What languages do you speak?
Alternatively, in the languages I speak:
Welche Sprachen sprechen Sie? (Deutsch/German)
¿Qué idiomas habla usted? (Español/Spanish)
Quelle langue parlez-vous? (Français/French)
EDIT: These sentences are now up to date.
I only speak two languages: English and bad English.
Aw, I was gonna make that joke
straylian, and that's about it.
Was Sprachen Sie spricht? (Deutsch/German)
I'm not a native speaker, but I'm pretty sure it's
Welche Sprachen sprechen Sie?
assuming you want to be formal, which feels a little weird to me in the context of an internet forum.
Edit: but to answer your question: fluent English, mehr als ein Bißchen Deutsch, y un poquito Español.
ein Bißchen Deutsch
BTW, this should be written as:
ein bisschen Deutsch
We switched from ß to ss in all words with a preceding short vowel in 1996: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschreibung_von_1996
So, it's "Fuß" and "Maß", because those are pronounced with a long vowel, but then "Fass" and "muss" and "Biss", because those are pronounced with a short vowel.
And in this case, "bisschen" is spelled with a small "b" for reasons that I'm not entirely sure are logical. 😅
It would be spelled with a capital letter, if "Bisschen" was a unit of measurement here (i.e. a small bite), like a "Liter" is.
But because it was used so much and without really referring to a specific measurement, it eventually began being spelled lowercase, similar to "wenig" or "etwas" ("ein wenig Deutsch", "etwas Deutsch"). Apparently, this kind of word is called an "Indefinitpronomen".
https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/bisschen
vs.
https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bisschen (much rarer)
Thanks! It's surprisingly difficult to get Germans to correct me on things. Most of them are just happy that I can speak it at all, so they tell me not to worry about the little stuff. 😂
It is indeed normal to use 'du' pretty much everywhere on the internet. Even in French i never see 'vous' (which to me feels more common than Sie in German usually).
I would like to know how a native german speaker would say it. But I would say like you
Well, if I were to post it to a community on e.g. feddit.org, I would write it as:
Welche Fremdsprachen sprecht ihr so?
"Fremdsprachen" just means "foreign languages", since I know that responding folks speak German.
Then "sprecht ihr" rather than "sprechen Sie", because addressing a group of people with direct pronoun is unusual in German.
As someone else already said, using "Sie" is also far too formal for this context. People refer to each other as "Du" on most of the internet.
But "Welche Sprachen sprichst Du?" still gives me vibes of a marketing firm hoping to drive engagement by referring to people directly.
And then the "so", I have no idea what that is linguistically, but it basically makes the question more casual. It invites for people to tell a story or to have a chat.
French, English, German and a little spoken Japanese. I also studied latin
Edit: in French we say: « Quelles langues parlez-vous ? »
(Or, let's be honest, more likely « Quelles langues parles-tu ? »)
No, it is odd to use the singular imho. Of course it is not the polite form
Eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/6ocn38/quelles_langues_%C3%A9trang%C3%A8res_parlez_vous/
t'parl'qu'a?
English and ɥsolƃuƎ uɐᴉlɐɹʇsn∀
Was Sprachen Sie spricht? Welche Sprachen sprechen Sie? (Deutsch/German)
/\ that's the more formal way of addressing either a single person or multiple (yeah, this formal pronoun is a bit weird and can be read multiple ways). If you wanna address a group of people more informally: "Welche Sprachen sprecht ihr?".
And thanks to my Swedish, I can read a surprising amount of Danish and Norwegian.
I would call myself proficient in French, passable in Spanish, barely functional in Swedish, and I can get by in German in a very banal emergency. 😉
“à l’école”, but otherwise flawless. You don’t see complex sentences with properly conjugated verbs from a lot of second language speakers, so I have a feeling your French is indeed pretty good.
Mostly self study from a variety of sources. I lived part time in Stockholm for four years, but it was far easier than I'd expected to speak only English, so although my reading and writing improved, my speaking and listening didn't. Every time I tried, they switched to English on me. I don't blame them.
Now I'm a bit stuck: I can't find much to listen to that's at my level. I'm past the beginner stuff but can't keep up with Swedish spoken at full speed.
Jag lär mig svenska i fler är 10 år
That sentence, while clear on what you want to communicate, is quite clearly not written by a native Swede.
I am a native Swede and this is how I would reformat it:
"Jag har studerat Svenska i mer än 10 år."
If I wanted to be less formal I'd use the slang "pluggat" instead of "studerat"
"Jag har pluggat Svenska i mer än 10 år."
Unsurprising. I'm still well in the stage where I'm formulating thoughts in English, then translating into Swedish. Very occasionally something pops out spontaneously, fully-formed, and in Swedish.
