As an Aussie my native language is obviously English. In primary school I learned Indonesian but can’t remember much except for a few numbers and how to say ‘good day’ (selamat siang, if you were wondering).
Throughout high school I took French and have actually tried to stick with it since then. I know enough at this point to struggle my way through books, or sort of understand things with subtitles, but I would love to be fluent one day.
In my first year of university I took a course on the native language of my city/region - Kaurna - but there aren’t actually any native speakers of this language and I can only say ‘hello’ and ‘my name is’ (niina marni, ngai nari… etc.)
Recently I have been studying in Belgium for the past four months so I know a few words in Dutch but all my classes are in English and everyone here just speaks to me in English so I haven’t really got the full immersion experience (probably for the best).
Ultimately fluency in one of these or any other language would be nice, I just want to say I speak two languages
Admittedly, I speak American and enough British to translate. Tiny bit of Spanish, and about as much Japanese as you get from watching subbed anime. And enough programming languages to be dangerous.
First language is English, learned French in school, know some ASL, and I’ve been trying to learn Anishinaabemowin but being a severely endangered language it’s not the easiest to find resources for. I guess technically I’m also learning klingon but that doesn’t count.
My first language is English, studied Spanish for 7 years so can understand that pretty well. I can then count to 10 in French, German, Japanese and Russian. I speak a bit of German too.
I tried learning Swedish so i can pronounce most of the Swedish letters and then there’s just foreign songs I’ve learnt phonetically too
I’m a native English speaker, and pretty much monolingual. I took French for six years, but I remember none of it, and I’m currently in my third year of studying Latin.
My first language is Russian, but I’m fluent in English now as it’s become my main language. I also used to have an intermediate level of Japanese (before I started learning English), though it’s gotten a bit rusty due to a lack of practice.
I started learning English when I was 21 because of Doctor Who, and improved it by listening to audio dramas and consuming lots of other DW content.
Fun fact: I actually found Japanese pronunciation easier to learn than English!
I’m not surprised, really. Japanese has a fairly limited set of syllables that all words are made from and they are pretty consistent, IIRC. English is anything but consistent.
Mind you, I can only really speak English. I just know a bit about a few other languages without having actually learned enough to really speak or read them… (And Spanish and Japanese are really the two I’d know the most about other then English.)
I’m gonna try and learn French again, firing up Duolingo…
I did it at school so I know lots of words but just find it impossible to string sentences together, and we live in France for a couple months in the year so I find it embarrassing that I can’t speak the language, especially as we are in the countryside and people here don’t speak much English.
My husband speaks it much better but he also does struggle.
We went to a memorial meeting in our village yesterday for VE Day and met people from the local area and I had such a difficult time understanding, although they all really appreciated us coming and tried their hardest to be understood!
I speak Moomin, Käärijä, Tian (quite well, if I put an effort into it), wannabe BillFiler (they are more like sounds that might sound right but don’t mean anything), and wannabe [redacted Scandinavian language that sounds very happy all the time] as well. I know a few words and phrases in French, Spanish and Italian.
I also speak, write, and read German, but my skills are rapidly deteriorating because I haven’t used it for many years. I studied German at school for six years and used to be very fluent. I still understand written German quite well but I’m not sure that I can produce very coherent texts or have very long conversations anymore.
I find the Swedish Chef so interesting. We never watched the Muppets growing up, and I discovered him as an adult. It is also kind of good as making it sound Swedish makes it seem like I am trying to understand what he says, but I can’t.
