How many languages do you speak?

[Laura PourMeADrink]

Karl Lagerfeld, fashion guru, who just died, said that if you didn't know 3 languages you were a hick.

[sinkingfeeling]

1. I'm a hick.

[COLGATE4]

2. Three. English, Spanish and French

[Laura PourMeADrink]

4. Wow.. impressed. I took five years of French and

Was just looking at Rosetta Stone on eBay to get it back. How did you learn?

[COLGATE4]

11. I took four years of French in H.S. and three

in College. I learned Spanish by marrying a Colombian girl and living and working in Latin America for 20+ years.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

47. Interesting. You've got two more years than I do. Was 7 enough? Did you follow up?

I do remember the moment at some point were you start thinking in French. It’s like an epiphany..like the moment you figure out how to ride a bike.

[COLGATE4]

70. Unfortunately I wasn't able to follow up since I wound up

working and living in Latin America. The French did come back when we were in France a couple of years ago - I actually astounded myself with how much I still understood and was able to communicate (although most Frenchmen in Paris give you "that" look and then answer you in immaculate English!)

[mikeysnot]

34. Duolingo

My wife used it to brunch up on her French. You can try the free app out to see if you like it. She bought the one year subscription because she uses it everyday.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

46. Thanks!

[GulfCoast66]

90. RS worked for me. In French

Had never taken any French and while I am hardly fluent my wife was shocked at how much I could say and understand in French our first time in France. That was after 15 straight months of 2-3 hours per week.

I practice up for 3-4 months before each trip now and am good to go. If I did it 4 times a week religiously and had someone to practice with I am confident I could become fluent.

[dameatball]

3. I speak fluent English and passable Northeastern Tennessee Hick.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

6. Lol. Speak some northeastern Tenn hick for us!!!

[dameatball]

10. Sorry, but I am in SW Virginia this morning .....:)

[Duppers]

74. 'hant gonna do hit.

Close enough. My apologies.

[jberryhill]

5. English, Spanish and Gibberish

[Laura PourMeADrink]

7. Did you learn gibberish from trump?

[jberryhill]

9. No, I use it extensively in my work

[panader0]

26. Oh... a lawyer eh?

I always read your posts. I respect your legal knowledge. Thanks.

[jberryhill]

32. I include it in arbitration clauses

"All disputes arising under this Agreement shall be submitted to binding arbitration to be conducted exclusively in Gibberish."

[Alwaysna]

8. English, American Sign Language and hillbilly.

[unblock]

12. A ton! C, c++, FORTRAN, pascal, modula-2, Java, assembly, sql,....

[Laura PourMeADrink]

48. Good one!

[alwaysinasnit]

64. Excellent. I am truly impressed. BTW, I used to speak COBOL. haha

[Dawson Leery]

77. ROFL!

[AJT]

79. Cobol, PL/1,REXX,CLIST

Ahhh, the mainframe

[Siwsan]

13. Conversationally, just English, Canadian and American, but I am multilingual in profanities

[dubyadiprecession]

58. You use four letter words in Canadian?

I hear Canadians swear by them.

[Dale Neiburg]

14. Fluently, English and French

Much less fluently, German, Ukrainian, Welsh.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

49. Oh. My grandparents were from the Ukraine. When my dad was coming out of operation

He started speaking it fluently. Normally he only knows a couple words.

[Dale Neiburg]

60. My late wife was from Ukraine also.

She taught me a little -- enough to impress my mother in law. MiL and I were always very polite around each other as I was never sure how much English she understood and she was never sure how much Ukrainian I understood. We got along very well....

[Laura PourMeADrink]

66. Oh so sorry about you losing your wife DN !

I would give just about anything to see my grandparents
Again and to ask them more about their life there. And what the trip to Ellis island was like. You don't think of these things when you are very young.

[blaze]

15. What do you call a person who speaks three languages?

Trilingual.

What do you call a person who speaks two languages?

Bilingual.

What do you call a person who speaks one language?
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
American!!!

[IrishEyes]

39. What do you call a person who can't speak one language correctly?

The president.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

50. DUzy!!

[bobbieinok]

16. English, German. Read French after 5 yrs in HS, college yrs ago

[NRaleighLiberal]

17. Three. English, music and tomatoes

[panader0]

29. Hey man--you should put your book title in your sig.

I just looked for it and couldn't tell which one was yours.
NRaleighLiberal is an author of a great book about heirloom tomatoes
C'mon, you deserve it.

[TEB]

18. Polish and Russian my grandparents were immigrants

And in the 1980s enough conversational German to get by with army stationed in west Germany. And I grew up coalfields Appalachian Pennsylvania so I was a hick by birth.

[bluecollar2]

19. Four

English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

It has been very useful over the years.

