I speak English, I’m learning my heritage language Norwegian.
Native Spanish, very good Catalan, good English and some (not enough to speak them) Portuguese, Italian and French.
Bangla mainly and sometimes English but pretty less in daily life (I do understand more languages but I just don’t speak them)
I want to say spanish, german and english, but the honest answer is none
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English, and I have some very poor Gaeilge (Irish).
I only speak english and bad english
Love 😘
Native Norwegian, fluent in English, can struggle through childrens’ comic books in German and sort of get by in Egyptian Arabic (or at least I could back in the day, but it’s been a while).
En annen nordmann!!!
jada, det er noen av oss her :)
So i’m fluent in English and a specific proto-sign language that as far as i know only a few hundred people sign. I can order food and ask where the toilet is in about 30-50 languages, depending on the day. My Spanish and German are rusty: i have production issues but my receptive is competent. All my other romance languages (except basque and romanian, i haven’t looked at those at all) are decent enough to travel and make an ass of myself. My germanic and nordic languages are worse than my romance ones. Do not ask me anything in Afrikaans I will assume you are drunk.
English, Russian, Serbo-Chroatian, a bit of Ukrainian. Very little of Deutsch.
Spanish native. I got bored with English so I moved on to learning Català 🤣
American English with a specialty in the dialect of American Regulatory Legalese.
Spanish, Arabic, and Irish I used to be able to read and write, but was always terrible at understanding any of them spoken.
I learned bits of German by proxy from having friends stationed at Heidelberg.
Since Lemmy apparently has a ton of people who are bilingual — how do I as a 31 year old man that knows enough Spanish to say ‘Thank you, where is the bathroom?’ and frequently watches anime in subtitles gain another language? I’m open to all suggestions, except bad ones. Specifically I am interested in learning Mandarin because I hate myself.
I’m a native Cantonese and Mandarin speaker and I’ll be brutally honest, you need a huge motivation, or else you will struggle to be fluent.
Not just because you like the aesthetics, or like the idea of being bilingual…
What are you gonna even use the language for.
For example, you might wanna learn Japanese for better experience enjoying Anime…
My parents came to the US as adults.
My dad has been in the US for… 16 years… still a non citizen and never really learned English
Meanwhile, mom needs it to do bussiness… investments… and stuff… so she has to learn it… She knows enough to become a citizen…
The biggest thing is IMMERSION. Even then, dad never learner it…
My parents barely understand me lol. Since I only know 2nd grade level of Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin share similar vocaublary)… despite being a native speaker.
A westerner is gonna struggle a lot with the tones…
I was “luckly” enough to be just at the perfect time of 8 years old so I know enough basics of Chinese before emigraring… so my brain is in between two worlds.
If I was born in the US, idk if I could manage to learn it.
IMO Mandarin is gonna be tough since Chinese shows are sooo boring… soo cliche… predictable story is gonna kill the will to learn… (unless you love bad tv drama lol)
Ask your self: What are you gonna use Mandarin for? (Also: do you also wanna learn the writing too? Since its logographics, much harder.) Just as a trophy? Or actually gonna regularly have a use for it?
Well, to answer your primary question — many of the people on the team I work with speak… it’s either Cantonese or Mandarin, I think they told me Mandarin but I’m not entirely sure. It isn’t something that would necessarily help me on a professional level, but it would help me on a personal level with many of them.
That’s genuinely my motivation, I don’t really care about ‘seeming’ bilingual — this is mostly to bring me closer to people who have helped me at work.
I mean the best way to achieve your goal of personal connection is just asking them to teach you.
I guess that’s true, I have actually mentioned it to a few of my coworkers – they all had a reaction that more or less spoke ‘there simply isn’t enough time for that’ lol.
Tangentially, there’s also this bilibili show called ling long reincarnation that, whether I’m stupid for liking it or not, is awesome. The thing about it is that I’ve always felt like there’s something lost in translation about the show, or there are themes that I’m simply unaware of due to… well an overall lack of knowledge about Chinese language and culture, I suppose.
Idk, full immersion would be best like you said — I just have no idea where I’d find that in California. I’m sure there are places, but then there’s the extra layer of somehow finding enough time to actually absorb the language through immersion. Perhaps I’ll just take up Spanish lol, I always did well in it in school and it’s close enough to English. I think it would probably be much easier to find people who speak Spanish here.
A bit of English and some Japanese…
Norwegian, Swedish, German, English, some French and maybe enough Spanish to survive a week or two.
En annen norsktalende person!!! Heihei!!
