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 4 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

India - Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, and English

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Mexican here:

Spanish & English - Fluent

Japanese - Intermediate-advanced

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 12 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

Same here! But I'm Mexican from Mexico.

Last year I've gotten to reading full-length Japanese news articles with little to no help with the Kanjis.

It's funny how many Latinos are naturally drawn to Japanese. I always blame the loads of anime we got throughout the 90s.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 19 hours 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] 4 points 20 hours ago

Lithuanian.

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

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

From Croatia, I'm multilingual!

English

Croatian

Serbian

Bosnian

Serbo-croatian

Montenegrin

Probably missing some.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Slovenian? Or don't I dare ask that?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 16 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours 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] 3 points 16 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

American, I speak English, Thai, and Korean.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 20 hours 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] 1 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

US. I speak ok Mandarin, poor Spanish and bad Portuguese. And I guess English. Also I can't read Chinese reliably, so I am also illiterate.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 22 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

There's a Hungarian hardcore band I like called Aws. It's a really neat language. I don't understand a word of it sadly. Maybe someday.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Ah, nice. Have not heard of them, funnily enough. But i am all for hardcore so there is that :D how did you learn about them?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

They were on Eurovision representing Hungary. I listen to alot of non-English music. This is the song if you're interested. I think their singer passed away unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago

Thanks, I’ll check it out. I don’t really follow music recently all that much so i guess it explains it

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day 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 1 day ago (1 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I usually refer to England as Great Brittan? Is that generally preferred? Are there many Spanish speakers in Great Brittan?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago

I usually refer to England as Great Brittan? Is that generally preferred?

No, because it's wrong!

  • Great Britain = England + Scotland + Wales
  • UK = Great Britain + Northern Ireland
  • British = citizen of (careful!) UK

You're welcome.

Are there many Spanish speakers in Great Brittan?

Far fewer than there are English speakers.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day 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 6 hours 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] 5 points 1 day 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] 2 points 19 hours ago

From Germany and know German and English. I can read Dutch and understand snippets but speaking it is beyond me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 21 hours ago

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] 4 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Italy: Italian, English and a local language

[–] [email protected] 3 points 19 hours 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] 2 points 16 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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] 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Depends what you mean.

By country of birth: I'm from PRC

As in "Where are you posting from?": USA

I speak Cantonese, Mandarin, English, and the the basic words of Spanish such as: ¡Hola!, Uno, Dos, Tres, Bruenos Dias, Muy Bien, ¿e tu?, Me habla pizza (Thanks, Spanish class. Still can't get the Spanish alphabet song out of my head lol 😅). And I can read like English (obviously), most basic Chinese characters, I think I know the top 100 of them, I'm more confident in identifying the characters if its in simplified. And techically, I can read the Kanji parts of Japanese (since they are basically Chinese). I hear some Japanese and Koreans words and can make out some of the words because they are so close to Cantonese. (I think Cantonese, Korean, and Japanese, decended from a common language). I could only write in English, after 10+ years of never using Chinese, I can't write shit beside like few basic words and my name in Chinese.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

(I think Cantonese, Korean, and Japanese, decended from a common language)

Idk about Korean but I do know that Japanese loaned tons of words from Chinese when they imported Kanji but they're otherwise unrelated afaik.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day 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] 7 points 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

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

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