Language

[Juno]

I learned Cantonese and English pretty simultaneously growing up - born and raised in Canada so I spoke English at school and with my friends, but at home I speak almost exclusively Chinese, at least with my parents.

In terms of writing, my parents did sign me up for a Chinese class when I was little, and I spent every Saturday morning learning how to read and write in Chinese from the ages 5 to 14, so I can read a decent amount of Chinese.

I definitely retained reading better than writing, but the Cantonese keyboard on my phone is pretty neat, I just need to know how to pronounce it and type that phonetically, then select the right characters, so I get by with that whenever I actually need to type in Chinese. Writing on paper is an entirely different story though, haha.

 

[Alyssandra]

definitely retained reading better than writing, but the Cantonese keyboard on my phone is pretty neat, I just need to know how to pronounce it and type that phonetically, then select the right characters, so I get by with that whenever I actually need to type in Chinese. Writing on paper is an entirely different story though, haha.

I registered four weeks late to an intro Mandarin class in second year uni. The prof thought I was crazy as I knew zero Mandarin and there was a midterm planned for less than a week later. Turns out, you can fudge your written expression score if you can read the characters well enough and/or deduce from context. Definitely a good strategy - most of the characters were used in the final exam questions, so to write a fictional letter, I just flipped between pages and singled out the characters I recognized.

Only works if you know the grammar, though lol

Spoiler:

Got an A+ in that class and absolutely adored the experience.

 

[strangerhypno]

I know 1.5 languages. English and I can understand my native language.

I would like to learn some other languages, like Korean just to impress the korean weebs, or German.

 

[tokyodrift]

Native is English. In the process of learning Korean though.

 

[Yue Han]

I definitely retained reading better than writing, but the Cantonese keyboard on my phone is pretty neat, I just need to know how to pronounce it and type that phonetically, then select the right characters, so I get by with that whenever I actually need to type in Chinese. Writing on paper is an entirely different story though, haha.

I can definitely relate to this. Learning to read is no problem but writing is an entirely different story. I've made the decision not to learn to write because, as you say, a keyboard that can use roman characters for the phonetics and then turn them into Hanzi has done me fine for every situation I've needed to write. I'd rather spend my time focusing on other components of the language. I love being able to read Chinese. It's something I never imagined I'd be able to do as a child and my life just so happened to take me down this path.

 

[Ninetales]

My first language is English. I also learned to speak a little Russian at a young age and Metropolitan French more recently. (I am not fluent in either language.)

My family on my mother's side has partial Russian ancestry and Russian is my grandmother's first language. Growing up, whenever I spent the night at my grandparent's house, my grandmother would murmur Russian Orthodox prayers to me before she would tuck me in at night. Eventually, I started reciting them back to her, which inspired my grandmother to begin teaching me the language. I can understand Russian fairly well and I can properly formulate sentences, although my vocabulary is quite limited and I struggle to efficiently read or write in Russian, as I am relatively unfamiliar with the Cyrillic alphabet.

French was a language I started studying only a few years ago after taking French classes in school. With French, I have the opposite problem that I have with Russian; I can write and read the language with relative ease, however, I find it significantly more difficult to communicate verbally.

I would undoubtedly say that I have a better comprehension of Russian as a second language as compared to French. This is due to the fact that I learned it at a younger age as well as the fact that I use it more in everyday speech. (I have some friends who are fluent in Russian.)

If I were to learn another language I'd most likely learn either Japanese, Mandarin, German, Italian, or Swedish. All of those languages are unique respectively and would be intriguing to learn. Nevermind the fact that each one would only broaden my worldview.

 

[Megan]

Mein Deutsch ist Amalgam dichterischen Durchfalls. (my German=diarrhea)
It's nice though, being able to read a lot of literature from known philosophers and poets in their native language.

I also had a couple years of Latin in school. Though there's not a lot of it remaining. But it is a fascinating language!

My English is decent. I don't need to learn in order to get top grades. It's most useful when watching streams or playing video games. I suppose, that's where I learnt the language in the first place even though I had English lessions for way longer. In terms of understanding I'd say my knowledge is sufficient enough to let me read anything from basic literature to advanced papers.

 

[boran_blok]

My native language is Dutch, learned English, French and a tad of German in school.
Currently studying to learn Japanese, ETA on that is somewhere around 2030 however. Lots of other stuff sucking up time.

 

[strangerhypno]

Speaking different languages

Are you fluent in any other language. Or can you speak some to a certain degree?

I can't speak any languages fluently at least, except English. Being bilingual or beyond is actually useful if that language is prominent, especially down in Texas where a ton of different cultures reside. But I forget all the spanish I learned in high school and I can barely understand my parent's native language.

I would like to learn Japanese or Korean, only because I can show it off to the weeb masses. Maybe refresh and improve my spanish cause TX. Or German because it sounds funny. I'd definitely should learn my parents native language.