Do you know multiple languages?

It is possible to adore a language even though it is not objectively the best.

I speak english and french fluently since my mother is french and I received a french education in an english speaking country with an english speaking father.

It's handy for visiting other countries and reading literature in both languages. I think it's also helped me understand more about translations and what exactly can be lost in a translated text. However it's not as amazing as most people think and I can't stand people on this board who mock monolingualism but probably don't even have a C2 level in their "second language".

Very few people are properly fluent in more than one language. In my experience the only people who are fluent in more than one language are people who grew with parents who taught them two languages. Met a lot of trilingual people but they were never fully fluent in all their languages.

That's been my experience as well. The only "bilingual" people that I've ever met started off really young, and almost all of the time it was because they lived in another country and needed to learn English when they got to the US.

Yes. I speak English French Spanish German and Japanese

I know a meagre amount of French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch but not enough to have a conversation or anything

I'm too lazy

>Mexican

My wife is nearly bilingual due to ten grueling years of English education, four years teaching English, followed by five years living in the US. Though she still misses those nuanced cultural references and idioms.

It's definitely not true that only people who grew up speaking multiple languages can be considered fluent in more than one language; living in an English speaking country might be warping your view a little. I would bet that a bilingual native English speaker would be less fluent in their second tongue than, say, a bilingual European would be in English, only because English is so ubiquitous. It's far more difficult for an English speaker learning a second language to immerse themselves in that language.

English because dumb anglo.

English and German are my native languages, though my German is poor. I also want to learn French at some point in the next few years. Then after that maybe dabble in some other Romance languages for the literature, just learning to read no speaking.

I am fluent in Portuguese and English, almost fluent in Italian and Spanish, and can read French, Galician, and Catalan.

I prefer Italian.

English, can read and write in German, and can do basic things in Chinese after living there for over a year. English is objectively the best language, but that's not to say that there aren't problems with the language. There are countless things that are better expressed in other languages, but English just has the biggest vocabulary, the richest history (given that you measure this as pure content per years and not by your personal standard of weighted culture production), and the most educated speakers today.

this is true but obv the best writers still take over 99% of their convention from a language, like Joyce and his English-Irish-Joyce blend. If you look at the nuts and bolts, he's still writing in English.

English and American Sign Language. Sign language is clearly superior language, however the vocabulary is still immature.

Spanish, english, and still perfecting my italian. I watched two pasolini films this week... it was akward; like, i could hear the italian just fine if i read the subs, but without them everyone spoke a different dialect (in the decameron everyone was actually a different race, but most were lombardian, i guess, in the canterbury tales). I've been also learning sanskrit very slowly. I really want to drop it for the moment and learn german or french, but i just don't want to read anything at the moment that isn't the vedanta philosophy.

Actually, the greatest pleasure of knowing a language comes from speaking it. I'm happier talking in my limited italian, than reading perfectly on english.

You seen Accattone?
One of my favorites

English, intermediate Japanese, and a tiny amount of German

English and German

The problem with German is that German literature uses so many advanced and niche words to describe concepts we don't have a word for English, so even though I took 4 years of German and practice all the time, I would need to live in Germany for years before I could actually read Stirner or Nietzsche.

Fühlt schlecht, Mann.

>pure content per years

What did he mean by this?

>objectively the best language

Get a load of this fella right here.

I know English, Spanish and Polish. Spanish and Polish are my favorites. Polish because it is my native tongue and it is a part of who I am to my core, and spanish because it lets me get laid when I vacation in central america

English and Norwegian (mother tongue).

yes, three.

that question makes no sense once you properly learn a new language and change your idea of what a language is.

I care about other languages only when I'm interested for specific reasons. Learning another language "just for exercise" is absolutely retarded (or geezer-tier)

The huge variety of the Italian dialects is one of the reasons that make Italian beautiful. You're learning standard Italian, of course, but once you'll get better at it you will have a lot of fun exploring the regional differences. It's just like the food.

finnish is the best

it's the final form of all language

reducing complex ideas to single words

it's like functional programming

>don't even have a C2 level in their "second language"
So what? Most of the natives aren't even C2. C2 is having a higher proficiency than the average native speaker. You can still be fluent inn a language without being C2.

