How Many Languages Does Everyone Here Speak?

General Discussion
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I mainly speak 4 different languages (Filipino, English, basic Japanese, and Korean). My mother tongue is Filipino aka “Tagalog,” I natively grew up in the Philippines (born in Mandaluyong City, the capital of Mandaluyong). English is my second fluent language (normally, I’m sometimes bad at it) where I improved from moving to my American hometown (Boise, Idaho).

Currently, I’m learning East Asian languages such as Japanese and Korean. However, I only attend one language school (Korean). I speak very basically in those new languages. I want to learn those languages because I’m very interested in their culture, traditions, and practices. I have some future plans to visit or live in their country to expertise their official language.

Does anyone have their dominant language and others that are recently learning at?

UPDATE (2/13/21): I recently learned German all by myself. :grinning:

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I was born in Changchun, China and now I’m an English and Japanese teacher.
my daily use of languages: 20% Chinese (native), 70% English (everything on the internet and education), 10% Japanese (anime and education).
currently still learning (from best to “worst”): Norwegian Bokmål (A2 level maybe), Esperanto (ever taught some students years ago), Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Finnish, Indonesian, Czech (only a little).

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I was born in Uzbekistan and my first language used to Russian. I don’t speak it anymore because my mother stopped speaking Russian with me completely while I was growing up, I can barely understand a word anymore. This is because when I moved to Canada, I grew up in a very isolated town. Why, you’d be considered foreign if you were from another town. You can imagine how they treated me, then… I was bullied a lot for being different so my mom wanted to help make my English better so that all the other kids would leave me alone. Now I’m fluent, at least, so it’s a fair trade-off in the long run :slight_smile:

I can also speak French and Japanese. My French is deteriorating these days but my Japanese is always getting better. I don’t need English subs to watch interviews these days, which is a huuuge bonus considering that VK interviews often don’t get translated. I also started reading Japanese VK magazines to spark my love of reading back (it went away…) and I’m glad that I can understand the funny/interesting stories or behind-the-scenes info that my fav musicians share in VK mags like Rock and Read or Ongaku To Hito. It’s quite the evolution from where I was a few years ago but I still have quite a long way to go to get to real fluency :sweat:

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Hmm for me; my first language was Chinese though I was forced to forget it because of attending school in the Netherlands which would have impacted a lot in my speaking if I wouldn’t drop it so I only kept Vietnamese for my parents and learned Dutch at school.

So In the end I speak these languages fluently: Vietnamese, Dutch, English
On a basic level: Japanese, Korean
Other languages ever learned but forgotten: German & French

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oh, you must be Linh-san, I remember you :smiley:
btw, I ever tried to learn some Vietnamese in order to understand an article about Tứ Sắc, a traditional card game (I’m a card game lover). it’s really head-scratching tbh and later regretted it :rofl: but I still keep practising Chữ Nôm these days, it’s very fascinating to write.

the only thing I remember about Vietnamese is, why da hell the letter “d” and “r” are pronounced as “/z/”??? :rofl:

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Yes that’s me~! :slight_smile:
That’s nice! Actually my Viet reading and writing are like elementary level haha but for speaking I can have normal conversations~ but glad to see you interested in the Viet-language :smiley:

As for the d and z, in South Vietnam for instance “Roi” they still clearly make the R-sound, but in North Vietnam they make it more harsh as it sounds more as a “z”. I guess its the dialect difference :slight_smile:
I have never made the “z” sound in my speaking so that might explains it :slight_smile:

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good to know, dank je voor de informatie!!! :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:
I used to dislike dialects, cuz that means I have to get to know more about one language, but since I learnt Norwegian, it’s not a big problem and I even think that’d be boring if there’s only one way to express in a language lol I’m always glad to know the differences and variations of languages I’m interested in now.

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Happy to see a fellow Canadian here! I’m from the french part of Canada, Quebec. What province are you from? Also, sad to hear your were bullied just because of this. And if you ever want to speak french, let me know haha.

