How many of you speak a second language?

I'm just curious as to the amount of bilingual and polylingual users. What's the best thing about it in your opinion?

english is my second language haha! : ' ) my first is welsh, and apart from that i speak conversational german. the best thing about it is that it looks good on a uni application, apart from that speaking fluent welsh is a bit useless. i'm losing my german skill steadily since it's been 1 year since i finished studying it : - (

Cariad said:

english is my second language haha! : ' ) my first is welsh, and apart from that i speak conversational german. the best thing about it is that it looks good on a uni application, apart from that speaking fluent welsh is a bit useless. i'm losing my german skill steadily since it's been 1 year since i finished studying it : - (

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Welsh is a real language??

English is also my second language, Greek is my first. I also did German and French classes at school but I don't remember enough to actually hold a conversation. But I can understand enough and I know my swear words

Speaking foreign languages is a good thing when you're travelling but nowadays if you know English you can converse with pretty much anyone

i started learning french and spanish in secondary school, but i soon dropped them after losing interest and having preferences in other subjects. at one of the universities i've applied for, we'll be given the option to study a language and i'd like to give mandarin a try.

Christos said:

Welsh is a real language??

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somehow.

I used to be good at conversing in French but that went down the drain :c

I wish I were properly bilingual. I mean, I probably could be if I could actually focus for more than a week or two on learning a new language. My problem is that I want to take a look at all the languages, so I can never sit down on learning just one in-depth.

English actually isnt my first language, technically. since i learned american sign language first before i learned the English language, that would technically be my first language. i learned ASL back when i was a wee baby, very very young. i still use it daily bc i live with my mom and she's deaf, and so is my dad, and i dont live with him, but i talk with him through the vp pretty often so.. yeah. i also know English, of course. and i took french in middle school and half of high school, but i barely remember anything besides le gateau and a few sentences, if any.

i speak enough italian to live on. not fluent by any means, but i used to live out there and could easily get by with what i knew - so, although it's not perfect, i'd say i "speak" that language. now that i'm not out there any more it's not particularly useful, but it comes in handy whenever i have to understand anything in spanish - the two languages are remarkably similar and i can speak italian to someone who speaks spanish and we can understand each other quite well. in that sense, it'll be a great starting point for when (or if) i come to learn spanish, which is much less intimidating a task than it once was.

then a funny one is irish (attn christos: this is a language, too!!!). back when i was really young and lived in ireland, i sort-of learned english and irish in parallel. a fair proportion of people in the town where i was born, at the time anyway, spoke irish fluently in addition to english and lots of writing, signs, etc. were in both languages. unfortunately when we moved away to england, irish obviously wasn't particularly used or useful and my knowledge of it kinda died. i couldn't really speak much of it now but it's funny how, whenever i go back out there or see anything written in irish, i can recognise old phrases well enough and quite easily pick up new ones too.

hoshiko said:

English actually isnt my first language, technically. since i learned american sign language first before i learned the English language, that would technically be my first language. i learned ASL back when i was a wee baby, very very young. i still use it daily bc i live with my mom and she's deaf, and so is my dad, and i dont live with him, but i talk with him through the vp pretty often so.. yeah.

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this is so cool. i always felt like sign language would be amazingly useful to know. is it well-standardised over the world, or would you need to re-learn it if you wanted to communicate with a deaf person in another country?

Nihilego said:

this is so cool. i always felt like sign language would be amazingly useful to know. is it well-standardised over the world, or would you need to re-learn it if you wanted to communicate with a deaf person in another country?

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well, sign language is different all over. it's the same all over in america pretty much, except for some slight differences in how states sign them. there are a lot of different versions of sign language. there's German sign language, chinese sign language, taiwanese..a lot. there's too many to name. but it's different all over. so if i were to go to china or germany or whatever and meet a deaf person, i'd have to learn their version of the sign language they have there. i'm sure it'd be very difficult for me as i'm only accustomed to the american version. thanks for asking though, i'm glad to see people taking an interest in it c:

English is my second language, and Italian is my first one.
I can speak some French and I'm currently learning German, too. I'll also start learning Spanish in a couple of years.

In today's world being polylingual can be quite helpful. However, speaking to foreigners is very easy, seeing how much the English language has spread.

I speak french IRL. I write in english, readin english and listen to stuff in english all day every day.I even think in english sometimes. I can't really talk in english tho, it just sounds weird with my accent and words I can't pronounce.

i speak a bit french and russian

I can speak French due to studying five long, tedious, arduous years of it at school, but not fluently. I can understand it better than I can speak it, I wouldn't be able to hold a conversation in French.

I can speak spanish, and italian :)

My mother language is Portuguese. But sometimes I can express myself better in English, sometimes I struggle to explain something in Portuguese and end up walking in circles when only one simple English word comes to my head that explains it perfectly.

Portuguese is kinda useful as there's a few countries that use it as a primary language, buuut I never got out of this hellhole so.

Give me any book in French, and I'd be able to tell you the main points of the story. I don't understand it fluently, but enough to get by.

That said, I'm not that great at reading or writing it. And I picked up a bad habit from my high school French teacher where he'd get us to speak in more casual French, and that leaked over into my writing (ch'uis pas fatigué instead of je ne suis pas fatigué, for example). But, at least I know enough to not get stranded in any French speaking regions, haha.

I'm fully bilingual, as Swedish is my first language but I've come to speak English every day at work, with online friends, and with my boyfriend. Yay!

Spanish is my first language, as it's what my parents speak.

I picked up English fairly quickly and I know it even more than Spanish now.

I also recently started taking French in high school. (It's been a bit hard for me to learn it so far.)

Mawa said:

I speak french IRL. I write in english, readin english and listen to stuff in english all day every day.I even think in english sometimes. I can't really talk in english tho, it just sounds weird with my accent and words I can't pronounce.

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So that's why your user title is the "The Typo Queen"...

I have the same issue, I can type/read French better than speak it. I butcher most of the French pronunciations. {XD}