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tiredofsametab ,

Native English, conversational japanese, survival German (I was conversational at one point, but it's mostly gone), a tiny bit of french (same as German), very basic Spanish, and a tiny bit of Hebrew (I wanted to learn something in the semitic family and it seemed less intimidating than Arabic to start with)

SuiXi3D ,
@SuiXi3D@fedia.io avatar

I speak English. Je ne parle qu'un peu le français.

DudeImMacGyver ,
@DudeImMacGyver@sh.itjust.works avatar

I’m just here to Beetlejuice

jeena ,
@jeena@piefed.jeena.net avatar
  1. Polish
  2. German
  3. Swedish
  4. English

And I'm learning Korean now but it's so damn difficult it's very frustrating.

VanHalbgott OP ,

Ah, Polish, very neat!

tiny ,

Native English speaker. I learned some French in school and enough Japanese to get through a judo match. I struggle to retain other languages. Everywhere I go everyone speaks English and it’s hard to justify learning a new one even everyone in a 1000 mile radius speaks English.

MentalEdge ,
@MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz avatar

English, Swedish, and Finnish.

tiny ,

Native English speaker. I learned some French in school and enough Japanese to get through a judo match. I struggle to retain other languages. Everywhere I go everyone speaks English and it’s hard to justify learning a new one even everyone in a 1000 mile radius speaks English.

jbrains , (edited )
  • I have spoken English since birth.
  • Je parle français depuis l’âge de 7 ans, parce que je l’apprenais à l’école.
  • Estudiaba el español en la escuela secundaria.
  • Jag lär mig svenska i fler än tio år.
  • Ich kann etwas Deutsch lesen und verstehen.

And thanks to my Swedish, I can read a surprising amount of Danish and Norwegian.

I would call myself proficient in French, passable in Spanish, barely functional in Swedish, and I can get by in German in a very banal emergency. 😉

VanHalbgott OP ,

Huh…where’d you learn Swedish?

jbrains ,

Mostly self study from a variety of sources. I lived part time in Stockholm for four years, but it was far easier than I’d expected to speak only English, so although my reading and writing improved, my speaking and listening didn’t. Every time I tried, they switched to English on me. I don’t blame them.

Now I’m a bit stuck: I can’t find much to listen to that’s at my level. I’m past the beginner stuff but can’t keep up with Swedish spoken at full speed.

MacroCyclo ,

Just go for volume. Listen to a lot of stuff at full speed and eventually it will start making sense.

folkrav ,

“à l’école”, but otherwise flawless. You don’t see complex sentences with properly conjugated verbs from a lot of second language speakers, so I have a feeling your French is indeed pretty good.

stoy ,

Jag lär mig svenska i fler är 10 år

That sentence, while clear on what you want to communicate, is quite clearly not written by a native Swede.

I am a native Swede and this is how I would reformat it:

“Jag har studerat Svenska i mer än 10 år.”

If I wanted to be less formal I’d use the slang “pluggat” instead of “studerat”

“Jag har pluggat Svenska i mer än 10 år.”

jbrains ,

Unsurprising. I’m still well in the stage where I’m formulating thoughts in English, then translating into Swedish. Very occasionally something pops out spontaneously, fully-formed, and in Swedish.

I’m mostly thrilled to have got “i” right there, because I haven’t quite memorized i/på with time expressions. It will come.

How well does your formulation convey the nuance that I’ve been learning (off and on, often passively), but often not actively studying? The verbs “att studera”/“att plugga” feel more to me like actively working, but of course, my feelings in this regard are more about English “study” than those Swedish words.

stoy ,

The suggestion I made tells others that you have actively studied the subject.

If you want to say that you have studied actively, but sporadically, you would say something like:

“Jag har väl studerat Svenska lite till och från under typ 10 år nu”

That is a causal way of saying it.

If you have only passively learned the subject, I would phrase it like this:

“De senaste 10 åren har jag hört och läst mycket Svenska, och har då lärt mig en del.”

This puts focus on how you were exposed to a subject and what you learned from it

jbrains ,

“till och från” is a new one for me, so thank you. I would have used “här och där”.

The last formulation makes perfect sense to me. I like to think I could even have written it.

Tusentack för att du tog tid för att förklara lite.

hoshikarakitaridia ,
@hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world avatar

No notes on your German. It sounds more formal than when I’d tell a friend but it def sounds right to me.

jbrains ,

Thank you. What little I can speak or write is very firmly 1980s textbook German.

Blaze ,

!esp for Spanish speakers

Skullgrid ,
@Skullgrid@lemmy.world avatar

thanks, this is going to help with my exposure.

hanabatake ,

French, English, German and a little spoken Japanese. I also studied latin

Edit: in French we say: « Quelles langues parlez-vous ? »

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

(Or, let’s be honest, more likely « Quelles langues parles-tu ? »)

hanabatake ,

No, it is odd to use the singular imho. Of course it is not the polite form

Eg: reddit.com/…/quelles_langues_étrangères_parlez_vo…

Zagorath , (edited )
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

Oh damn. It didn’t even occur to me that we were talking plural here lol

Obviously you’re right.

edit: I honestly hate the fact that English doesn’t have a non-vernacular way to distinguish between singular and plural in the 2nd person. Makes it so much harder to get my head around this sort of situation. “What languages do yous speak?” Would make it so much easier!

