this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
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I'm from the US and English is the only language I speak fluently.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

日本人です、日本語しか話せないのであえてここも日本語で書きます

※普段は機械翻訳をつかってます

ちなみに、一般的な日本人の殆どは日本語以外を話すことはできません、日本の英語教育はあまり意味をなしていません

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

From USA. Fluent in English and Russian (self-taught and lived in St Petersburg and Moscow for a number of years).

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

From Croatia, I'm multilingual!

English

Croatian

Serbian

Bosnian

Serbo-croatian

Montenegrin

Probably missing some.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Slovenian? Or don't I dare ask that?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Slovenian is different, it is similar and could understand something but don't know it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

India - Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, and English

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Mexican here:

Spanish & English - Fluent

Japanese - Intermediate-advanced

French - Still learning but it's so similar to Spanish it feels like cheating 😅

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

French was more confusing than Spanish was to me. I'm trying to learn Spanish actually. It's a beautiful language.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

United States and I speak English and a little Spanish but I wish I knew more Spanish.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Brazil. Fluent in Portuguese and English, though I understand a tiny little bit of Dutch. I can understand Spanish sometimes because of similarities between it and Portuguese.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'm from The Netherlands and I speak Dutch, English, a bit of German and no French at all even though I had French in school for 13 years.

But The Netherlands has 2 official national languages, Dutch and Friesian, although English officially isn't a foreign language anymore due to the quality and quantity of English speakers and there are discussions to make English the third national language.

I wish I knew more languages, but sadly I'm really bad at learning any. Some people learn languages so fast, I'm better at math and such. I wish I knew Russian, Chinese and Spanish because I'd love to travel to old USSR republics, China and other Asian countries and South America. Knowing the most spoken languages in the world would be amazing I imagine. And I wish I knew Norwegian because I love the language and the country so much. Plus, you can communicate in Denmark and Sweden too. But luckily now we have Google translate so I could communicate even though I don't have shared languages with where I want to go.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

although English officially isn't a foreign language anymore due to the quality and quantity of English speakers and there are discussions to make English the third national language.

Do you have a source for this? I'm Dutch native too, and have never heard of this.

The majority of Dutch people speak English at a decent level, but there are no non-immigrant native English speakers.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Hungarian, so beyond that that i speak english (duh) swedish, though i mostly read books on it, not a lot of swedes around, and i am trying to pick up some chinese now

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

Norwegian.

I’d say fluent in Norwegian, English and German. German because I lived there for a year and the missus is German.
I can make myself understood in Spanish.
Swedish and Danish come for free as they are so close to Norwegian. I don’t need to speak them as we understand eachother mostly.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

American, I speak English, Thai, and Korean.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

I wish I knew how to write Korean nicely. Is definitely easier to speak for me than to write it lol.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The second part is easy to answer:

  1. German
  2. Polish
  3. Swedish
  4. English
  5. Korean (just started learning.

The first part is a bit more complicated, depending on what you are actually asking, where and who you are.

  • If you're asking where I live then it's Korea.
  • If you're asking where I came from to Korea then it's Sweden where I lived for 15 years
  • If you're asking what nationality I feel I belong to with my heart then it's Germany where all my ancestors are from
  • If you're asking where I was born then it's Poland

I hope you his answers your question.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Not completely, there are 2 Korea's. But since internet access in one is extremily limited, I can make an educated guess in which one you live right now.

Nice track record by the way.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

Ah yeah :D so South Korea, just for the record ^^

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

From Mexico Magico, and I speak Spanish, English, enough French and enough Portuguese brasileiro to get by. And I am currently working on improving my Korean because I live in a city that has a huge community.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

UK, trying not to be a typical one-language Anglo by learning German. I'm thankful there seems to be a large German community on Lemmy!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Lithuanian.

I speak Lithuanian, English, some Swedish and traces of Russian.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (2 children)

From the UK originally, which is complicated enough. To foreigners I tend to say "England", which (a) is true and (b) everyone understands. But I consider myself British, not English, and certain not a "UK person" (ugh).

