What Languages Can You Speak And/Or Understand?
 

I speak a little spanish and understand a lot more.

I speak a little more Amharic and understand more than spanish, though it used to be the other way around.

I sort of speak English.

I am fluent in Hyphy.

I know a little biblical hebrew especially those cognates with Amharic.

You sort of speak English? You seem to do just fine here...

you'd be surprised.. hyphy and slang have completely replaced my normal english vocabulary.. whenever I have to talk to somebody's grandma I'm caught like a deer in headlights and can not remember regular english without slang, in a similar jam as when I start to deep an amharic conversation with an Ethiopian and they lose me completely..

essentially, since I started to learn Amharic, I don't really speak any languages that well as I smoke way to much pot.. I sort of speak a garbled mix of them all :)

That's cool... I guess it's good that you still type English perfectly well?

i fluently speak dutch (flemish variety), english and french.

i understand german, both written and spoken.

i understand most written spanish and some italian.

i can use latin to find the meaning of words.

i use the languages i know to understand simple things in some other languages (like swedish)

Tu parles français, Ploesj??

Only English. We American's are terribly uncultured... I do know a bit of sign language though (taught it to my kids as babies) and am fluent in pig latin.

I'm on the mono-linguist boat here. Rudimentary French, but very much rudimentary. I often toy with learning other language but I find it hard enough to articulate myself in my native tongue.

Like Kegmama and most Americans, I was raised to believe learning other languages besides English could be an indication of terrorist ideologies.

Despite that, I know a little Spanish and a little Portuguese, although not enough of either to feel comfortable in a situation where only that language was being spoken.

fluent in english and spanish (reading, writing, conversing)

can understand most written italian. can understand most written portuguese.

I can understand some Hebrew, but I'm not all too comfortable speaking it, aside from very basic conversation.

Fluent in German and English

I can speak a bit of French too, not too good though!
And well, I can write my name in Hebrew

Dutch
English
French (not that good though)
I can understand German.

english (more or less, hahaha)
german

unfortunately thats it

English my first language.

Spanish I would say I have a better than average proficiency with. It helps.

Some basic German. I am trying to learn more.

Will begin learning Japanese this year.

English is my native language
I've studied 5 or so years of French and I can understand what is spoken to me 95% of the time and can reply 80% of the time. I'm still a little rusty on the whole "answer off the top of my head thing", though. The odd verbs still get me sometimes.
I'm pretty good with context within Romance or Germanic languages, so I'm not totally helpless.

oui bien sür, c'est la deuxième langue officiel en belgique... j'ai eu des classes depuis huit ans, et maintenant je suis toujours capable d'avoir une conversation pas trop compliqué. je pense que je fais assez de fautes, mais je peux dire la plupart des choses.

it really seems to depend on where you are born: people living in a country that speaks a language known in the whole world won't easily learn a second one. we in flanders know barely anyone else in the world speaks dutch, so we have to learn something else or we're pretty much screwed. plus, belgium has three official languages (dutch, french and german) and we are expected to know the basics of all of them (even though the stress is mostly on french and dutch)

and even then it depends on the educational choices you make. i know many belgians that just have notions of other languages, while they are supposed to know them. many people are absolutely crap at acively using english, too.

Spanish and Latin.

I failed hard at French.

I'm curious to learn German.

I mumble into my chest fluently

im surprised at the amount of people here that said that they can kind of speak hebrew. lo ra bichlal

i am fluent in english and hebrew, but im not usually very articulate.
i took like a semseter of german, so i can understand a few sentences, but i basically dont know it at all.

English, and a lot of French.

I learnt German at school for four years, but I had to give it up. I'm not fluent in it, but I could get by, and probably pick up a lot, if I was to ever go to Germany.
I also want to learn Japanese. I've taught myself some words and phrases, but I've decided I'll wait until I've done my HSC to learn more.

ha super je vais ressortir le thread sur la France. On va bien rigoler.:D:D

as well as nefeli did, I used to be really good in German, I even did my final exam at highschool in German ("Ich habe die Abitur in Deutscher Sprache abgelegen") but I've forgotten almost all of it since then. My head's going void.
I also used to learn Spanish at the University, but it was just 2 years so I didn't learn much.
Other than that, Slovakian is my native tongue.
I speak Czech fluently (those two languages are more similiar that you could imagine) and can handle Polish.
I know a bit of Hungarian too (although I'm not too proud of it).

english and that's it. Tiny bits of a few other languages. I can understand far more written french than I can through spoken, but I think that is more to do with frequenting forums where a large portion of the members are french and speak in a mixture of english and french(which I miss a lot here and I wish more of you frenchies/other languages would start threads for yr own language). I understand most of what ploesj wrote ( french is second language in belgium, had classes for 8 years, can speak well most of the time if its not too complicated.. and I don't understand the last part), but I think if she spoke it I would understand a lot less.

absolutely. If I had actively learned all the languages I was given opportunity to learn throughout my childhood/adolesence, I could theoretically be speaking fluently in english, indonesian, arabic, japanese, chinese-mandarin, spanish, and french. Instead, because I've never HAD to learn, it's all just tid bits.

ouch that's bad. i would like to get better at spanish, the only lessons i had were one-hour classes once a week for two years... it's not a hard language to learn and you quickly understand it, but actively using it is another thing.

i learnt most of my english just from using it and talking to people. got fed up with english in school when we skipped the chapters on shakespeare sonnets and a clockwork orange in order to get the chapters on supermarkets and kangaroos finished. (the average age of the students was 18 at that time)

i would start threads in flemish but barely anyone here speaks it i'm afraid :P

yeh exactly. If you have the opportunity to use your language/improve it, learning is so much easier. A positive of living in Europe, I think. A negative of living on an isolated island :(

Is flemish an area-diaelct of dutch? The dutchies were the second biggest alt to english language at the placebo/slash/teenglamgoth forums I used to frequent. The threads were always EPIC.(and mostly about black nail varnish and homoerotic picture posts)

Only English for me, and tiny bits of French ad German from school but that's been almost completely wiped from my memory. Language education in the UK is fucking dire.

flemish is officially the same as dutch, the grammar is exactly the same, but the pronunciation is very different, as is some of the vocabulary.

there are many different dialects in flanders too, and they all sound quite different. in fact, if i go to the sea (about an hour and a half away by train) i find it hard to understand the people living there. all dialects have their own specific pronunciation and vocabulary (for an example, there are about 200 or more dialect wors for 'butterfly' in flanders)

the main difference between dutch and flemish is that dutch sounds a lot louder and harder. flemish has a lot more foreign sounds in it, which makes it easier for us to pronounce other languages without an accent that is too obvious. most flemish people can pronounce both english and french without too many problems.

that's cool. Thanks ploesj :)

i'd love to learn japanese but i have no idea where to start.

i did french in school for 7 years but i'm horrible at it and can only understand very basic french.

English and Spanish...that's it.

claro que helps!

english....bits of spanish

not on this board though?

besides my own language can speak and read in english and finnish, can understand and read some russian, and tiny bit of german.

during university had to learn latin for a year but... i cheated.