Mr_Blott ,

That precisely how the Scots and the Irish would ask it, the yanks would say “y’all”. It’s just the English who are fucking weird :)

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

Yeah, sort of. I also use “yous” frequently as part of my dialect regularly. But it’s certainly an informal usage that I would not normally use in written communication.

I actually suspect, though I haven’t investigated it enough to be confident, that there may be something else going on. That there’s possibly a difference—in my dialect, at least—between 2nd person plural “multiple specific people” and “a general large audience”. And that “yous” might only be appropriate in the former.

hanabatake ,

Yeah, it is the hardest thing when learning a new language. When you learn a new concept that your language doesn’t use. For example, in Latin, German and Japanese, the grammatical case is very important but totally irrelevant in French and English. So I try when I speak French or English to think about the case. That way it comes more naturally to me when speaking German or Japanese.

Zagorath ,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

Yeah, the catch here is that it’s a feature that my native language does at least sort of have, just applied in a way that makes it not clear. When it’s a feature I’m completely unfamiliar with, I’m more likely to be on guard for it, if I’ve learnt it. But here I didn’t even think about it, because it was an element I am familiar with, so I never second-guessed my intuition, even though that intuition was wrong.

folkrav ,

Not particularly odd, just less formal. Much less of an issue with recent generations especially. Younger millennials and later don’t seem to care nearly as much in a lot of contexts. Honestly, outside professional interactions, I see and hear the “tu” a whole lot.

MacroCyclo ,

t’parl’qu’a?

madjo ,

Nederlands is my native language. And I speak English, some German and I can make a fool of myself in French. And I can order a beer in Spanish and thank you for it.

VanHalbgott OP ,

Very cool.

arudesalad ,

English natively und ich lerne Deustch (aber ich spreche nur ein bisschen)

Nemo ,

English natively, but I also speak Spanish every day at work. I can read and write Latin. I can exchange pleasantries in half a dozen other languages.

VanHalbgott OP ,

Bueno!

spizzat2 , (edited )

Was Sprachen Sie spricht? (Deutsch/German)

I’m not a native speaker, but I’m pretty sure it’s

Welche Sprachen sprechen Sie?

assuming you want to be formal, which feels a little weird to me in the context of an internet forum.

Edit: but to answer your question: fluent English, mehr als ein Bißchen Deutsch, y un poquito Español.

Droggelbecher ,

It is indeed normal to use ‘du’ pretty much everywhere on the internet. Even in French i never see ‘vous’ (which to me feels more common than Sie in German usually).

hanabatake ,

I would like to know how a native german speaker would say it. But I would say like you

Ephera ,

Well, if I were to post it to a community on e.g. feddit.org, I would write it as:

Welche Fremdsprachen sprecht ihr so?

“Fremdsprachen” just means “foreign languages”, since I know that responding folks speak German.

Then “sprecht ihr” rather than “sprechen Sie”, because addressing a group of people with direct pronoun is unusual in German.
As someone else already said, using “Sie” is also far too formal for this context. People refer to each other as “Du” on most of the internet.
But “Welche Sprachen sprichst Du?” still gives me vibes of a marketing firm hoping to drive engagement by referring to people directly.

And then the “so”, I have no idea what that is linguistically, but it basically makes the question more casual. It invites for people to tell a story or to have a chat.

hanabatake ,

Thanks for the detailed answer. Interestingly it is pretty similar to the idiomatic way to say it in French. Except for the “so”

hoshikarakitaridia ,
@hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world avatar

“So” is indeed one of those small things that’s just colloquial to casual conversation in in Germany. To me personally it signals that you weren’t as exact with your question so you’re leaving it kinda open ended to some degree. But when it comes to Grammar no clue what this is.

It feels a bit similar to “do you speak any other languages or ~” because this leaves it less as a direct question and more as an open ended conversation, suggesting you just wanna know more and you’re not very particular in your question and in what you expect as an answer.

VanHalbgott OP ,

Sehr gut, danke! Muy bien!

Ephera ,

ein Bißchen Deutsch

BTW, this should be written as:

ein bisschen Deutsch

We switched from ß to ss in all words with a preceding short vowel in 1996: de.wikipedia.org/…/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschr…
So, it’s “Fuß” and “Maß”, because those are pronounced with a long vowel, but then “Fass” and “muss” and “Biss”, because those are pronounced with a short vowel.

And in this case, “bisschen” is spelled with a small “b” for reasons that I’m not entirely sure are logical. 😅
It would be spelled with a capital letter, if “Bisschen” was a unit of measurement here (i.e. a small bite), like a “Liter” is.
But because it was used so much and without really referring to a specific measurement, it eventually began being spelled lowercase, similar to “wenig” or “etwas” (“ein wenig Deutsch”, “etwas Deutsch”). Apparently, this kind of word is called an “Indefinitpronomen”.

de.wiktionary.org/wiki/bisschen
vs.
de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bisschen (much rarer)

spizzat2 ,

Thanks! It’s surprisingly difficult to get Germans to correct me on things. Most of them are just happy that I can speak it at all, so they tell me not to worry about the little stuff. 😂

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