I'm mostly thrilled to have got "i" right there, because I haven't quite memorized i/på with time expressions. It will come.
How well does your formulation convey the nuance that I've been learning (off and on, often passively), but often not actively studying? The verbs "att studera"/"att plugga" feel more to me like actively working, but of course, my feelings in this regard are more about English "study" than those Swedish words.
No notes on your German. It sounds more formal than when I'd tell a friend but it def sounds right to me.
Thank you. What little I can speak or write is very firmly 1980s textbook German.
Welche Sprache sprechen Sie*
Welche SpracheN with n
Fair point.
Was für eine Sprache du sprichst.
Keine Verständliche
I'm able to speak German (native speaker) and English (fluent).
Also, as a German speaker, I'd like to correct the question in the post:
Formal would be "Welche Sprachen sprechen Sie?".
More fitting for a casual environment (such as Lemmy) would be "Welche Sprachen sprecht Ihr?" though :)
This is, because in German there are formal and informal ways of addressing people, both with their distinctive pronouns. Usually, when talking to people you don't know personally, you'll address them formally and then, when offered to, switch to the informal style once you know them. Online or among the younger generation it is much more common to just use the informal case though.
Welche Sprachen sprecht ihr?
Would be correct. The capital "Ihr" is used when addressing nobility.
Baguette, dutch, english and spanish, i love to speak all 4 equally but french is the equivalent of a having a migraine to write
Welche Sprache sprechen Sie?
Vee feel shpra her shprist doo, doo arsh lock
*Du... Benutzen wir Sie hier wirklich?
Situationsbedingt ist siezen besser. Nicht das ein User meint seinen Chef im deutschen Zweig zu beeindrucken :D
I know enough Spanish to embarrass myself. I know enough of Nahuatl to understand some glyphs. I speak English at an American level, which is greasy.
(Spanish):
Mi lengua materna es el español.
(English):
I speak English as my second language.
(French):
Je parle rançais aussi, me pas aussi bien que l'anglais. (Ouais je sais, ce n'était pas un accident)
(Japanese):
日本語も できるよ。2年ぐらい 勉強している。実際、去年 日本語能力試験を受けて、N4が できた。言語は 勉強の頑張れば、頑張るほど、よくできるよ。
(Russian?):
When I was in highschool I started learning russian, but since then I've forgotten most of it, I can only say hi, good (morning/afternoon/evening) and other easy things. I don't have a russian keyboard but it's 'Privyet', 'Dobraye utra', 'Dobrij bchyer', 'Spakoinai nochi', 'Spasiba', 'Izvinitye, ya nye ponimayu, ya nye goborit po-russkij', 'ya nichyevo nye snayu'.
(German?):
Ich lerne Deutch im Moment mit meine Freundin. Aber ich bin nicht gut.
Si quieres algunas observaciones... "¿Qué idiomas hablan ustedes?" Sería lo correcto (de acuerdo a la RAE). Creo que utilizaste la conjugación de la segunda persona singular del verbo hablar "tú hablas", en vez del plural "ustedes hablan". Et en français, je ne sais pas pourquoi, mais mon cerveau me dit que "¿Quelles langues parlez vous?" Va mieux. Und auf Deutch, ich denke dass "Welche Sprachen sprechen sie?" richtiger ist.
How do you learn kanji?
I lived for some time in Japan so I learned to talk and to read the kanji useful in the everyday life (like in the restaurant or the bus). But I feel like reading the news is still too hard and I do not even know where to start.
The best way to do it is to try reading an article and stop at every kanji you don't know to look it up. It's a slow process but the struggle's what makes it easier to remember. Maybe try it with manga first as the panels help give context to what's being said and the shounen stuff has hiragana above the kanji to help look it up.
I have a dictionary app called 'akebi' that shows me the words, the kanjis and the stroke order; and I also use google keyboard with the onscreen-drawing pad for japanese, so every kanji and kana I wrote on my previous comment was hand drawn by me. It takes a bit of time to get used to, but it really helps.
Also, learning about the origins of kanji, it's radicals and history helps a lot, you'll start creating connections in your head about pronunciation and meaning. You'll associate meaning and sound to kanjis a lot faster that way. I've come to the point of hearing a word, learning it's meaning and then I come up with the possible kanjis that make it up, and surprisingly I'm right 60 to 80% of the time!
Try calligraphy too. I learned all the kanjis that originated hiragana, and sometimes I see them in the wild and immediately know their pronunciation (60% of the time)
I'ts a matter of patience, and motivation, A LOT of motivation.
Bloß schwäbisch
𝔊𝔲𝔱𝔢𝔫 𝔄𝔟𝔢𝔫𝔡
Dutch, English, French and German.
