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Do you speak another language?

This sentence also makes perfect sense in English and is grammatically correct:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
 
i'm austrian.

my native language is german, though i was raised tri-lingual. so right now i natively speak german and american english. i kinda forgot the mandarin-chinese parts my father taught me...

at school i was taught english, french, latin and russian.

so that's five languages for me, though one of them is dead. the funny thing is how easy it is to translate italian texts with french and latin knowledge. it works rather smoothly.
 
English is my first language and I speak French fluently. I can hold a basic conversation in Italian and Russian.
I made a goal for myself when I was younger that I would learn 5 languages during my lifetime. I just have one left to go, and I'm thinking German would be cool. I know German pronunciation pretty well from having to learn German lieder when I took voice lessons in college. Now I just need to learn what the words mean...
I can understand some Spanish since it's so similar to French and Italian, but I don't really care to learn it, it's such an ugly language (my apologies to all you Spanish speakers out there!).
 
Stampyhead said:
I can understand some Spanish since it's so similar to French and Italian, but I don't really care to learn it, it's such an ugly language (my apologies to all you Spanish speakers out there!).
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Eh, it depends greatly on the dialect I think. Argentine Spanish can be quite beautiful, while Mexican and Caribbean Spanish are nails on a chalkboard for me. I've had people think that when an Argentinian, Guatamalan, and Mexican friend and myself (with a strong Madrileño accent) are talking that we are speaking four somehow mutually intelligible but distinct languages. So maybe you're just used to the Mexican Spanish :) *ducks and runs from any Mexicans on the forum*
 
juanster said:
catalan, is i am not sure exactly how to categorize it (i don't think i could even if i wanted to),I wouldn t call it a language on its own, but could not call it a dialect of spanish either because it's very different from spanish writting included, it is spoken in the west of spain, people that speak catalana nd spanish can understand each other, i dunno which came first, anyways i speak,write, read: spanish, english and french fluently.
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Catalan is a dialect of Spanish in the same way French is a dialect of Italian. :p

I speak all four of those, and English of course. Not too hot on writing them down though sadly :eek:
 
I speak French and German so badly that I can't really say that I speak them. It's interesting that I speak them badly in different ways though – I know the structure of French a bit better, but find it really hard to speak, but can't remember much German, but when I have to speak it I find it much easier.

New Year's resolution is to learn both to a reasonable level though, as I've always found it hugely embarrassing to go abroad and suck at speaking the language. I can get by, but it's obvious I don't know them very well, and it would be nice to continue my day-to-day habit of bantering with random strangers in other countries too. ;)
 
Lau said:
I speak French and German so badly that I can't really say that I speak them. It's interesting that I speak them badly in different ways though – I know the structure of French a bit better, but find it really hard to speak, but can't remember much German, but when I have to speak it I find it much easier.

New Year's resolution is to learn both to a reasonable level though, as I've always found it hugely embarrassing to go abroad and suck at speaking the language. I can get by, but it's obvious I don't know them very well, and it would be nice to continue my day-to-day habit of bantering with random strangers in other countries too. ;)
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That's probably due to their relativity and semblance to English. I have the same problem with French. I have never really studied German, but I've heard people with your same problem too.
 
Lau said:
I speak French and German so badly that I can't really say that I speak them. It's interesting that I speak them badly in different ways though – I know the structure of French a bit better, but find it really hard to speak, but can't remember much German, but when I have to speak it I find it much easier.

New Year's resolution is to learn both to a reasonable level though, as I've always found it hugely embarrassing to go abroad and suck at speaking the language. I can get by, but it's obvious I don't know them very well, and it would be nice to continue my day-to-day habit of bantering with random strangers in other countries too. ;)
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oui oui, mais c'est pas difficile, :p where do u live? UK?

sometimes when I go to Japan people expect me to speak Japanese somehow because they can't see the difference between a tourist and a local... so it's kinda embarrassing when they start talking to you in Japanese and all I know is hello how are you blablabla... :D

New year's just around the corner... I should also have some new year's resolution as well. but I hardly follow them because I actually haven't heard of it before until my French teacher told us to write out a new year's resolution in the beginning of this year...

dynamicv said:
French is a dialect of Italian.
tongue.gif
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Depuis quand le français est un dialecte de l'italien? :eek: I know they're all latin based but I can't even pick up a word of Italian resembling French :)
 
Lau said:
I speak French and German so badly that I can't really say that I speak them.
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I can read quite a lot of French, but my spoken French is quite poor. I can also read some German but can speak very little.

