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German (native), English (proficient), French (I can understand and read most of it, speaking or writing is something different, though), Italian (see French), Latin (I have my "Latinum", too - I don't really speak it, though XD), some Russian and some Japanese.

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18 minutes ago, Astreya said:

Latin (I have my "Latinum", too - I don't really speak it, though XD)

Nobody in their right mind actually speaks Latin. It's a dead language for a reason. XD It's way too complicated for sane people.

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@olympe

Fun fact - one of my professors at the university told me that he had to go to a meeting in Italy and didn't speak Italian, but he managed to get along by speaking Latin to the Italians XD

 

Edited by Astreya

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Well, I guess you could say that *simple* sentences in both languages are similar enough. Although Italian, as far as I know, doesn't know all those cases. So, I guess it's fair to say that *simple* sentences in Italian are a bit like *simplified* Latin.

 

That being said, I've heard a similar story about someone from Italy and someone from Spain speaking to each other in their respective native language - successfully. I also heard pretty much the opposite story about Italians from the North and the South of the country who didn't manage to communicate well at all. Not to mention several instances of where someone from Germany and from Switzerland (with Swiss German as their native language) met and had to resort to English in order to communicate with any modicum of success. And once, on a motorway station, I kinda overheard a group talking, figuring they were speaking some (to me) weird dialect of German that I could get the hang of if I listened to them for a while. They then entered a car with a yellow licence plate...

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Well, I bet Northern Germans should be able to understand Dutch, too, and vice versa. Understanding Bavarian (Southern German) is much more difficult for us Prussians from the Northern regions. XD

 

By the way, I never studied Spanish or Portuguese, but I can indeed understand quite something from Portuguese or Spanish texts due to the fact that I did study French, Italian and Latin. (My French teacher always said she taught us "vulgar Latin".)

 

I only started to understand Schwytzerdytsch when I listened to (and read) interviews with football players from the FC Basel (where my favourite goalie played at that time). This took me quite a while and some looking up special terms, though XD

Edited by Astreya

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37 minutes ago, Astreya said:

Well, I bet Northern Germans should be able to understand Dutch, too, and vice versa. Understanding Bavarian (Southern German) is much more difficult for us Prussians from the Northern regions. XD

It's easier if you know your local dialect. I know the one from my hometown (similar enough to Kölner Platt) works - at least very definitely for the people from Gouda... Unfortunately, though, I don't actively speak any kind of dialect apart from some sayings I picked up mostly from my grandparents. I merely understand 90 to 95% of it. *shrugs* It's definitely going extinct, it's mostly older folks who still speak it.

Edited by olympe
spelling

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@olympe

Sadly I mainly speak Standard German myself. As my Mom is a Saxon and my father was born in Berlin, they didn't speak Ruhrdeutsch either, so what I know from it I actually learned from some articles that were written in dialect in the local part of the WAZ (which sadly were discontinued some years ago) and from people using it in the streets (less and less by now).

As I studied linguistics (and quite some historical linguistics, too), I'm probably still a bit more aware of the dialect here than many other people. ^^

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I speak German (native) and English. Although I can read, write and understand English perfectly and I have a big cache of words that I know, I suck at talking. Why? because I know so many words, but never heared them, so I assume their pronunciation and I guess I'm wrong sometimes. People also say that my English sounds American (I guess I watched too many cartoons haha). I had Spanish for 2 years, but I forgot most of it because I don't need it and I didn't like it.

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i speak romanian (native) and english. i'm sorta learning french and i'm also trying to learn japanese as well! that's about it i guess

 

i can obviously speak and read romanian and english, i'm a bit struggling with french and i can read (kinda) japanese

 

languages are fun

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I'm extremely fluent in English. It's the only language my casual Geminian brain has bothered to learn to the fullest extent, due to a natural aptitude for it and the fact that my favorite grandma prized it more than any other subject. I know a few things in other languages, maybe enough to order off the dinner menu in French and Gaelic, but I'm nowhere near fluent. What I prefer immensely is to learn the technicalities of a language - how it's put together, how to properly structure a sentence, etc. - so that if I ever decide to sink my teeth into it, I have a leg up. I've studied Latin nouns to the point where I can generally walk a Romance tongue back through it and gain a least a vague idea of what's being said.