Also, most of the monolingual moking goes towards anglos, since they don't have to learn english as a second language and thus stay monolingual. I bet most of the "native language+english" learnt by exposition rather than actually making an effort, so yeah, you are right, they can't really brag about it.
Nonetheless, anglos still deserve all the mocking they can get :).

>It's handy for visiting other countries and reading literature in both languages. I think it's also helped me understand more about translations and what exactly can be lost in a translated text. However it's not as amazing as most people think and I can't stand people on this board who mock monolingualism but probably don't even have a C2 level in their "second language".
I have a Cambridge certification of C2 English proficiency, people seem to be really impressed when I tell them

It's a bit embarrassing that I learned English mostly by playing Runescape when I was 10.

I know Hungarian, English and German.
All of them are great. I like German for its imaginative way of constructing words, English for its universality and Hungarian for being weird and sort of rich beneath the surface.

english and Hebrew (mother tounge)

not in a biased way, but hebrew is really good because its very informative if spoken correctly. I am trying to learn German at the moment and I have to say its also very informative, albeit less informative than english...
I still think that english, however, is really beutiful, and in that sense, both languages are preety in about the same way, but only if spoken correctly ( just like some native speaking english people cant speak it oproperly, so do native sspeakers of hebrew sometimes speak terribly)

*less informative than hebrew*

French because I'm French, Hebrew because I'm a Jew, Russian because I'm a physicist and English

Yes, four.

Native in Spanish and Catalan, English at C2 level and German at B2.

I love all languages, I don't even understand what you mean by "best" language.

>עברית
>שפה טובה

>Yes, four.
>Native in Spanish and Catalan

I speak German and Russian fluently, with a working knowledge of Japanese, Farsi, Gujarati, and French.

I love all of them equally, and being elitist about languages is the mark of a fool.

English, Russian, Ukrainian

The one that allows me to get access to most of the information in the world and that most of the people on the planet uses. Languages are fun but I can't be bothered, life is too short to learn to speak the same shit in ten different ways. Still they can provide you all kinds of economic opportunities but motivation has to be something palpable like being stuck in a foreign country, specific job opening or love for precisely this sort of learning or a specific language.

>C2 is having a higher proficiency than the average native speaker
Do you have proof for this statement because I've done quite a few language assessment tests and I doubt any native speaker with a high school education could fail to get C2. I've even known people with a C2 level who had dreadful accents and I wouldn't even qualify them as truly fluent, albeit my standards for this are high.

A very honest reply. I spent a few years living in the US as a young teen, and while I might have a better grasp of the language than many native speakers, I feel it's wrong to call myself bilingual as I have a lot more ease and flow in French. But in truth, there is no level of language proficiency as there are many parameters that come into play, such as culture, humor, etc... I completely disagree with you when you say that being bilingual isn't as amazing as people think. You cannot comprehend the grasp of your language as a monolingual. Language is WAY more than just words. It forms new neurological pathways in the brain, which allows for meta awareness surounding languages, perspectives and cultures. You might not realize as you learned both languages at an early age. Monolingualism is the equivalent of mastering zero language.

Russian, English, with an understanding of Serbian.

I prefer Russian for things related to the GPW, WW1 and RCW along with religious lit and proverbs.
English for everything else.
Serbian for the poem cлoвo љyбвe.

Finnish is the most beautiful to hear.
Irish is the most aesthetic especially for poetry.
English is best for daily use.
French is super autistic.

I speak English, Russian, and Ukrainian, in that order of fluency.
I know them because I learned Russian in college and lived in Ukraine for a while. English is native.
I'd like to learn French, improve my Ukrainian, and maybe Spanish as well.
Languages are fun and each of them has a different taste.

