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How many languages do you know?

Abstract said:
Cantonese - can listen and understand a lot of it, but speak it poorly. Don't ask me how this is possible, but it's actually quite common.

Mandarin - Tried to learn it for 4 months, and quit because I could only do 3 of the 4 tones. That cut out 25% of the vocabulary.
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I think a lot of people are this way with both Cantonese and Mandarin. There are lots of times when I can't get the words out because of the tones and I just end up drawing characters on my hand. I can understand more or less okay though.

Exactly the opposite of French, IMO, where it's easier to get your point across but can really difficult to understand depending on where you are.
 
Vietnamese: Enough to hold a conversation; understand more than actually speaking

Cantonese: Understand it a little bit here and there

Spanish: Read/write/speak fluently

English: Obviously.
 
Zombie Acorn said:
II have been juggling whether to learn french (my ancestors language) or chinese which I think could be a very good business tool in the future. Obviously chinese would be much more challenging as I don't know anyone who speaks it around here, although i do have a few friends online who I could chat to.
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Technically there is no such language as 'Chinese', there are dialects of which Cantonese and Mandarin are two of the most common. Arguably the most difficult language to learn as there are no short cuts (see my post above) to it.

If you've never learnt a foreign language before, one of the Latin based (Romance) languages French, Spanish or Italian would be easiest to pick up from an English background.
 
Vogue Harper said:
Technically there is no such language as 'Chinese', there are dialects of which Cantonese and Mandarin are two of the most common. Arguably the most difficult language to learn as there are no short cuts (see my post above) to it.

If you've never learnt a foreign language before, one of the Latin based (Romance) languages French, Spanish or Italian would be easiest to pick up from an English background.
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Having seen fellow classmates struggle with Mandarin in high school, I became a little bit doubtful of actually learning it in college.

I know Spanish fluently. Would you recommend learning French in college? Or some other language?

PS - Chinese/Mandarin is being taught at the other campus of my college. It's going to be difficult for me, as I'm a commuter student.
 
Vogue Harper said:
Technically there is no such language as 'Chinese', there are dialects of which Cantonese and Mandarin are two of the most common. Arguably the most difficult language to learn as there are no short cuts (see my post above) to it.

If you've never learnt a foreign language before, one of the Latin based (Romance) languages French, Spanish or Italian would be easiest to pick up from an English background.
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Mandarin is the language I was referring to just to clarify, I really haven't looked at anything except for symbols at this point and could probably only point out a few simple characters such as animals/seasons etc. The different tonal structures of each of the words seems like it would be difficult to master, but I am really drawn to the fact that there doesn't seem to be extremely complicated and irregular rules in the language (I am not advanced so I may be wrong).
 
ecstasy said:
Having seen fellow classmates struggle with Mandarin in high school, I became a little bit doubtful of actually learning it in college.

I know Spanish fluently. Would you recommend learning French in college? Or some other language?
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As a Spanish speaker, Portuguese and Italian should be easy for you and French wouldn't be much of a stretch, either.

BUT, if you want to really want to expand your horizons, go for something completely different in college. In my experience, learning a language that's close to one that you speak natively can be done later in life, without an excrutiating amount of effort, whereas a learning a language with no commonality to one you already know benefits more from structured learning while you're younger.
 
ecstasy said:
Having seen fellow classmates struggle with Mandarin in high school, I became a little bit doubtful of actually learning it in college.

I know Spanish fluently. Would you recommend learning French in college? Or some other language?
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Don't be put off learning Mandarin. Mandarin is made (slightly) easier to learn to speak because of pinyin which is the way standard Mandarin is Romanized (i.e. you transpose English phonetics to learn to speak the language). I don't think there is an acceptable way to Romanize Cantonese so that makes it harder for English speakers to learn as you have to try and figure out a way to Romanize it yourself.

If you can already speak Spanish fluently then you can easily pick up another Romance language e.g. French. I knew a girl who spoke English and French fluently. Within no more than a year she managed to learn to speak Spanish and Italian fluently because they were so close to the two languages she already knew - quite amazing really.
 
I can speak English with fluency. I could order food and basic stuff in Spanish. I could also have a "conversation" in Spanish if it happened to be on a topic I learned in school.
 
Zombie Acorn said:
The different tonal structures of each of the words seems like it would be difficult to master, but I am really drawn to the fact that there doesn't seem to be extremely complicated and irregular rules in the language (I am not advanced so I may be wrong).
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The lack of 'grammar' to Mandarin (or indeed any Chinese dialect) is very true and is probably the quid pro quo for screwing your head over with the sheer complexity of intonation and vocabulary for example as far as I am aware you don't have to worry about tenses, genders, split infinitives or conjugating verbs with the Chinese dialects.
 
I speak Cantonese fluently. Trying to learn mandarin right now. My fiancée is taiwainese but for some reason she can speak perfect mandarin and Cantonese, with no accent at all.

Oh and of couse English, I lived in Toronto most of my life.
 
English: 100% Fluent (Native Language)
French: 33% (Can read/write some words, phrases. Harder to speak the language though.)
Farsi: 66% (Cannot read/write any words or phrases. Can speak, however not to native speakers.)
 
iGuardian said:
English: 100% Fluent (Native Language)
French: 33% (Can read/write some words, phrases. Harder to speak the language though.)
Farsi: 66% (Cannot read/write any words or phrases. Can speak, however not to native speakers.)
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Oh Farsi, my Grandpa knows Farsi.
(useless fact:p)
 
techfreak85 said:
Oh Farsi, my Grandpa knows Farsi.
(useless fact:p)
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How does he know it, is he Iranian or did he learn it somewhere else?

It's a hard language to learn! (for me at least) Whole different alphabet ("alef beh" as it's called in Farsi using english characters)
 
iGuardian said:
How does he know it, is he Iranian or did he learn it somewhere else?

It's a hard language to learn! (for me at least) Whole different alphabet ("alef beh" as it's called in Farsi using english characters)
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he is Sweedish.
i think his parents were missionary and i think they lived there when he was a child, so he picked it up pretty quick at a young age.
 
techfreak85 said:
he is Sweedish.
i think his parents were missionary and i think they lived there when he was a child, so he picked it up pretty quick at a young age.
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Ah okay, always good to know a different language, I find it helps me understand a culture more when I understand their language.
 
I speak English and Italian, though my vocab in Italian is a little rusty. I comprehend and understand better than speaking though. I can get by quite easily though, it just takes me a few seconds to think of the right word in some situations.
 
I can speak English fluently (native - debatable :D).

I studied Gaeilge (Irish) - reading/writing/listening and speaking for 5 years and could read an Irish newspaper Lá almost fluently although my writing wasn't the best.

I studied Spanish for 3 years reading/writing/listening and speaking but could speak and read as if I studied it for 5 years.

I learnt Greek writing for a 6 week course.

I also know HTML.

Body language as well.:D
 
I speak English (native) and enough Spanish to get by when I'm on vacation in Mexico... such as: me encanta la cerveza, más cerveza, por favor, dónde está el baño.

I also fluently speak C, C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, and HTML. I'm also pretty decent in Objective-C.
 
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