[onetexan]

20. 2 & a half, & i still feel inadequate re: my linguistic skills

Compared to my professional colleagues in europe & elsewhere

[FakeNoose]

21. Almost all Europeans can speak at least 3 languages

I'm sure that's what Lagerfeld was referring to when he said that. I'm moderately fluent in German, and I still remember a tiny amount of Spanish from high school (50 years ago) and this probably puts me in the 90th percentile for Americans. I believe that our collective weakness in language fluency has really damaged American credibility in the world's eyes.

[mitch96]

62. "Almost all Europeans can speak at least 3"

Agreed.. My Mom only had an 8th grade education (Slovak, came here at 6 mos) but spoke 6 languages... She grew up in western PA and spoke Slovak at home, went to a Russian religious school, Was an Au pair in Europe and spoke French and Spanish. Don't remember the other two.. She would curse me out multilingually when I REALLY pissed her off.. Funny as hell..
m

[democratisphere]

22. English, Android, Windows and Pig Latin.

Capable Genius.

[ProfessorGAC]

23. 1.5

Obviously, English, and enough Italian that I can get by in that country.
But, I have to translate 80-90% of every word I hear or say from English to Italian or the reverse.
So, I'm awfully slow.
That's why I say only one & a half languages.
I also know the Russian alphabet, but only know less than 50 words. If it's that many. So I don't count that at all.

[2naSalit]

24. Well that depends...

I have used over eleven languages in my time in musical performance, and then there's music itself. I speak English and was once fairly adept at conversational French but I wouldn't claim that now. I can read and comprehend about four languages.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

25. English, Minnesotan and Cat.

Some German and Norwegian, which I can read much better than I can speak. I've sung in those languages (except for Cat) plus Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Provençal, Swedish, Icelandic, Old Church Slavonic, Greek, Mandarin and Hebrew. So I know some words in those languages, but singing doesn't really count.

[True Dough]

27. Karl Lagerfeld

is also leaving up to $20 million to his cat.

I only know one language. But in relation to the above, I say:

CRAZY!

FOU!

VERRUCKT!

LOCO!

クレージー!

[pnwest]

28. English, Dutch, Doggie, and enough

Spanish to get my point across...

[ret5hd]

30. I speak gibberish fluently.

[MissMillie]

31. Does pig-latin count?

otherwise... just the one.

I used to work at a prestigious college where many of the students came from abroad and I was always impressed how many of those students spoke multiple languages.

Kind of makes you wonder why so many people get up in arms about whether or not people here in this country speak English.

[kennetha]

33. I've studied lots of them

besides English, I studied French in High School, Portuguese as an exchange student in Brazil, Russian in college, Ancient Greek and German in grad school.

English is my native tongue. I can still speak passable German. French I still speak a little, but only haltingly. Portugueses and Russian I now speak hardly at all. Ancient Greek ... well you don't really speak that ... you just read ancient texts. But I can't do that anymore.

Europeans speak many more languages than most Americans do.

[Aristus]

35. English, German, and steadily-improving Spanish.

I should go around speaking Spanish in public places, just to see which right-wing fuckheads are going to call the police on me.

[CaptainTruth]

36. English, a decent amount of Spanish, & learning Italian.

My wife is Italian & we visit her family a couple times a year so I'd love to be better at Italian. Thankfully it's about 90% the same as Spanish.

My wife was an art history & languages major, today is a professional translator, & speaks Italian, English, French, & German, & when we visit history museums she reads the Greek & Latin inscriptions to me.

I have no idea why such a smart woman married a guy like me, I'm just really glad she did.

[SKKY]

37. I must be a hick then. I only speak Spanish and English...

[IrishEyes]

38. Do Klingon, Ewokese, Elvish, Dothraki and Na'vi Count?

I can speak and understand Spanish, French and Italian pretty well. I'm currently learning Japanese. I tried Irish and Welsh. They were difficult but I may try again someday. I would also like to learn Norwegian and Swedish. I like studying languages and learning new words.

[DFW]

41. Swedish is incredibly easy if your native language is Engish

A bonus is that Norwegian is so similar, they are, for all practical purposes, mutually intelligible.

[IrishEyes]

42. Yeah, I studied a little Swedish before I visited there.

That is one of the reasons that studying the language appealed to me. Danish is also supposed to be similar. I want to visit Denmark and Norway someday.

[DFW]

43. WRITTEN Danish is similar

Spoken, it's sort of like being in area where cell phone coverage is spotty, and words are cut off after you have spoken half of them. Another way of putting it is describing Danish as Swedish spoken with a mouth full of mashed potatoes.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

69. Danish is weird.

I've been studying Norwegian for a couple of years now, and it is fairly easy, in considerable part because its grammar and word order are a lot like English. Like any language, speaking is a little more difficult. To complicate matters a bit, Norwegian has many dialects and two official written languages: Bokmål, which is used by the majority and is more closely related to Danish, and Nynorsk, which is used in some of the areas in the western part of the country. Nobody actually speaks each of them; though, except tv broadcasters; they use their own dialects that are based on these written languages. But at least Bokmål-based dialects are pretty understandable.

