What Languages Can You Speak?

 

Pretty darn close in French (good enough that I can teach English Language Arts in French......with aid of a dictionary )

I read and write Latin but since there really is no use in speaking it, I didn't bother learning that.

I get by in Italian because I can read and I can curse (very vividly might I add )

 

-Spanish (my mothertongue)

-English (quite fluently)

 

-French (actually, I don't speak it, but I can understand it quite well if I have a dictionary or a translation software like Babelfish, since it's similar to English and Spanish in some aspects)

-Italian (with this one I use the same technique as with French, but it's easier, since it has a lot in common with Spanish)

-Portuguese (this one is even easier to understand for me than Italian)

 

-Slovenian (only a few words, since my grandparents spoke it)

 

And I've tried learning a little Japanese by myself, too. Not easy.

 

I dont like to use Babelfish to translate sentences, since it's not thrustworthy. I only use it to translate single words, and then I use my brain to translate the whole sentence. It's slower, but it's a safer method.

 

Five years of French lessons at school and I still stutter and mumble incoherently when ordering a beer in France and end up pointing and nodding with a stupid grin on my face. There really is something dreadfully wrong with the English education system with its complete inability to produce children who can speak a second language inspite of years of forced lessons. This is as true today as it was 30 years ago - we spend so much time learning to congugate verbs and what that past-participle plu-freeking-perfect tense is that any desire to actually HAVE A CONVERSATION is completly disregarded (I neither know nor care what the pluperfect tense is in English - let alone French, yet I can speak and write English like a flipping native and have been able to since I was very small). I wanted to learn German but was not allowed to because I was so bad at French - where is the ing logic in that? There is nothing remotely similar in the two languages and surely it is easier to teach a language to someone who actually wanted to learn it than force them to endure a language they have no affinity with?

 

Sorry, I rant (you rant, he rants, we rant, youse rants, they rant - rantingly simple really). Yep, I'm embarrassed to be English  - but, like Jim and others, I do try and pick up odd words and phrases in whatever country I'm in.

 

 

 

 

I am fairly well versed in BASIC, C, Pascal and Coral-66 but I can't speak them.

 

Oh, and I can speak American, I haven't tried Canadian yet because I haven't been there and what little Australian I know I've only picked up from watching Neighbours and Skippy.

 

 

As for the eaiest and hardest languages to learn -- it was Hebrew for me, in both directions. This language is very easy to learn to speak, due to its "mathematical" nature -- once you've learnt a template, you've learnt all the similar words in all their conjugations and declensions, and Hebrew is the templatic language.

 

It was also the hardest at the same time, since it is not easy to learn to read and to write in language which is written from right to left (presuming you're used to read and to write in the opposite direction all of your life), and due to the lack of signs for vowels. However, once you catch the principle, it's only the question of training...

 

Multiple votes are not enabled (at least at my PC), so the poll is not very accurate. I chose "other" because my native tongue is not listed, although I am fluent in English.