I agree with you if you're referring to native english speakers

English lacks most of the grammatical elements that are shared among all other indo european languages, so for a native english speaker to master things related to inflection and noun genders is a great challenge for them

But if you're referring to continental indo european speakers then I disagree
Most languages from the same linguistic branch within the indo european languages are quite similar, and there's no use for native speakers to be introduced to all the grammatical concepts that are absent in english when they learn other languages

The exception to the rule that you're probably trying to refer to for "people that grew up speaking more than one language" probably comes from the idea that if these native english speakers grew up speaking another continental indo european language along with english, then they're technically not a typical monolingual english speaker because they are native to other indo european language as well, what makes them fall into the category of the continental speakers and allows them to learn other languages properly because they already digested those grammatical concepts

Your distinction between english and continental indo-european languages isn't a fair one to make, for someone who speaks a romance language it's just as difficult to learn a germanic language as english (if not harder), and this also works in reverse.
In fact germans and dutch speak english MUCH better than french, italians and spanish which leads me to believe their languages are structurally more similar to english than the latin languages are, although I've never studied a non latin language other than english.
I also don't believe native english speakers are more disadvantaged on a linguistic level when it comes to learning another language, it's more an issue that their education system usually doesn't encourage this and most the internet is english so unlike other languages they're not forced to learn a language other than their own.

In fact most the people I've met who claimed to be bilingual but weren't were non native english speakers who claimed fluency in english when they clearly didn't have it. In my opinion if native speakers find your accent difficult to understand then you can't claim to be bilingual.

I speak Spanish as my mother tounge and I learned English as a very young child. My school was bilingual.

They're both beautiful languages with different applications, but I think Spanish is prettier. Most of the time, though, I'd rather read translations in English; most Spanish translations are from Spain and Castilian Spanish kinda blows.

I only know two and I'm only good at one.

I know english and spanish and """know""" japanese

No, the education system here never put much emphasis on it, and I lack the intelligence, time, and patience necessary to become fluent.

I always wanted to learn Latin, and for some reason French has recently become more interesting.

So why do you think continental indo european speakers speak many languages on average, while people from the uk don't?
By that logic british people should be very proficient in other languages, what isn't true, even though britain is just a few miles away from france and the netherlands.
The problem isn't britain being an insular nation, the problem is english becoming an endemic language as a consequence of that, what makes it so simplified compared to other continental languages

I don't mean these posts as a critical essay toward anglos as a whole for that matter, but those things I just mentioned are understood by continental speakers, because that is an impartial statement

Why do you think there's a massive language market that revolves around native english speakers in the first place? Is it because they are already used to all the basic indo european elements and learn everything right away and then stop consuming language resources, or because they go shopping for languages many times because they need to buy language resources and keep the market running indefinitely once they need years and years of study until they can finally become conversational in that language at a decent level?

For instance, just for you as a native english speaker to learn the gender of all the nouns in a continental language is something that could take an entire decade, while among continental languages they don't actually change that much. So yeah, that saves years of study, and because of things like that continental speakers don't actually need to learn a language entirely from scratch like anglos, they just adjust the things they already know for the most part, even beyond different language branches.
Why do you think there's a need to entire introductory sections in anglo books about "what's an adjective" or "what is the accusative case"? Continental speakers cringe when reading them and come across that especial chapter that's exclusively meant to be a self help section on "why you shouldn't give up on the language before you get your first results".

The native english speaker stuff isn't a meme, and isn't an opinion either, that's the reason why anglo speakers generally have a harder time learning other languages and why they complain when they see people that are native speakers of other languages managing to reach faster results in a shorter period of time. What's worse is their attitude when faced with that, if they took that humbly and actually started learning languages in a different way and through a different approach, they would succeed more often.

>In my opinion if native speakers find your accent difficult to understand then you can't claim to be bilingual.
Then all native english speakers I have ever met were monolingual without any exception whatsoever, everyone can tell a native english speaker trying to speak another language both by their accent and by the typical grammatical mistakes that are particular to them

Again, the reason native english speakers don't speak other languages well in comparison to others is because they aren't forced to. The school system doesn't encourage them to become proficient unlike for other countries.
I can say from experience that french people are just as bad at learning english as english speakers are at learning french, the difficulty goes both ways except that french people are forced to learn english in school whereas english speakers aren't forced to learn another language in many cases.
English is a very inconsistent language, and in this way it offers unique difficulty to someone who only knows how to speak a language with rules that can be followed regularly (ie all latin languages and probably more but I haven't studied more than that).

