I’m from the US and English is the only language I speak fluently.
South Africa and pretty much just English. Apparently I was fairly fluent in Zulu when I was little kid, before starting school and losing it. And we learnt Afrikaans in school but Afrikaans kids went to Afrikaans schools and I grew up and lived in English speaking areas so it was never used. If I tried to speak Afrikaans now, I would embarrass myself but I can mostly read it and understand someone if they’re talking slow enough and I’m concentrating hard enough.
Honestly something that pisses me off is that despite going through school in the ‘new’ South Africa, the new government never bothered making sure we learnt to communicate with each other. So instead of learning Zulu and being able to freely communicate with the majority of the population, we learnt Afrikaans because they never fucking bothered to change it.
I can also understand very small bits and pieces of written and spoken German from high school but that’s barely worth mentioning. Also, I can kinda sometimes understand a little bit of written Dutch because it’s remotely similar to Afrikaans.
Polish living in Poland, I know English, I don’t speak it much though, currently learning Japanese
American, I speak English, Thai, and Korean.
American, English only but I need to learn Burmese as that’s where my daughter-in-law is from. Can’t have hypothetical grand kids speaking a language I don’t know.
Italy: Italian, English and a local language
Hungarian, so beyond that that i speak english (duh) swedish, though i mostly read books on it, not a lot of swedes around, and i am trying to pick up some chinese now
From the UK originally, which is complicated enough. To foreigners I tend to say “England”, which (a) is true and (b) everyone understands. But I consider myself British, not English, and certain not a “UK person” (ugh).
I speak French near-natively from having lived there for a big chunk of my life. Spanish: intermediate, because it’s like French. German: got an A at GCSE decades ago, so not very good. Tried learning Russian a few years ago and, wow, that was hard. I cannot speak Russian. But being able to decipher the Cyrillic script is definitely a cool party trick.
Norwegian.
I’d say fluent in Norwegian, English and German. German because I lived there for a year and the missus is German.
I can make myself understood in Spanish.
Swedish and Danish come for free as they are so close to Norwegian. I don’t need to speak them as we understand eachother mostly.UK, trying not to be a typical one-language Anglo by learning German. I’m thankful there seems to be a large German community on Lemmy!
From Croatia, I’m multilingual!
English
Croatian
Serbian
Bosnian
Serbo-croatian
Montenegrin
Probably missing some.
US. Fluent in English but I can speak enough spanish to do most everyday things. I am learning Japanese, and while I can read and understand about half of it, I can’t pronounce shit and haven’t bothered practicing since I just want to read it.
Born & raised in the US, lived in Poland for the past several years. Speak a good bit of polish, enough to navigate most interactions with strangers but not enough for deep conversations with the father-in-law.
I’m from The Netherlands and I speak Dutch, English, a bit of German and no French at all even though I had French in school for 13 years.
But The Netherlands has 2 official national languages, Dutch and Friesian, although English officially isn’t a foreign language anymore due to the quality and quantity of English speakers and there are discussions to make English the third national language.
I wish I knew more languages, but sadly I’m really bad at learning any. Some people learn languages so fast, I’m better at math and such. I wish I knew Russian, Chinese and Spanish because I’d love to travel to old USSR republics, China and other Asian countries and South America. Knowing the most spoken languages in the world would be amazing I imagine. And I wish I knew Norwegian because I love the language and the country so much. Plus, you can communicate in Denmark and Sweden too. But luckily now we have Google translate so I could communicate even though I don’t have shared languages with where I want to go.
Ireland. First language English, second Irish (but only in the education system), learning Russian
Nice try glowy