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As for me, I was born and raised in Quebec, Canada. So my main language is french. I learned english at school but I learned most of english while playing video games and playing World Of Warcraft haha. Lately I’ve been learning the basis of Japanese, and from time to time I understand some words. I’m learning through Duolingo.

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hey bro~ we’re kinda similar cuz I played Diablo II back in the days and learnt a lot of words of fantasy :joy: and later I became a Diablo-like game fan.

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I live in Netherlands (Not born there, but moved as baby)
So mother language is Dutch,
However as child I always watched German TV so I learned German fluently too. But since I don’t write German daily anymore and I also don’t watch TV daily anymore (really rarely nowadays), I kind of forgot how to write/speak it on a fluent level. But let me stay a month in Germany and I speak it fluent again.

I’m still very very very rookie in English. I can communicate, but often I do encounter words I really don’t know the meaning off, while others say “It’s a common word” while I am like “huh?, really… I really have no clue of its meaning…”
At school I never scored high until the very last school year… I never understood what the teacher explained and the books where just difficult, I understood some casual English but well that was not the English we learned at school. (points out that learning from books is often just shit)
I learned to communicate in English after my 20ties, because of the Internet.
I also learned to understand English with reading walkthroughs to play games.

So it’s Dutch, German, English,

Also I do understand more Japanese than I am aware off and slowly I start to be able to write and speak it more fluent too. If someone speaks not to fast and clearly and does use not slang, I be able to understand it if I know the topic. However I should train to understand spoken Japanese too.
I can read about 300-400 Kanji without ever really have seriously learned more than… 50, I just remember them because of reading. writing with hand I might be able to write 10-20 or so :rofl: someday I also gonna practice that.
I also do know some business Japanese also talked with a Japanese business guy about it and he said, stuff is changing in more “casual” wring ways. less Kanji than in the past. So it’s fun to learn about it (^_^), hope I do understand much much more Japanese when I can go to Tokyo again.

But I do have dyslexia so learning a language goes different and takes longer… And how I do learn a language is really weird for non-dyslexia people :rofl:

Also at school, most languages teaches are NOT educated to teach a language to people with dyslexia. They just cannot, I’ve seen trying, but they explain stuff in really difficult ways and they do focus too much on your mistake which you did do wrong again for the 1000x. While a Remedial Teacher keeps it very simple and knows how he/she can help you to make that mistake not for the 1001x time and if you do they won’t never tell you that you suck and should give up and they won’t let you repeat stuff over and over again, they also move forward even if you didn’t master something yet. Also they have much more fun and better material how to learn a language more easy.

I also learned Indonesia a bit in the past, but I’m not longer befriend with people from that county… otherwise I would have spoken it now too for a bit. It’s a pity, I really liked that language.

And French is a language I’ve forgotten… I’ve learn it for about 2 years. I could count until 100 at least I guess. but I cannot anymore. lol And some more stuff… :cry:

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I was born in Lithuania, but my whole family is Russian (USSR times, y’know). So, I’m fluent in both Russian and Lithuanian languages. Besides that, I also speak English (especially now, since I’m now studying in the Netherlands).
Tried to learn German several times (and even worked in Germany for several months), but, without any IRL communication, it was difficult to remember words.
Then, in 2009, father moved our whole family to Spain for 6 months. I and my brother had to go to a normal Spanish school, so I learned some Spanish. Sadly, can’t remember much besides “tourist level” phrases.
P.S. Despite studying (and having a part-time job) in the Netherlands, I don’t speak dutch… yet.

