How many languages / What languages do you speak?

How many languages are you fluent in?

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    206
Tyler said:
Pitch is used differently, but it's not purely phonemic.
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I agree and was merely oversimplifying so the point would not be lost. Still I maintain that there is a qualitative difference between the use of pitch in Chinese and English, which creates a difficulty for a speaker of one language in learning the other.

We can say:

"He's here."

and

"He's here?"

and make the difference between a declarative and interrogative sentence obvious through the modulation of pitch. You can't do that with Ta zai jer. You can't put a rising or falling tone on a single Chinese syllable that doesn't have it, or you change it into a different morpheme and lose the meaning.

Yes, I know they do that in pop songs, but they restrict themselves to short sentences and a very small vocabulary that slavishly follows the context, thereby reducing ambiguity. I can almost understand Chinese pop lyrics.
 
I think it's more accurate to say that Chinese simply uses pitch for phonemic uses more, and we use it for feeling/sentiment more.

That said:

"ta zai a!"

and

"ta zai a?"

(also... "ta zai zher", not "jer"!)

Are perfectly acceptable constructs in Chinese. Different charater for 'a', but the same sound except the tone is changed colloquially.

For that matter: "a???" is a common statement for confusion or disbelief, whereas "ah.." is disappointment (as in "ah, hao kelian ah"), and "a!" is understanding. Slap these on to the end of any sentence and you can use pitch to express sentiment.

I know for a beginner learning the language it's much easier to just tell them "Chinese questions are constructed using positive-negative form or adding 'ma' and 'ne' to the end of sentence". But it's very far from the whole truth.
 
Truth be told, this is one of the biggest difficulties I have with Chinese! I can never remember which character for 'a' is surprise, which is understanding, which is... Same for some other sounds.
 
Cellar_Door said:
English - 9; French - 6; German - 1; Russian - 1
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Are you using my powers-of-three scale??? A "1" means you know approximately three words. If you can stumble through an understandable sentence, with a vocabulary of 100-300 words and a rudimentary grasp of elementary grammar, that's a 4 or a 5.

Passable pronunciation of a restaurant menu might qualify for a 2. :)
 
It's hard to tell how much of each language i know. Some i learned while young, some i learned recently.

I can speak all of them fairly well, Icelandic was by far the hardest to learn...

English
Spanish
German
Icelandic
Danish
Chinese
Korean
Japanese
Latin
and of course Russian
 
Wish I knew more.

English - 9
German -7
Spanish - 6
Latin - 5
Italian - 4
French - 3
Russian - 2
Swahili - 1
Japanese - 1
 
Romanian-10
English-9
Spanish-7

I understand German, French, and Arabic.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
Are you using my powers-of-three scale??? A "1" means you know approximately three words. If you can stumble through an understandable sentence, with a vocabulary of 100-300 words and a rudimentary grasp of elementary grammar, that's a 4 or a 5.

Passable pronunciation of a restaurant menu might qualify for a 2. :)
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Erm, I thought I was.

Ok, all the words/phrases I know in German:

Guten Tag
Auf Wiedersehen
Wo Wohnst Du?
Ich Wohne in ...
Ich bin sechzehn Jahre alt.
(Meine) Liebchen
Mutter
Vater
Grossmutter
Grossvater
Ich bin dich
Shizer (and various other rude words)
(Numbers up to 100)

Perhaps a 3/4 then if you count numbers?

All the phrases I know in Russian (transliterated of course):

Da
Niet
Niet Dorma
Pajalusta

That looks like a 1 (just about) to me.

Oh, I could add Welsh:

Yaown
Diolch
Bore da
Chi
Llan
Euraid
Losinen
Ambwlans
Nyrs
Araf
Ysgol
Jennie dw i

So that's about a 2.

Apart from my 6 in French, I know nothing of any other languages. Pretty shaming really.
 
Let's break out your individual German words:
Cellar_Door said:
Guten, Tag, wo, wohnen, du, ich, bin, sechzehn, Jahre, alt, meine, Liebchen, Mutter, Vater, Grossmutter, Grossvater, (Numbers up to 100)
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That's sixteen words plus the numbers. Let's see, ein - neun and zehn - hundert, that makes nineteen more and 35 words gives you a 3. Perhaps my scale is too generous at the low end but I didn't want to make it too difficult to use.
Auf Wiedersehen
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You probably don't know what wiedersehen means (again-see), nor auf, so I didn't give you credit for them.
Ich bin dich
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I think you're trying to say Ich liebe dich, "I love you." Your sentence would translate as "I am you," but the grammar is incorrect.
Shizer (and various other rude words)
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I'm not giving you credit for that one because you spelled it wrong and if that's the way you pronounce it you're also saying it wrong. I don't recommend learning profanity when you know hardly anything else of a language, so I'm not going to teach you how to say it right.
Perhaps a 3/4 then if you count numbers?
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It's a power-of-three scale. Zero = one word, 1 = three words, 2 = ten words.... 10 = one hundred thousand words. 3/4 would mean you know two words and you know many more than that.
All the phrases I know in Russian (transliterated of course): Da, Niet, Niet Dorma
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Do you mean nye doma, not at home? There's no R in it. Unless you speak a non-rhotic (silent R) British dialect and throw the R in to make it look like an AW sound. That's not the standard way of transliterating Russian.
Pajalusta
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That's a ZH, not a J. The ZH in "Asian," "collision," and many French words like jour and garage. It's customarily transliterated as "pozhaluysta" because that's the way it's spelled in Russian. But Russian spelling is not perfectly phonetic: the unaccented O is pronounced as an "uh" and the Y is silent. Sometimes it's written "pozhalu'sta" in Roman letters, to get it half right.
Apart from my 6 in French, I know nothing of any other languages. Pretty shaming really.
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6 = one thousand words. That's nothing to be ashamed of. Very few Americans know a thousand words in any foreign language.
 
My mother tounges are Castilian and Catalan. I grew up speaking Polish and Romanian as well as those are my parents origins. But I can't read or write very well in those languages.
And English of course, but my english is horrible. I went to a British School and I barely learned, I think I've been doing better since I met my partner who's British.
 
I would like for more people, who have not done so already, to list their languages and proficiency.
 
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