As for your last statement I agree and it's why of the countless people I've met who considered themselves bilingual I've only met a handful who really were, all of which grew up speaking both languages.

I agree on many of your points, but the example I gave on british people having the same statistics on how many languages they speak on average as americans is a sound one.
They have been exposed to most major european languages for millennia, french has been the official court language of england for around 300 years following the battle of hastings, and yet they don't speak any other languages on average.
It would be easier for them to learn other languages if english and the other languages were more similar at a structural level, and if the speakers were already used to all the things they were supposed to be introduced to beforehand as a native speaker of a language that shares that system. That happens among continental languages, but that doesn't happen among english and other languages.

And for those reasons I don't think americans being taught chinese at school from an early age would make them proficient in the language as a german would be learning french for 4 years, for instance. That wouldn't be the case if the language the americans were learning would be a language that shared many core elementary concepts with english, just like german shares with french (even if they differ a lot once they're from different language branchs), but unfortunately there's no such language, english is a one of a kind language, there's no major language that could be equivalent to that comparison save for a few dialects in the netherlands and northen belgium.

I recently read the king james bible by the way, and the more you go back in time in terms of liguistic development, the closer english gets to other continental languages. If you would still speak middle english as your native language the average native english speaker would be able to learn other continental languages as easily as the average continental one.

I've heard of this before but I don't understand it. How does one learn to read a language without being able to speak it? Do you not pronounce the words in your head? Do you just pronounce them wrong without worrying about it and so know that you could never carry on a conversation with someone who can properly pronounce the language? Should I do this for Greek and Latin since they are dead languages anyway?

If I'm a true langlet and only know English, and seriously want to entertain the idea of learning another language, perhaps Italian, is there a chart for an idiot like me? I took French for 8 years in school and learned nothing partially because there was no rigidity to it - it's just a 40 minute class three times a week. All I remember is some few French words. In terms of learning new words as being akin to just learning new synonyms, that part doesn't seem so hard except for retention. But sentence structure and syntax and grammar and everything, I'm probably exceptionally retarded coming from English-only background. Is it possible Veeky Forums? Can a stupid dummy like me learn Italian, or Latin, or Greek?

Of course you can, the only problem in that case is that it would take a longer time for you to reach fluency
Get yourself introduced to the things you don't know, memorize the grammatical cases and all of that which are mostly inflective in those languages (just google them), start reading comic books or wikipedia articles and watching videos, then start reading actual books

Is gonna be difficult, but don't make the mistake of starting with Greek, German, or any other non-romance language.

By all means, start with a romance language. Once you get hold of one, you will soon get hold of the rest. Seriously. Making yourself able to read the whole traditions of Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and South America is probably the best thing you will ever do to yourself as a reader.

It is going to be difficult learning your first language and will take you a few years. I took me about two years until I was able to read a book in English, and even then it was still very difficult. However, after you learn Italian, it will take six months at most for you to be able to read your first Spanish book, then six months to your first French book, then one or two weeks for your first Portuguese book since you kow Spanish already.

The best method: MEMORIZE one of the Gospels in Italian, then read it in Spanish, Portuguese and French several times. You will understand all of it while learning new words.

Also, learning to read is different from learning to write and speak, but the more you read, the more you learn to write and speak. I can speak reasonable Italian (mother language is Portuguese), and all because I read books in it.

By the way, get used to browsing the dictionary ten times for every page, because you're gonna have to do it. Circle every world you don't know, then make a line connecting it to the margin, and write the translation in the end of that line. The pages will be absolutely filled with circles, lines and words, and this is normal. Then, reread the same book several times. The best thing is that from the second reading on you will not need the dictionary anymore. After you got used to the words, read other books by the same author (because he will use a similar vocabulary) and then proceed to other authors. After three or four books the next ones will be easy. Start with history books. For Italian, use the history books of Indro Montanelli, cause that's as easy as it can get.

Starting with novels is not recommended because they will employ many common nouns such as soap, chair or spoon which very A LOT from one romance language to another. History books will use more abstract words, usually coming from latin, which are very similar throughout the romance languages, so that's much easier.