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  • I'm from The Netherlands and I speak Dutch, English, a bit of German and no French at all even though I had French in school for 13 years.

    But The Netherlands has 2 official national languages, Dutch and Friesian, although English officially isn't a foreign language anymore due to the quality and quantity of English speakers and there are discussions to make English the third national language.

    I wish I knew more languages, but sadly I'm really bad at learning any. Some people learn languages so fast, I'm better at math and such. I wish I knew Russian, Chinese and Spanish because I'd love to travel to old USSR republics, China and other Asian countries and South America. Knowing the most spoken languages in the world would be amazing I imagine. And I wish I knew Norwegian because I love the language and the country so much. Plus, you can communicate in Denmark and Sweden too. But luckily now we have Google translate so I could communicate even though I don't have shared languages with where I want to go.

  • The second part is easy to answer:

    1. German
    2. Polish
    3. Swedish
    4. English
    5. Korean (just started learning.

    The first part is a bit more complicated, depending on what you are actually asking, where and who you are.

    • If you're asking where I live then it's Korea.
    • If you're asking where I came from to Korea then it's Sweden where I lived for 15 years
    • If you're asking what nationality I feel I belong to with my heart then it's Germany where all my ancestors are from
    • If you're asking where I was born then it's Poland

    I hope you his answers your question.

    • Not completely, there are 2 Korea's. But since internet access in one is extremily limited, I can make an educated guess in which one you live right now.

      Nice track record by the way.

  • US. Fluent in English but I can speak enough spanish to do most everyday things. I am learning Japanese, and while I can read and understand about half of it, I can't pronounce shit and haven't bothered practicing since I just want to read it.

  • UK, trying not to be a typical one-language Anglo by learning German. I'm thankful there seems to be a large German community on Lemmy!

  • Ireland. First language English, second Irish (but only in the education system), learning Russian

  • American, English only but I need to learn Burmese as that's where my daughter-in-law is from. Can't have hypothetical grand kids speaking a language I don't know.

  • I'm from the UK and speak English and am fluent in British Sign Language. I can speak enough French and Spanish to navigate a short holiday, which means I suck at both.

  • Also US

    English of course

    I took a few years of French in middle and high school, not much of it stuck. A couple basic words and phrases, and if they speak slowly and clearly I can usually get the gist of what someone is saying and fake my way through some reading.

    The story of my French education is a mess, full of long term substitutes, substitute-substitutes, a sad lonely man whose spirit was absolutely broken by the kids who had him first semester before I had him and got fired a couple weeks before the end of the school year, and a lady who was absolutely baffled by the fact that her French 3 class barely spoke any French because the first 2 years of our French education was a total waste.

    A handful of Spanish words and phrases from middle school "exploratory" Spanish class for a couple months and working in a warehouse for a few years where I was one of only a handful of native English speakers, but nowhere close to conversational.

    And I've been teaching myself Esperanto, which has been going rather well. It's hard to say how conversational I am because there's not a whole lot of esperantists running around to chat with, but I'm reading at probably about a 2nd grade level, which is something I suppose.

  • South Africa and pretty much just English. Apparently I was fairly fluent in Zulu when I was little kid, before starting school and losing it. And we learnt Afrikaans in school but Afrikaans kids went to Afrikaans schools and I grew up and lived in English speaking areas so it was never used. If I tried to speak Afrikaans now, I would embarrass myself but I can mostly read it and understand someone if they're talking slow enough and I'm concentrating hard enough.

    Honestly something that pisses me off is that despite going through school in the 'new' South Africa, the new government never bothered making sure we learnt to communicate with each other. So instead of learning Zulu and being able to freely communicate with the majority of the population, we learnt Afrikaans because they never fucking bothered to change it.

    I can also understand very small bits and pieces of written and spoken German from high school but that's barely worth mentioning. Also, I can kinda sometimes understand a little bit of written Dutch because it's remotely similar to Afrikaans.

    • Zulu is an awesome language! I've heard it spoken before. It seems difficult to learn from an outsider. Maybe I'm wrong. Afrikaans is interesting to me because it's a Germanic creole language. I've heard it's the easiest to learn Germanic language in the world.

      • Yeah, Zulu is a different beast to European languages. I suppose as different to English as certain Asian languages would be. It also borrows from English and Afrikaans though, for certain Western words and concepts that weren't in the vocabulary before. And there's still nouns and verbs and tenses and shit, so it follows the same basic rules / concepts as any language.

        As for Afrikaans, funnily enough I'm actually living in a part of the country now where some fluency would've been useful. Luckily you seem to be able to get by with just English just about anywhere though.

  • I’m from the US and English is my native language. I took French in high school and minored in it in college and was actually pretty fluent in it for a while. A decade after graduating I married a native French speaker from Quebec, but our semiannual trips to Quebec to visit her parents now remind me just how much fluency I’ve lost. I’m still fine in common daily tasks but get into a deeper conversation and I start floundering.

    I used to work in a technical role at a Spanish-language TV station and picked up some, but that’s also disappearing now ten years on.

    I guess it’s a use it or lose it situation.

  • Dutch but I live in England. Speak Dutch an English fluently and French and German reasonably well.

  • From Germany and know German and English. I can read Dutch and understand snippets but speaking it is beyond me.

  • 日本人です、日本語しか話せないのであえてここも日本語で書きます

    ※普段は機械翻訳をつかってます

    ちなみに、一般的な日本人の殆どは日本語以外を話すことはできません、日本の英語教育はあまり意味をなしていません

  • Brazil. Fluent in Portuguese and English, though I understand a tiny little bit of Dutch. I can understand Spanish sometimes because of similarities between it and Portuguese.

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