How Many Languages Do You Speak? (1 Viewer)

How many languages do you speak?

  • Total voters
    102
Spanish, French and English.

I can understand Italian and Portuguese if they talk to me, but never try to answer with a sentence.
 
Just one.

Couldn’t tell you a word of Scotland’s other language, Gaelic. I could tell you more Doric words (and that’s an incomprehensible dialect).

Currently in France with my hopeless pigeon French. Most people I speak to reply in a English. Doh.
 
I've got a year of baby talk under my belt. I'm getting pretty good at it.

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Regrettably, only one, English. As a know it all redneck in high school I always thought I would return to the middle of nowhere Kansas after college, and would not have a need to learn another language. While I still live in Kansas it is not my little bubble I grew up in. My lovely wife loves to travel, and we have gone to the Caribbean and Mexico many times, something i would have never dreamed of in my omniscient adolescence, at least knowing spanish would be handy at times. I've tried to learn on my own several times but just can't stick with it.

After looking the poll, it is somewhat nice to know there are others with only one
 
I actually voted 3, English, Mandarin and French. My French is rusty but I took French immersion for 7 years then FSL for another 5, but haven't spoken much of it since high school though.
 
This is a serious question for those of you who only speak one language and have small children.

How do you discuss things with your spouse that you don't want your children to hear? For example, I can't just ask my wife "Hurdy gurdy gurdy?" in front of my children, I'll instead ask in English "What do you think, shall we take them to the playground?". I mean, if the kids understand the question and the wife says no, then they'll throw a tantrum!

For that reason, me and the Mrs use english for secretive talk. How do you monolinguals solve it?
 
BELGRADE said:
I speak :

-French
-English
-Serbian
-Croatian
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Now that I 'm thinking this over, you actually also speak "Montenegrin" and "Bosnian":LOL: :laugh:
(I also speak Epirot, Cretan, Cypriot, Thessalian, Macedonian, Cycladic and Peloponesian):D
 
German or swiss german is my mother tongue, learned french in the french speaking part of switzerland and use it a lot at work. I know english from my exchange year in the US way back.
And i know basic spanish, from the pablo escobar netflix series.. Muy peligroso, plata o plomo.
 

ok, put me down for Love, English, Music, Spanglish, and Pig Latin. Sometimes I am good at sign language when another driver pisses me off.
 
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You could drop me in Australia or New Zealand and I’d probably manage.
 
I checked 3 for Danish, English and German. I used to talk Italian and French too, but it's too rusty to reasonably count.

I understand Norwegian and Swedish with little trouble and could possibly speak it better than I speak German, but it would still be half-Danish. So I didn't count it.

I read a bunch of languages, Germanic and Romance, enough to rarely have to ask for directions, and I didn't count that either.
 
I checked 2 for English and German.

I had 7 years of French in school, but after years of not using it, I wouldn’t pretend I’m anywhere near even conversational now.
 
Mr Winberg said:
This is a serious question for those of you who only speak one language and have small children.

How do you discuss things with your spouse that you don't want your children to hear? For example, I can't just ask my wife "Hurdy gurdy gurdy?" in front of my children, I'll instead ask in English "What do you think, shall we take them to the playground?". I mean, if the kids understand the question and the wife says no, then they'll throw a tantrum!

For that reason, me and the Mrs use english for secretive talk. How do you monolinguals solve it?
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My parents spoke "pig latin" in those cases. By the time I was old enough to figure it out, I was old enough to not throw a tantrum. I was also old enough to know that I shouldn't let them know that I cracked their code.

As for myself, my friends used to tease me, saying that English was not my native language. It was the only one I knew, but I frequently said things wrong, so it was said that it was not English.

Then, in the mid-1990's, before taking a trip to Germany I bought a book and learned the language. It took me about 2 months, and about 2 days of the trip to not just understand enough of the language, but was able to speak (what I was told) a perfect dialect. My vocabulary was limited, but I could carry on a conversation.

I tried the same thing before going to Iceland a couple years ago. It was nowhere as successful, but I was able to get off the regularly beaten tourist path and did fine - though nearly everyone wanted to speak English.

Today, I cant speak either one anymore (@abby99 is right, use it or lose it). I feel I could relearn quickly though.

Basically, If I'm going on a trip, I'll try to learn the native tongue, but learning is slower as I get older, and retention is a bummer.
 
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From middle school to college, I studied French for a total of about 7 years and still do not really speak it. I can read low-level French for the most part but am still very much a novice student with little to no ability to speak comfortably or understand spoken French. The extent of my French usage has been ordering drinks and snacks at Tim Horton's in Montreal a couple times.

In 2017 and 2018, I visited Peru twice for a total of 6 months, and I got better at Spanish during that time than I ever was at French, especially spoken. Now I'm married to the reason for my trips, and I get a fair amount of practice around the house with her, as well as playing games online with our friends (many of whom are from South America or otherwise speak Spanish).

I wouldn't describe myself as exactly fluent, but I'm at the point where I can listen and understand people pretty well, and I can engage in limited conversation. I'm also told my accent is pretty good for a gringo. One of the biggest points where I realized I'd hit a turning point was when I started to recognize and form new words, without looking them up, based on my knowledge of the structure of the language and vocab from Latin-based words in English and French. I don't quite think in Spanish yet, but I'm getting there, and I practice more or less daily.
 

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