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Who here speaks more than one language?

direstraits said:
Easily learn Spanish/French? How? Is there a pill I didn't know about? :)

ds
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The four Romance languages (I'm excluding Romanian here, of which I know nothing about :eek: ) are extremely similar regarding vocabulary and syntax: Portuguese, Spanish (the closest to pt), French and Italian.

If I hadn't been a lazy bastard during high school I could have mastered French. Interestingly enough, I studied Italian three years in University and have since discovered that French makes more sense to me, because it's very similar to Italian.
 
I have had conversations with people who speak Portuguese. Now I do not speak that language but I do speak Spanish. Both languages are similiar enough to make out phrases and communicate successfully. :D
 
I'm really, truly impressed at the wide range of languages mentioned here. A couple I've never even heard of. Perhaps because I'm a stupid American. LOL

It reminds me of a joke my Spanish teacher once told me. She asked me what you called a person who spoke two languages. I said bilingual. So she asked me what you called a person who spoke three languages. Suspecting it was a trick question, I hesitantly said trilingual. Finally, she asked me what you called a person who speaks only one language. I replied monolingual, but she shook her head no and told me that the correct answer was "American." :D
 
Hi ValkyrieRaven88

You are an american, you speak the international language English, so you dont need to know other languages. Although my mother tounge is not English yet I had to learn it to communicate with the world.

And as an Indian I know some other Indian languages, because in India different people speak different regional languages.

That is why I had to Know minimum four languages.:)
 
Speaking English isn't an excuse not to learn other languages. Actually, I think Americans are very behind in comparison to other countries because we adopted the "everyone speaks English anyway" philosophy. I'm telling you, that's a lie. Even in America you run into plenty of people who can't speak English very well, if at all. They're talking about making Spanish a second national language.

I'm actually planning on learning Esperanto, among other things. I think it's a great idea and I've heard it's easy to learn. My uncle, a former linguist for the NSA, informed me that those who bother to learn Esperanto are usually very eccentric, and I said that suits me fine. I read somewhere that only 100,000 speak it fluently.
 
lady.cordelia said:
TUNDRA! waving excitedly to "see" you! oh, and you missed the open door. i posted about it but you weren't here! ;)

and you didn't post latin! you know latin don't you?

i know a tiny bit of spanish, a fair amount of a dialect of french (but not quite the standard french you hear in most areas of france) due to family being from a certain area with a little difference in the language. i am learning latin along with my daughter.
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No, I don't know latin--it's my father who does. That's so sad about the open door!! I will lament the loss of the open door. Next time...maybe you could send me a PM?
 
it is open now! but i can't get the dang key to move to open the dang door! something up with my mouse or something, because i know i did all the right moves to get there - i always cheat and go to leakycauldron.org and figure it out from there what steps to take:


click on the mirror and a tree appears, click on the middle of the door at the top and a wreath appears, click on the top of the mirror and garland appears, and then click on either side of the door on the spider webs and then the wind chimes and a key appears and take the key to open the door and it will take you inside to play a game of hangman

i think it only gives the name of the new title, which is old news now, but whenever you gain something on the site and it goes into your album, then sometimes you get access to info sooner than others, or so i hear, so i was trying to get in anyways.
 
ValkyrieRaven88 said:
I'm actually planning on learning Esperanto, among other things. I think it's a great idea and I've heard it's easy to learn. My uncle, a former linguist for the NSA, informed me that those who bother to learn Esperanto are usually very eccentric, and I said that suits me fine. I read somewhere that only 100,000 speak it fluently.
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Declensions apart, it shouldn't be difficult: it has the same syntax as English, there's only one plural form, there's only one gender. It's practically custom made for English speakers :D

Bonan ŝancon, Valkyrie.
 
I don't know. I think having only one gender will confuse me a little. I mean, confuse me more than in Spanish having to learn four forms of our word "the". Oh, well, I'll figure it out. Vocabulary-wise, I somehow manage to stumble my way through everything.
 
Do you mean one gender as in you don't have both feminine and masculine nouns, or one gender as in you don't have a differnce between "he" and "she"? I thought you meant the last one.
 
Now I'm not really sure.

I'm under the impression Esperanto only has one suffix for all nouns, so can there be a distinction between masculine and feminine words?
 
I suppose not. I'm planning on buying an Esperanto-English dictionary, so I'll tell you if I ever find out.

But there's a difference between him and her in English and we don't have feminine and masculine words, either, except for those that deal specifically with gender. And pronouns, of course.
 
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