I used to know Greek and some Italian but they've long since been forgotten.
 
I speak German as my native language and learned English and French as my secondary languages at school, and although I am not sure whether or not my english is good enough, I've never been chased by a large mob with torches or pitchforks during my annual London visits, so I guess it's not that bad. :p

I still can read (and understand) French, but I haven't really spoken it since my last days at school ("Il a dix ans quand je l'appris dans l'école" ;) ), so there are many words missing in my vocabulary nowadays. Maybe I should fresh up my memory with some movies or TV series like someone proposed earlier in this thread.

My (not yet ex-)wife tried to teach me some Polish words and phrases, but to no avail...
 
iSamurai said:
I think he meant Italian and French come from the same origin (ie. Latin)...
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I agree with Skunk. I don't think that's what meant either judging by the smilie. I read it as saying that Catalan was as different to Spanish, as French is to Italian... from a Catalonian's POV.
 
skunk said:
i think you missed the point...
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mpw said:
I agree with Skunk. I don't think that's what meant either judging by the smilie. I read it as saying that Catalan was as different to Spanish, as French is to Italian... from a Catalonian's POV.
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Bingo. Catalan and Spanish are both obviously derived from Latin (as with Italian and French), but in structure Catalan has more in common with Italian than with Castellano, and it's vocabulary is heavily influenced by French.

As a few examples...

The Catalan for please is Si us plau, which is derived from the same root as the French S'il vous plait and completely unrelated to the Castillian por favor. The verb menjar (to eat) compares well with manger in French and mangiare in Italian, but the equivalent in Castellano is comer. Same with the verb "to speak" (parlar, parler, parlare, then the Spanish hablar), "to want", "to do" and many others. Catala uses the same possessive pronoun convention as Italian, with the masculine or feminine form of "the" prefixing the your, my , her, etc (e.g. la tua in Italian is la teva in Catalan) The words for "this" and "that" are aquest and aquel, once again closer to the Italian questo and quello than the Spanish este and ese. There's far more I could list, but that'll do for now.

All in all there are enough differences with Castellano and enough similarities with other Latin languages for it to be considered a language in its own right. It's also spoken in south-west France and in Sardinia, so it isn't confined to Spain itself. There are more speakers of Catalan than of Welsh.
 
dynamicv said:
The words for "this" and "that" are aquest and aquel, once again closer to the Italian questo and quello than the Spanish este and ese.
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Although the other examples are good (and I agree Catalonian is a separate language, I can't understand a word of it but Italian I do better with Italian having never studied either language), it should be noted that Spanish also has aqueste and aquel (as well as [aquese]), although in modern times only este (this), ese (that) and aquel (yon) are really ever used outside of poetry.
 
guifa said:
Although the other examples are good (and I agree Catalonian is a separate language, I can't understand a word of it but Italian I do better with Italian having never studied either language), it should be noted that Spanish also has aqueste and aquel (as well as [aquese]), although in modern times only este (this), ese (that) and aquel (yon) are really ever used outside of poetry.
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Thanks for the correction. I also find Italian by far the easiest language to understand when I'm listening to it. It's the way they pronounce every single syllable clearly.
 
guifa said:
Eh, it depends greatly on the dialect I think. Argentine Spanish can be quite beautiful, while Mexican and Caribbean Spanish are nails on a chalkboard for me. I've had people think that when an Argentinian, Guatamalan, and Mexican friend and myself (with a strong Madrileño accent) are talking that we are speaking four somehow mutually intelligible but distinct languages. So maybe you're just used to the Mexican Spanish :) *ducks and runs from any Mexicans on the forum*
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You could be right. I'll admit that I don't have much to compare it to other than the Mexican immigrants I knew in Arizona...
 
Portugues

I speak portuguese fluently because I lived in Brasil for two years. It was great, I now work taking customer service calls from Brasil in Portuguese.


tchau!
 
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