 

It does bother me that I'm not bilingual at my age, but I'm so lazy. Something shiny always seems to draw my attention elsewhere.

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I'm a native speaker of Finnish and I love my language. It's my main subject in the uni and I've just finished my bachelor's degree in linguistics. I'm also pretty crazy about everything (well, almost) related to Italy, including the language, which happens to be secondary subject. I can read it quite well and understand enough to follow the lectures held in Italian, my writing is okayish but speaking is another matter. My chances to practice it are, unfortunately, very limited. In school, I studied Swedish for seven years and more in the upper secondary so I think I should be able to use it with a little brushing up. English, too, I read and write and understand okayish, having studied it just one year less than Swedish, but speaking it is so frightening for me. The pronunciation is so difficult!

 

It would be so much fun to be able to learn more languages. I've taken a beginner course in Northern Sami and I've signed up on a latin course this autumn (my excuses: I couldn't find enough courses in my real subjects, and... it could be useful for my Italian studies?). My strenght in any language studies is definitely learning to understand the grammar. That's when I feel I'm in my element and I'm never content until I can truly understand the mechanics of a certain feature. I'm usually one of the quickest learners in class. On the other hand, learning new vocabulary could be considered a weakness for me. I often get the meaning of new words when I read a text or hear the language but I won't memorise it, and I don't expose myself to whatever language I'm learning enough to really absorb it, all the sayings and set phrases, all the different translations to a given Finnish word with their own subtle nuances. I do learn new words fairly easily simply by repeating them by myself, it's always been like that, but I just feel less motivated to do that, to learn vocabulary, than to study the grammary.

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Bilingual Tagalog and English here, both native I suppose. I know a little bit of Japanese from my weeb days. Been studying Russian for some time now, and I'm juuust proficient enough to keep up a simple text conversation. Languages absolutely fascinate me! I'm actually super big into conlangs (constructed languages) and have been working on a few over the years. My dragons are all actually named in one of my newer conlangs.

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I’m fluent in English and British Sign Language, used to be fluent in French but am rather rusty now, although I will still read in French on occasion. In the past I’ve tried learning Italian, Japanese and Danish, but haven’t had the opportunity to keep up with them, sadly.

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English is my native language, and I can kind of understand French.  I took a year of intro French at a college and picked it up pretty well, but now I'm just trying to "maintain" that knowledge by using Duolingo haha.  It sucks that a second language is not widely taught in American primary schools.  I wish I'd been forced to learn a new language at a young age!!

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Korean, little bit English and Japanese  :v

Edited by KDA_Killed

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I started using Duolingo to learn Finnish a couple of months back. Suomi ei ole helppo kieli!

 

I'm definitely enjoying the lessons, though. I wish they did more for conversational speaking along with the more formal language. I'm definitely getting better at reading bits and pieces of Finnish news articles and such, although at this point I still lack the vocabulary to really understand the bulk of it. I've been watching stuff on YouTube to try to improve my listening skills as well. I know I'm getting a little better, as I've picked up on something in a music video that was either incorrectly subtitled or else whoever did the subtitles did a "this is what he meant" translation rather than something more word-to-word. Probably a grammar issue, or a colloquialism that just can't be accurately translated. But it's been driving me nuts! There's some banter between the band members, and just before they launch into the song, one of them tells another, "Shut up and play!" according to the subtitles. But I swear the first thing out of his mouth is either "teacher" or "to teach" and I don't hear the word I know means "quiet" but again, colloquialism could explain that.

 

@Varislapsi, might you be willing to watch the video at some point and tell me what the first and third guys to talk are saying? The second guy, the one who swears, I understood him just fine! 🤣

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My native language is Slovak/Czech (they're so similar I am fluent in both), and I also speak English obviously, and Danish! 

I can sort of get by in Hungarian too but I haven't been conversational in it since I was a child.

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I’m fluent in English and I used to be quite fluent in Irish :>>

I took French classes but they never stuck with me QwQ

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I was supposed to be bilingual, but my father's side of the family never bothered to teach me or my older brother their/our native language (Crimean Tatar).
We picked up Russian as our native language, studied Ukrainian for eleven years and then I got into University, where I majored in English.
I took French, German and Latin classes as a part of a program as well as some extinct languages, but never really got into them.