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greetings and I have a question. I know Lithuanian is a Baltic language but how similar is it to Latvian grammatically? or is there anything you think special about Lithuanian comparing with Germanic languages? thanks in advance! :handshake:

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Hey there.
Uh, to be honest, I don’t know the answer :sweat_smile: At least, from a first glance, it’s difficult for me to understand Latvian. However, there are different dialects of Lithuanian which may be similar to Latvian.
Now, comparing to Germanic languages, Lithuanian language has some connection (or, at least, that’s what lithuanians want to boast about) to the sanskrit with similar words. Oh, and also women’s marital status can be checked by their surname (-ūtė, -itė, -ytė endings for non-married and -ūnė, -ienė, -ynė for married women). Which may cause some legal problems abroad (a friend of mine had difficulties in Czech Republic proving that she’s married now (and not just changed her surname)).

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i speak english and chinese (cantonese, hakka and mandarin), and my german and japanese are both workable. i’m very lucky to have grown up in hong kong which is officially bilingual, and has such a variety of non-official languages with a huge presence.

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I’d say the only language I’m actually fluent in is English.

I’m Canadian, so I studied French until the end of high school, and I remember a fair amount of it, but I’m super rusty and probably would need to do some reviewing before I could hold a conversation.

I studied Japanese as an elective for 3 years in university, and while I think my ability to understand it has improved quite a bit due to lots of reading and listening practice, I’m really not very good at speaking or writing at all.

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awesome info, much appreciated :love_you_gesture: and I’m sorry about asking this question you don’t really know, cuz I actually have a plan of learning the two main Baltic languages after Estonian. (I have a list of languages which I wanna learn.)
thanks again.

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Wow, I’m impressed so many of you speak several languages. The only language which I speak fluently is German. I’m still learning English and over time it became better through internet, animes and k-drama series with english subs. I know I still do grammar mistakes and have an bad accent but on the other hand I’m trying to communicate with others to get a better feeling for english. Now, I’m glad that other people can understand me.

Furthermore I’m interested to learn the japanese language and started to learn Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji a few months ago. I must admit though that kanji is/was hard for me to write because I wanted to write it perfectly and I had forgotten that I was still a beginner and so I practiced everyday and it got better. Anyway, my favorite Kanji is 猫. That was the first character I had to learn. :laughing:

Oh, I see there are some Dutch people here. Back then I’ve often visited the Netherlands in holidays and although I never learned Dutch I could understand a little bit but I think this is because German and Dutch are similar.

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I’m surprised by the amount of Dutch speakers here… it’s such a small country lol

So my first language is Dutch too. I was born and raised in the Netherlands. My mom is Dutch and my dad is Portuguese, but they divorced when I was like 7 and even before that I never actually learned Portuguese. I love its sound though.

I’m confident enough to say that I consider myself fluent in English, since it was important for my studies (tourism and travel management) and a few jobs I had before moving to Japan. I also stayed in Vancouver, Canada for like 8 months.

I studied at 2 language schools in Tokyo, for 1 year each, but never got passed this intermediate level where I’m ok with daily stuff but rely on English for advanced stuff and work. My husband is Japanese and I’d say we use English 90% of the time. Not in favor of improving my Japanese at all huh.

I also studied German for 4 years in high school, but I don’t really speak it anymore. I’d say I understand about 50% listening to it or reading it though. My 2 years of Spanish in college were fun, but also forgotten because I didn’t get to use it after I graduated.

I feel like this story makes me sound super old, but I’ll turn 28 this Spring. Ok that’s pretty old x]

Sooo Dutch, English, intermediate Japanese, some German and basic Spanish and Portuguese.
I’d love to get my Portuguese to the same level as my Japanese someday.

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My native language is Brazilian Portuguese (the variety spoken in Rio de Janeiro, which is considered the standard). I also speak and teach English as a second language/lingua franca. I’ve also studied German and Japanese (A1 level, though). I study Linguistics and my main areas of interest are 1) Second-language acquisition (SLA) (but some academics do not agree with the concept of “language acquisition” when applied to languages learned later in one’s life) and 2) TESOL (Teaching English as a Second Language). In the future I would like to study Portuguese as a second language (PLE; Português Língua Estrangeira.)

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