What languages do you speak?

Any method other than the elegant system we have in Chinese is needlessly convoluted! :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: Little kids actually learn math faster if their first language is Chinese (as opposed to, like, English) because counting is less confusing

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I speak English and vague touristy gestures that mainland europeans seem to understand if that counts? /j

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functionally i only speak english. i have held conversations (and successfully ordered gelato) in italian. i could attempt french. but most of my language energy is focused on reading latin and ancient greek, at which i am better than most people but not as good as i need to be if i want to progress academically.

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My first language is English. I studied French in my sophomore and junior year of high school but I’m not very good at speaking it. Stopped it in my senior year since 2 years was recommended so I didn’t feel like continuing it.

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I’d rather not say what my first language is as it has a fairly limited amount of native speakers and I don’t want to dox myself. I do consider myself a native English speaker despite it being my second language, as I learned it via immersion at a very young age (I lived in the US ages 4-5).

I learned French in school, but it was by far my worse subject. The only tests I ever failed were in French - and, in fact, I failed all my French tests but one (the one where I cheated and copies off a classmate). I hated it, and I remember nothing.

Other than that, I’m currently vaguely learning Welsh (picking things up here and there rather than doing it properly), and I’m as knowledgeable as can be expected with Vulcan (yes, the Star Trek language). I understand the grammar and only need to look up words about half the time, but it’s difficult to practise when there’s no one else who speaks it.

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I speak english, and that’s really about it.

I was required to take two years of a foreign language in high school, a long time ago, and took spanish. My first year was highly disrupted, with multiple teachers leaving, and it was all a long time ago, so right now mostly if someone was speaking slowly enough, I might pick up words, and I could probably say that I don’t speak spanish and ask where the bathroom is.

I’ve got a smattering of japanese words from both being into anime enough to pick some up and having been occasionally interested in learning it, but not really enough to get by.

Gaelic actually rather fascinates me, too, but more in a “listening to music in Gaelic” sense then actually learning it.

And I’m actually interested in the history of languages and how they work and the origin of words and such. Not to mention conlangs, since the idea of actually making a language is pretty interesting.

I also know assorted computer languages, but I’d imagine we aren’t counting those…

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It’s really interesting to me how different languages are taught in different places. In Germany, you have to take English from third grade until you finish school, so that’s up to eleven years depending on where you live and what degree you finish, with many taking advanced classes in the last two years since it’s one of the easier subjects for exams. If you’re doing the highest school degree (about half of the students do currently I believe) you have to take a third language (usually french or latin, occasionally spanish) from sixth to at minimum tenth grade.

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Monolingual English speaker unfortunately. Did some French in year 6-8 and 11 and can remember the basics even after a decade or so but that’s just about it

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Why can’t computer languages count? I think they should!

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Yeah once you get to 80 it gets weird, you basically have to say four twenties (blaze it) and then keep adding on until you get to 100 (cent). Like 99 would be quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (4x20) + 10 + 9

(Yes I mostly remember how to count in French over everything else. No this doesn’t say anything about me stop looking at my pfp /hj)

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I usually type them rather then speaking?

I’ve been using Python a fair amount lately, and C/C++ on and off. I’ve programmed in Ruby, various versions of Basic (Ranging from Super Extended Basic to Visual Basic for Applications), and a long time ago, Pascal and Hypercard. Little bit of javascript (and things like html and markdown and bbcode).

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My first language is German.

I do not have a talent for learning languages. I’ve always wanted to be able to speak more languages, but it is just so much harder for me to learn languages compared to other subjects (e.g., math, programming, etc.).

As it was a mandatory subject, I started learning English in school. For one year, we had a teacher who really challenged us. It helped tremendously. One of the best teachers I ever had. But sadly, after that year, we had a teacher who just mumbled and didn’t care about us learning anything. So when I finished school, I could not speak English at all.

Later at university, I started to read books in English. Tad Williams was just writing his Otherland series, and his final book wasn’t translated yet. So I bought the English one. Oh, dear! A testament to the quality of the story that it actually kept me reading. At that point, I also learned that translating every word is not viable and not necessary for understanding. Sentences can be understood without translating every word.

I got quite good at understanding written and spoken English by reading books and watching movies and TV series in English. But I could not speak or write whole sentences. It turns out passive and active language skills are, at least for me, completely independent abilities.

I guess I was forty years old when I first traveled to the UK. I got it in my head to visit a conference in Edinburgh. I had a piece of paper with pre-written text for the cab. I vividly remember how I tried—and finally succeeded—in explaining to the person at the reception of my hotel that I needed help to open the window (windows in the UK, or at least in the hotels I stayed over the years, are different from the ones I was used to in Germany, and I was afraid of breaking things, LOL).

And still, I was not able to really speak English.

A few years back, I moved to Austria for a while and started working for an international company. And they just threw me into it. I’ll never forget the first workshop I had to facilitate with a group of people from Austria and people from India (remote, in English). :upside_down_face:
Let’s just say, I survived, and I’ve get the feeling that nowadays I am actually able—slightly dependent on how tired I am and grammar is still a problem—to hold conversations with people in English. Not perfect, but often good enough.

That all just goes to show—one’s never too old to learn new things, even without talent for it. :slight_smile:

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My mother language is Russian.
All my life I’ve been learning English so I’m kinda good in it (C1), but I’m still improving it in order to move in Europe.
Also I know Italian (around A2 level) and a little Serbian (A1) because of living in Serbia. And I want to learn more languages from more common (like German, Spanish and French) to less (Dutch and Japanese)

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My first language is Swedish. I learned English in school, by playing video games and watching movies. I have studied Spanish in school and Costa Rica. But language is not my speciality and I am not very good at it.

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Honestly, they should. I’ve recently had to learn some python by myself because our professor just sort of threw tasks at us and it is really hard.
For me, math also feels like a language, just the way my brain processes it with that sort of intuitive understanding you get eventually feels precisely the same

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I would argue that natural languages are different from programming languages. I started with Prolog as a teen, then moved on to Turbo Pascal (later Delphi), different BASIC dialects, C, Fortran, COBOL, C++, C#, Java, HTML, various scripting languages, …
All were easy to learn for my mathematicians brain.

But when it comes to natural languages, I still learned just one additional language besides my first one. Maybe it’s just me, but I always felt like the theoretical ability to describe language mathematically did not equate to being able to learn the language quicker.

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English, and, well, that’s it.

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English is my ‘native’ language, but I speak bits and pieces of Polish coming from a Polish immigrant family. I speak and study Spanish and German at university, too. I’d probably say my Spanish is the stronger of the two.

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You’re probably right in that programming languages are more like scripts, just a different way of expressing something.

I say maths itself is a bit like a language to me because it’s got an underlying structure (logic, rules) and a sort of grammar (with the way proofs are structured, what sort of proofs you can use, quantifiers). And I think it forms the way you understand the world and different concepts in it, the same way a language would. But all of this is just coming from me, and I’m pretty talented at both languages and maths, so it might just be the way my brain works :sweat_smile:

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I’ve got English as my first language. I learned French and German to A level standard (exams at age 18), but that was some thirty years ago now so I’ve forgotten a lot. I can read them much better than I can speak them.

I had a couple of years recently learning Scottish Gáidhlig because I wanted to move to the Highlands, but we have ended up in South Wales so I’m now learning Welsh instead!

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