Edited by Tiheya

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22 hours ago, catstaff said:

@Varislapsi, might you be willing to watch the video at some point and tell me what the first and third guys to talk are saying? The second guy, the one who swears, I understood him just fine! 🤣

 

Yes I can do that! Which video is it? You got me curious, anyway. 😸 I'm even interested in translating!

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1 hour ago, Varislapsi said:

 

Yes I can do that! Which video is it? You got me curious, anyway. 😸 I'm even interested in translating!

It's Tarot's 25th anniversary re-release of their 1986 hit Wings of Darkness. Slightly different from the original, as they had a second guitarist but no keyboardist back in the day... and of course, 1986 was right in the middle of the hair band era. I've seen the original video as well and cracked up at how they all looked in their spandex and leather and their hair all teased out with Aqua-Net. Baby Marko Hietala, I don't know if I'd have recognized him but for his eyes. Wish I'd heard of Tarot back then, though, I've been going through their old stuff and I really like it. But the band's been idle since the drummer Pecu Cinnari died in 2016 (complications of diabetes) and of course, Marko just announced a few weeks ago that he's retiring from Nightwish and public life for at least a year, so it's looking less and less likely that Tarot will ever put out anything new.

 

Anyway, the video to watch:

 

And if you care to see the old one, for the giggles... there are two uploads of this; this one has better quality, although someone is talking over the intro:

 

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Ah, I see!

 

The first guy says in Finnish: "Hei, taunot, tätä on nyt jauhettu kakskytviis vuotta. Oisko mitään pienintä toivoa et saatas tää nyt viimein menemää oikein?"

Here the subtitles basically only miss the tone of his words; "tätä on jauhettu" is more than "we've been playing", it's metaphoric (jauhaa 'to grid') and means that they've been doing the same thing again and again without getting anywhere. Very common! Often we use the word if someone is speaking about the same subject (that doesn't interest us) for a long time. Then he wonders if they have "the slightest chance of hope", any hope at all, to get it right. (Taunot, that's funny... I would never have been able to explain that but I assume "jerk-off" is quite fine. 😹)

 

The third guy: "Lopetahan toi jaarittelu ja ruvetaan vetää sitä biisiä."

So it's "lopeta" and not "opeta"! No wonder you got puzzled. Stop talking that nonsense and... I can't really translate vetää here, it's used in informal language for 'doing something, performing a task'. Always as a transitive verb, I think, and it's also quite common even if I can't see myself using it.

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10 minutes ago, Varislapsi said:

Ah, I see!

 

The first guy says in Finnish: "Hei, taunot, tätä on nyt jauhettu kakskytviis vuotta. Oisko mitään pienintä toivoa et saatas tää nyt viimein menemää oikein?"

Here the subtitles basically only miss the tone of his words; "tätä on jauhettu" is more than "we've been playing", it's metaphoric (jauhaa 'to grid') and means that they've been doing the same thing again and again without getting anywhere. Very common! Often we use the word if someone is speaking about the same subject (that doesn't interest us) for a long time. Then he wonders if they have "the slightest chance of hope", any hope at all, to get it right. (Taunot, that's funny... I would never have been able to explain that but I assume "jerk-off" is quite fine. 😹)

 

The third guy: "Lopetahan toi jaarittelu ja ruvetaan vetää sitä biisiä."

So it's "lopeta" and not "opeta"! No wonder you got puzzled. Stop talking that nonsense and... I can't really translate vetää here, it's used in informal language for 'doing something, performing a task'. Always as a transitive verb, I think, and it's also quite common even if I can't see myself using it.

 

Kiitos paljon! It's been driving me nuts for a couple of weeks now. Almost makes me wish I had the option on YouTube to make subtitles come up in Finnish, at least while I'm still getting my listening skills up to where I want them.

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Yeah, I know! I have similar thoughts with Italian so often, when I'm watching Italian films or something. Especially when I saw My Brilliant Friend on HBO because they often speak in dialect so I had no hope to understand it well enough without any subtitles but I'd really have preferred to read them in Italian.

 

It always gets so much more difficult when you listen to colloquial language instead of formal speach.We have quite many differences between spoken language and standard written language in Finnish, too...

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