With a sliver of Latin from school, so I do understand morsels of Italian and Spanish
Is dutch your first language? How hard was it to learn german?
Yes Dutch is my first language. German can be strange to learn, much of the vocabulary is similar, but sometimes strangely divergent. The grammar is more straightforward, and more rigid, but can be hard to learn. Gender of the words is just gambling as I'll never learn that by heart.
I much prefer french, tbh it feels more natural to me, maybe just because it's a bit more distant, linguistically. Therefore it feels like it runs on different hardware, mentally.
你會哪些語言？(Traditional Chinese)
That's about it. I am an interpreter and translator between English and Chinese.
Which Chinese language?
Mandarin. I can speak Taiwanese as well.
fluent in Maltese (native) and English. Conversational in Italian. I was one of the last generations to grow up without the internet, so we had to watch TV. And we're in close proximty to italy so we could get their channels. It is much less common nowadays for kids to also know Italian here. But people my age have no idea what Dragon Ball Z sounds like in english. We all watched it in Italian.
And I'm learning Korean now but it's so damn difficult it's very frustrating.
English is my native tongue.
J’ai appris la français à l’école.
Rŵan dw i’n trio dysgu Cymraeg!
How are you getting on with Welsh? What are you using and have you got anyone to practise with?
Mae o’n braf! I’ve been using SaySomethingIn’s Automagic Welsh tutor. It’s really nice for being able to set your own learning pace. I haven’t really practiced with anyone in earnest, but I did take a trip to North Wales earlier this year and did ok! They were shocked that an American would choose to learn Welsh
English and Scots Gaelic.
A bheil gàidhlid agad?
in addition to my native brazilian portuguese, i'm fluent in english and basic to intermediate level in spanish and french. i can understand and speak roughly some german and russian too (started the courses, but never finished). my objective is to someday learn both german and russian up to intermediate level, and then go for some arabic, mandarin, kongo, nheengatu (an old creole language that mixed tupi-guarani and portuguese) and esperanto.
Euskaraz hitz egiten dut. (Basque language: I speak Basque)
Spanish is also my mother tongue. As you can see, I also speak English.
Ustedes should be hablan
Pas parle Americano
Parlo italiano da madrelingua, and i speak english decently(mostly informal and internet/'murican slang).
I studied a little Spanish in middle school but forgot it, mostly.
Mi parolas la Esperanton tre malbone.
Greek, English, and I understand a bit of French, since my husband is French. I lived for 9 months in Germany too, and I could understand a bit of that too, but that was 30 years ago and I've forgotten most of it.
Truth is, I don't really like verbal communication, in any language. I have trouble finding words (including my native one), it's as if my brain is not optimized for language. It gets worse when I'm sick (I have multiple autoimmune issues), it's as if language becomes a barrier. My husband becomes aggravated when I can't find the right words to communicate. I wish we had telepathy, communicating with feelings.
English, Mandarin and fluent in C++
Into mixing different elixirs lately
Mi parolas iomete da Esperanton, y yo hablo tambien un poquito Español, pero medyo fluent ako sa Pilipino, ang wika taga sa Pilipinas. I’m pretty good at English, too.
Mi esperis vidi tro da esperantistoj en Lemmy!
I'm a native Portuguese speaker, fluent in English and can understand Spanish and French. Despite having had 3 years of French in school, I can no longer speak properly, and my writing is really bad, but I can understand pretty well. Spanish just comes to me because of the similarities with Portuguese, I never formally learned it.
Same as you, but little Japanese here...
School languages are absolutely worthless unless you kept practising afterwards. You generally aren't there wanting to learn and don't have natural conversation partnerships to practice with.
Yeah, exactly! I was quite amazed at how fast my French degraded after I stopped having classes.
My native language is French, but I also speak fluent English and a little 日本語 and Spanish.
日本語はもっと難しいだったな。 El español era más fácil de aprender gracias a sus similitudes con el francés, pero, no hablo muy bien😅.
Oh btw, it is not "Que langue fait-vous parler" (blind traduction of the english "What language do-you speak") but rather "Quelles langues parlez-vous?" ("What languages speaks-you?").
We don't use "do" for interrogative in french. The endings for "parler" (to speak) are: Je parle, tu parles, il parle, nous parlons, vous parlez, ils parlent. To make interogative phrases, just invert the pronoun and the verb: tu parles -> parles-tu? So "What language you speak" -> "What language speaks-you?". Sorry for the awkward course ;)
Ma langue maternelle est le français. Je suis né et vis au Québec, d’une famille canadienne française assez typique. Mes habiletés d’écriture sont plutôt fortes à en croire mes notes à l’école, mais je les pratique très peu. Je ne le parle pas aussi bien que je l’écris…
Otherwise I’m pretty proficient in English. I’d say I’m more or less bilingual at this point. I cannot seem to enjoy fiction books nearly as much in the language though. I can’t really appreciate the differences in style well enough, I think.