So, back to Danish. I've been watching a lot of Norwegian tv series and movies on the various streaming services in order to learn more vocabulary and get more comfortable with pronunciation (if you have Netflix, watch Occupied; it's excellent). Occasionally I also branch out into Swedish and Danish shows. So I was watching a Danish murder mystery based on one of the Department Q novels, and I could hardly understand anything they were saying because they swallow their Rs and make other strange sounds - until the serial killer villain turned up, who spoke Norwegian and was clearly understandable. The contrast between the sounds of the two languages was really striking when I heard them side-by-side, even though the words were almost identical.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

53. Totally impressed IE !!!!! What a cool thing to do! Do you have

A method/tool that you like?

[IrishEyes]

54. I study on Duolingo every day.

There are lots of other great websites to learn a language. I can help you find some good resources if you let me know what language you are interested in learning.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

57. Wow thanks. Going on vacation but will message you when I get back.

[TuxedoKat]

86. Ohh

I’m very interested in the websites too having studied French, Spanish, German, Italian and Mandarin. French is my best language. Any websites to recommend for Italian, Spanish or Mandarin?

[DFW]

40. I guess I'm not a hick

I speak English, Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, Swedish, French, Italian, German (Zürich dialect and high German) and Russian.

I also know smatterings of Croatian, Greek, Portuguese, Basque (Euskera), Tagalog, Polish, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish, and Japanese, but just enough to surprise the natives, not enough to hold a serious conversation.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

52. jasna cholera !

Holy Mackarel in Polish

[DFW]

61. Ja wiem, ja wiem

But if I have to converse, it's really only the nine I mentioned above. I get a few smiles with my few words of the others, but I can't hold a conversation in any of them. I can even say a word or two in a few others (Kurdish, Hungarian, Arabic), but not even enough to know what is said in return.

Still, even a few words mean that you know about their language and you cared enough to learn a word or two. People rarely expect that in Americans because they rarely GET that kind of respect from Americans.

But I DO have some fun at times. At the hotel I usually stay at in Brussels last week, there was a new employee at the check-out counter. A colleague of hers, who is from Macedonia, and with whom I speak my few phrases of Croatian, was at the counter, too. I asked the new woman where she was from, and she said Sweden. I said, OK, well, then she could speak Swedish to me. Me, being a dumb American, she just laughed and said "yeah, right, I don't think so." Her Macedonian colleague assured her I could indeed speak Swedish. She still didn't believe it. I told her to say something in Swedish. She asked "what?" I said, tell me in Swedish that you don't think I can speak Swedish. She did. I then answered, "Varför tror du att jag inte kan svenska? Jag pratar svenska flyttande!" (Why don't you think I know Swedish? I speak Swedish fluently!) She nearly fell over backwards, and said she had never heard an American speak Swedish fluently and practically without an accent before. I told her, yes, you probably did, but you never realized it was an American because you were so convinced we were incapable of learning your language. THAT gave her food for thought.

We Americans are not more stupid than people from other countries, just mostly too arrogant to think we need to learn other languages. Maybe many of us don't NEED to, but other languages give you a free window into other cultures you never get otherwise, expansion of mental horizons, if you will. For that matter, if I had never learnd German, I would never have met and married the woman of my dreams. That alone was reason enough! We raised our daughters bilingually (I only spoke to them in English, and my wife only spoke to them in German) on purpose so they could automatically be at home in two languages and two cultures, and it was well worth the effort.

Even if you don't NEED to learn another language, everyone SHOULD.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

65. Very interesting. I am anxious to learn a new

Language (maybe Italian? Or Polish) and to revive my French! What a cool thing to do and good for your brain.

Are some easier to learn than others?

Perhaps Europeans are more multi-lingual since they are geographically so close to each other and there are many open borders???

[DFW]

67. If you want an easy task, try Swedish

It's REALLY easy if English is your native language. Our professor spoke Swedish to us from day one in college, and by the end of the year, we could all pretty much hold our own in conversation. I was in Sweden the summer before I entered college, and went back a year later, after my first year of Swedish in college, and they couldn't believe it. They had all convinced themselves that their language was so difficult, and yet, it really isn't. You don't even have to conjugate verbs. In Swedish it's always the same form for 1st, 2nd and 3rd person, both singular AND plural!

