Multi-Lingual?!

[Admin Sora]

I am really curious now. There are so many languages in the world, so who knows another language? What language is it, and how well do you understand it?



Other than English, I speak German fluently. At least, I'd say fluently. I speak, read, and understand it well enough to carry every day conversations and I did live there for 18 months. Now my spelling is total crap, so it takes me forever to write anything in German because I can't remember how anything is spelled.

To get really technical, I do NOT understand and speak all the dialects. I understand Hoch Deutsch, Plat Deutsch, Hesse, a bit of Erzgebirgisch (it gets iffy if they speak fast), and Berliner. Germany has many dialects, and these are all Northern dialects. Hoch Deutsch is 'high German', that's what you learn. It's the standard German. Plat Deutsch is a dialect spoken in Northwest Germany. Erzgebirgisch is definitely a bizzare one. It's spoken in Erzgebirge, which is right next to the Czech Republic.

Now I speak Hoch Deutsch, but I've been told I have a strong Hesse accent, which is basically a province right above Frankfurt.

And, for kicks and giggles, here is a Youtube video of my favorite word in German. WHICH I CAN SAY! Eichhörnchen

[mod audrey]

I've taken French since the second grade through to having self-studied it at AP level. I definitely wouldn't consider myself fluent—because I can't express myself equally well in both French and English—but I would guess that my ability is around roughly B1 or B2 of the CEFR. My university actually has a bilingual campus, so I probably could find out for certain pretty easily.

Having said that, I'm much more comfortable with Standard French (Metropolitan French) than with other forms of the language. (I guess I'm going to have to get used to Québécois French now, though.)

Other than that, I can fingerspell American Sign Language (ASL), and I know a handful of words and phrases in various other languages. My next goal is to learn Hindi-Urdu, but, in reality, I'll likely end up taking Arabic.

[Deleted]

I studied French for seven years, from seventh grade to twelfth grade. I took the AP examination and earned a 5, which means I mastered everything taught to us better than like 90% of the country, but, like Audrey, I hesitate to proclaim any sort of fluency lol. Reading is by far my best area, and if I wasn't such a lazy butt I could probably write a lot better, but all the accent marks mess me up. Also, tenses. I'm utter crap at tenses other than the present and composed past lol. Comprehension wise, I understand Standard French the best (since that's what we were taught), but our teacher also made a point of making us listen to the Québécois accent...which is still kind of hard for me but w/e. We also had to learn bits and pieces of African French, but that was franglais-esque (je go) so really the struggle there came from switching back and forth between the languages lol.

I can fingerspell ASL and if I was dropped in Spain I could find an airport or an English speaker who could take me to one, but other than that I'm a bit meh at languages, oops.

[Deleted]

I took German for three years in middle school, so I'm not extremely fluent but I can understand and also respond fairly easily. I took maybe a year of Spanish my freshman year of high school but none of that really stuck haha.

I also use sign language, or ASL, and I love it. It's extremely helpful not only in life but with the children I work with

[COLIN!]

Took French in school from 8th-11th grade. I know some phrases still and can pick up on a few things in conversation here and there, but I've mostly lost all of it unfortunately.