Allô!
As-tu été frappé par l'inondation lol
Je suis en Montérégie, c’est très plat dans mon coin, donc non, heureusement. Mais l’eau s’est accumulée un peu partout dans le coin pareil, à des endroits où j’en avais jamais vu…
Nederlands is my native language. And I speak English, some German and I can make a fool of myself in French. And I can order a beer in Spanish and thank you for it.
Fluent in Norwegian and English. Norwegian allows me to basically fully understand Swedish and Danish, but my mimicking/mocking of those languages does probably not count as languages I can speak.
I also have some very rusty german education which would probably allow me to be understood, but hardly enough to have a conversation.
English natively, but I also speak Spanish every day at work. I can read and write Latin. I can exchange pleasantries in half a dozen other languages.
!esp@lemm.ee for Spanish speakers
thanks, this is going to help with my exposure.
English, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati
Only reading: Japanese, Arabic, Russian
Can you say something about Urdu and Gujarati?
Samples from the four I know:
My name is Leni.
Nimi mi li Leni.
Hake anni Leni.
-- -.-- / -. .- -- . / .. ... / .-.. . -. .. .-.-.-
Samples from ones I know selectively:
O Leni to'u i'oa.
Ko Leni toku ingoa.
Meu nome é Leni.
Je m'appelle Léni.
English and my native Serbian.
Ich habe Deutsch in der Schule gelernt. Ich benutze es sehr seltsam, aber ich habe fast nichts vergessen, weil unsere Lehrerinen sehr sehr Böse war. Deutsch in der Schule hat meine Leben 10 jahren verkurtzt.
Έχω μάθει και τα Ελληνικά. Ένα από τα όνειρά μου είναι να διαβάζω τα κείμενα στα αρχαία ελληνικά, αλλά αυτό ήταν τρόπο δύσκολο. Γιατί αποφάσισε να μαθαίνω πρότω τα νέα Ελληνικα, καί σύντομα τα αρχαία είναι πολύ πιό εύκολα.
I can understand a fair amount of Russian, but I can't necessarilly speak it as well.
German, English, a little Dutch and Javascript
English. Poorly.
English, and the teeniest, tiniest bit of Spanish.
My Spanish is in a southern accent, and doesn't even reach the fluency of a damn toddler.
I have more latin under my belt from medical terminology, which I guess is sort of a language of its own. I've been out of the field for over a decade, and I still do well with it casually reading publications that interest me. But I don't really have enough of the latin to equate to being able to speak latin, or even read it. Same with the greek that's folded into medicalese.
So just english in any real sense, though I can kinda read Spanish well enough I guess, as long as I have access to a dictionary lol.
Polish
English
Learning German and Spanish
Cantonese (廣東話/粵語) is what I speak, Traditional Chinese (繁體中文) is what I write.
唔好彩嘅係，Google 仲未支援粵語翻譯，你可以試下用其他翻譯器，DDG 嗰個好似 OK
(Translation: Unfortunately, Google still doesn't support Cantonese translation. You can try other translators. The DDG one seems ok.)
Other than that, I also speak Mandarin (普通話/國語), which is the other spoken Chinese.
Russian, English and some Japanese.
พูดภาษาไทยได้ครับ ພາສາລາວດ້ວຍເດີ້
Ich spreche Deutsch, And I speak English, and I learn Russian.
Englisch deutsch français
Native English speaker. I learned some French in school and enough Japanese to get through a judo match. I struggle to retain other languages. Everywhere I go everyone speaks English and it's hard to justify learning a new one even everyone in a 1000 mile radius speaks English.
Greek, Dutch and English
Native English, conversational japanese, survival German (I was conversational at one point, but it's mostly gone), a tiny bit of french (same as German), very basic Spanish, and a tiny bit of Hebrew (I wanted to learn something in the semitic family and it seemed less intimidating than Arabic to start with)
Dutch, a funky dutch dialect, English and I understand German but I don't speak it. Should probably learn it.
Merican and a touch of Mexican
English and Turkish as native languages, I've also studied French as a prep-year for highschool so I can understand it but don't speak it fluently, same with Italian, somehow. Other than that I've been learning Mandarin for a year and I'll take the HSK 3 exam in a few months :D
In French, it's "Quelles langues parlez-vous?"
Yw! It's kinda weird we have to make "what" be gendered and plural depending on the word we're asking about lmao