As for the Europeans, you are exactly right. Germany, for example borders on ten other countries. Cross the German border, and you can hear, Danish, Dutch, French, Letzeburgisch (Luxembourgish), Schwyzerdüütsch (Swiss German), Czech and Polish. Austria borders on parts of the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, Germany and Italy. Etc. Etc. Etc. If you are in Brussels, drive for 3 hours in any direction, and you are in the Netherlands or Germany or Luxembourg or France or drowning in the North Sea. Switzerland is only somewhat bigger than Connecticut, and has FOUR official languages. With that kind of proximity, a European has to be REALLY insular to speak only one language.

I find the Romance Languages fairly similar and easy (French, Italian, Catalan, Spanish), except for Portuguese (pronunciation) and Romanian (also Latin-derived, but 2 millenia of totally different development and influences). The Germanic languages--EXCEPT for German, which retains some antiquated declensions--are also relatively easy. Dutch (Nederlands) is closest to German, where the Scandinavian languages are much closer to English. Don't get fooled by geographical proximity! Finnish and Hungarian aren't European languages except for geography. Linguistically, they are no more similar to European languages than Kyrgyz.

Beyond those two, I find Japanese to be the biggest challenge, as it is spoken backwards (for our western brains), just as European languages are spoken backwards as far as a Japanese is concerned.

[kairos12]

44. Spanish and German.

[bif]

45. A little French and Italian. But I can swear in a number of languages!

[DonViejo]

51. Three; English, Spanish and Thai

[Laura PourMeADrink]

55. Impressed! I was just thinking...if I were truly as multi-lingual

As Malaria claims she is, I would give a couple speeches/talks to different groups. But I saw her website showing she graduated with a degree in architecture before it disappeared and they then said she went for one year?

[lunamagica]

56. Two, English and Spanish, so I guess I'm a hick :(

.

[sakabatou]

59. Besides English, I can do Japanese (from hearing/translation)

and Hebrew (reading only).

[fierywoman]

63. English, Music, Italian, Spanish (1/2), German (1/4) and some very vile slavic curse words.

[ailsagirl]

68. Three

German
Spanish
English

Working on Scottish Gaelic (a tough one)

[Laura PourMeADrink]

71. Wow. How cool are u

[ailsagirl]

83. Not terribly, really

I took Spanish in school
I lived in Germany for a year

But I wouldn't say I'm fluent (I should have added that to begin with)

And Scots Gaelic? Pie in the sky, methinks!!

[ProudLib72]

72. Yiddish, Hebrew, English

Some Spanish. A tiny bit of Irish. A tiny bit of Russian. I had a year of Arabic in grad school and somehow made "A"s.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

75. Are you a math wizard? Doesn't that go hand in hand?

I was thinking about tackling my ancestor language. Russian, Polish or Ukrainian. Isn't it immensely more difficult to have to learn a new alphabet too?

[ProudLib72]

80. Actually, I am pretty good at math

I taught myself the Hebrew alphabet when I was learning Yiddish. That wasn't too difficult. Cyrillic isn't so bad. Arabic is tough! You would think that, since I knew another Semitic language, Arabic would be easy. Not so!

[Duppers]

73. I'm a hick. 😁

2

[yuiyoshida]

76. Ni- 二

Two

Watashi wa nihongo to eigo ga hanasemasu. 私は日本語と英語が話せます。

btw...
I have a friend who speaks five languages ..English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese
and Korean.

[applegrove]

78. Two. English and french. The french comes back to me when i am immersed.

[Dave in VA]

81. 3

English, Spanish, French.

English (given)
Spanish, 3 yrs HS, 3 semesters in college
French, wife worked for a french company so hired a personal tutor so I wouldn't be the "stupid American" sitting in the corner at company events.

I have learned that the more wine I drink at diner the better my spanish/french gets!

I try to practice each of them for a few minutes each day. Just conjugate a verb or two!

[guillaumeb]

82. 3. French, English, and passable German.

My hometown is very rural.

[beveeheart]

84. English and French

[Wolf Frankula]

85. English, Some Euskara and Afrikaans.

I took Spanish and German in school. But forgot most of them because I never had a chance to use them.

Wolf

[madamesilverspurs]

87. One.

And that's after three years of French I in high school. Hick I am, yeah? I'm told that my lack of language ability is related to my inability to read music or do complex math. Whatevah.

My cousin, on the other hand, is fluent in half a dozen languages and can get by in a dozen more; comes in handy when you're in international banking.


.

[Lionel Mandrake]

88. I speak 1.111 languages.

English, 0.1German, 0.01French, and 0.001Spanish, where 0.1 means ein bisschen, 0.01 means un tout petit peu, and 0.001 means un poquititito. I could copy DFW if, like a cat, I had nine lives.

[area51]

89. I know a little Spanish, Welsh, and American Sign Language. n/t

[Wounded Bear]

91. Two...American English and profanity...