol content over 0.2

[Darthwing Teorist]

I speak, read and write Romanian, French and English. I'd like to learn at least some Spanish and maybe Mandarin.

[emre]

I really wish I could speak

-Turkish
-Russian

Heh... I wish I could speak Chinese...

[qiphlow]

speak, read, and write:
--english (native)
--spanish (probably 90% fluency)

would like to learn, via matrix-esque direct upload:
--tagalog, if only to better understand the conversations at family gatherings (i can understand a tiny bit, and form very rudimentary sentences).

[Bär]

English - native
German - fluent but losing it since I no longer have anyone close by to speak it with
French to an intermediate level, but it's been a long time.
From knowing German I can understand some very basic conversations and read some Dutch, and to far lesser degrees Danish, Swedish & Norwegian.
Living in Albuquerque I picked up some Spanish & can read it some with the help of French.
I studied some Russian & Japanese and I used to know a tiny bit of Slovak from my grandpa, who spoke at least some German and Hungarian before he learned English in school, even though he was born in 'Merca.

Latin & Italian would be interesting, Mandarin, Scots or Irish Gaelic, Arabic, Diné/Navajo, Hungarian.... Putting the time & effort into learning these languages I have only academic interest in and no practical use for...well...ain't gonna happen. I'd probably put effort into learning Italian out of all of these.

[Steve James]

One of the posts referred to a site that had an interesting article on languages that sound alike. For ex, Greek and Spanish (from Spain) sound alike. Portuguese (from Portugal) sounds like a Slavic language. IOW, a person is speaking something that you think you should understand, but doesn't get a word. That also happens when someone speaks to you in a language that you understand, but aren't expecting.

[edededed]

English - native
Japanese - fluent
Mandarin Chinese - conversational
Korean - conversational

Studied German for 6 years as a kid and Taiwanese for a bit in college, but completely lost all of that through the years... would like to restore the German, though (Taiwanese was quite complex in terms of the tones, so I am not sure if I can restore that one )

[B_Diniz]

just related to this topic:

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com, this guy is awesome.

I trying to speak english as like read and write and some chinese (mandarin)







This is know by 10.000 sentences method! Very good to spend a few on this.




how to learn a language

Att

[bailewen]

One of the posts referred to a site that had an interesting article on languages that sound alike. For ex, Greek and Spanish (from Spain) sound alike. Portuguese (from Portugal) sounds like a Slavic language. IOW, a person is speaking something that you think you should understand, but doesn't get a word. That also happens when someone speaks to you in a language that you understand, but aren't expecting.

This one has happened to me a lot with English even. It's so weird. Some Chinese person will spit out a sentence in English and I will completely not understand it, not because their English was so bad but because I was "listening in Chinese". Sometimes after a several second delay I will suddenly realize what they were saying and try my best to reassure the person that their English was really pretty good. I think the phenomenon is interesting because it points to something about how we process language. So little of what we hear is what was said. I think it's like the way vision is constructed in the brain. We don't see things directly. We get a messy crapload of information from two different eyes that don't match and actually only see things in focus in a very small part of our field of vision. The eyes flit around and the brain remembers what stuff that we aren't focused on looks like and creates a coherent image. With hearing, I think our brain does something similar. Without even getting into how we focus on a particular sound (compare talking to someone at a loud party to listening to a tape recording of a conversation at a loud party) in interpreting language, we anticipate, we fill in the blanks, we make all sorts of assumptions and account for accents and so on. When you aren't expecting a certain language, even your mother tongue, it's like your brain hasn't loaded the database in to RAM yet.