I speak French near-natively from having lived there for a big chunk of my life. Spanish: intermediate, because it's like French. German: got an A at GCSE decades ago, so not very good. Tried learning Russian a few years ago and, wow, that was hard. I cannot speak Russian. But being able to decipher the Cyrillic script is definitely a cool party trick.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

American, English only but I need to learn Burmese as that's where my daughter-in-law is from. Can't have hypothetical grand kids speaking a language I don't know.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Denmark. I understand Swedish, Norwegian and German. I speak Danish, English and Dutch.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

South Africa and pretty much just English. Apparently I was fairly fluent in Zulu when I was little kid, before starting school and losing it. And we learnt Afrikaans in school but Afrikaans kids went to Afrikaans schools and I grew up and lived in English speaking areas so it was never used. If I tried to speak Afrikaans now, I would embarrass myself but I can mostly read it and understand someone if they're talking slow enough and I'm concentrating hard enough.

Honestly something that pisses me off is that despite going through school in the 'new' South Africa, the new government never bothered making sure we learnt to communicate with each other. So instead of learning Zulu and being able to freely communicate with the majority of the population, we learnt Afrikaans because they never fucking bothered to change it.

I can also understand very small bits and pieces of written and spoken German from high school but that's barely worth mentioning. Also, I can kinda sometimes understand a little bit of written Dutch because it's remotely similar to Afrikaans.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Zulu is an awesome language! I've heard it spoken before. It seems difficult to learn from an outsider. Maybe I'm wrong. Afrikaans is interesting to me because it's a Germanic creole language. I've heard it's the easiest to learn Germanic language in the world.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah, Zulu is a different beast to European languages. I suppose as different to English as certain Asian languages would be. It also borrows from English and Afrikaans though, for certain Western words and concepts that weren't in the vocabulary before. And there's still nouns and verbs and tenses and shit, so it follows the same basic rules / concepts as any language.

As for Afrikaans, funnily enough I'm actually living in a part of the country now where some fluency would've been useful. Luckily you seem to be able to get by with just English just about anywhere though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm part Scottish, part English. I speak:

English - idiomatically
French - conversationally
Italian - I just want to reply to people in French all the time
German - I can ask where the station is
Japanaese - I can say 'I do not understand'

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I can say "I do not speak French" in six languages!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Me ne parolas la Francan.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Mexican American. I speak English, Spanish and some Japanese.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

US. Fluent in English but I can speak enough spanish to do most everyday things. I am learning Japanese, and while I can read and understand about half of it, I can't pronounce shit and haven't bothered practicing since I just want to read it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

From Germany and i speak German, English and Spanish. I can survive daily life in French and Catalan, but its pretty rough. Currently, i am learning Persian :)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

From the Netherlands. I speak English and Dutch pretty much on the same level. I can work my way around German if I've been in a German speaking country for a couple of days. I can speak French if I really need to and I'm currently learning Portuguese. Understanding Portuguese has made me also understand Italian and Spanish a bit better.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Polish living in Poland, I know English, I don't speak it much though, currently learning Japanese

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

Ireland. First language English, second Irish (but only in the education system), learning Russian

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Italy: Italian, English and a local language

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You can't just tease us like that, what's the local language? The less common a language is the more interesting.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That's true! I love less common languages. Well I can speak Neapolitan, a language spoken in Southern Italy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thank you, I had never heard of your language before. How similar is it to Italian? Is your language taught in schools and is it common?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Italy is a fairly a new country (it was born in 1861) and before that each part used to speak a different language which, just like Neapolitan, they are still alive. These languages and dialects are not taught in school so the only way to learn them is by listening to those who passed it on which I think it's pretty cool.

In my day-to-day life I speak a mix of Italian and Neapolitan (but there are people who speak only the latter) but we try to use only the former when we speak to people from other parts of the country who wouldn't be able to understand us. Nowadays our local language is getting "italianized" a bit but it's still different from it, just like Spanish and Italian or other Romance languages.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to let Lemmers know about it :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Thank you for teaching us. I love learning about languages.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

The UK.

I am fluent in English and good enough in Mandarin to get by.

Earlier in life I was passable at French in France, but I have lost that now. It's been overwritten by the Mandarin from having spent a few years in the PRC teaching English.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (6 children)

Swedish: Native English: Fluent to the point where it might as well be native Spanish: Alright, probably upper B2

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