Which languages do you speak?

[Sports_for_Life]

I am fluent in English.
I am okay at spanish.
I am not that good at French.

[Gia]

Hm, I would think it depends on the person. I’m good at picking patterns in spelling, so I never had a particular problem with English (and subsequently with other languages I’ve learned), even with words I didn’t know. The listening part in tests was never that hard.
In Greek, phonetically what you hear is what you write (mostly, I don’t think there’s a language that that’s 100% true) so it seems easy, but we have 5 “i” spellings and 2 “o” spellings, so things can get complicated.
And I’d believe bad spellers exist everywhere :-).
However, your Spanish friend got me thinking, I’ll ask others about this, my own experience might not be accurate.

[yebellz]

Just to be clear, my friend was only just talking about Spanish words being spoken among fluent Spanish speakers. It’s entirely language specific. Also, neither of us meant to say that spelling competitions work only in English, just that there are some languages where they don’t really work.

[BSandwich]

I speak English as my mother tongue and I did Afrikaans for 12 years in school, but I’m still not that good. I’d say my level is around basic to intermediate conversation. And I’m decent at essays lol.

[bugcat]

I’m still essentially monolingual. Such is life.

When I was a child I couldn’t see the point of French: “You can go on holiday and order a croissant!” seemed rather flimsy given the predominance of English as a first / second language in the developed world, which I was already quite aware of at the time. I also resented both French and German for their relative morphological complexity, having multiple cases and genders – and such it was with a mixture of arrogance and contempt that I began, wasted, and failed all my school language lessons.

I’ve continued to plug on a bit with Latin. I made an Anki deck with a disproportionate amount of obscure plants and animals with very limited use, as is my wont and weakness, and I practiced with that for a time before giving up. I bought a few more textbooks, and more recently the first seventeen books of Pliny’s Natural History. To be honest, I think I will probably die monolingual, having never had the discipline and consistency to change that fact. I’m grown to accept that.

[kingkaio]

Fluent in English
Okay in Chinese
Not that good at Japanese
Starting French

[RubyMineshaft]

[Groin]

Fluent in french english german spanish
Manage something in chinese

[Rotasu]

My mother tongue is Indonesian.
Can speak Javanese
Ok in English

[omote]

Native French, because my grandmother told my father back in 1930 it was useless to learn Brezhoneg the language of our ancestors.

Seven years of Latin in high school, a bit of ancient Greek.
Can read Spanish, but unable to speak.
Can sing German, Russian, Italian …

Trying to learn Chinese characters (since about half a century, with results similar to my progress in Go)

And using English, per force

And to declared monoglots : you need at least the viewpoint of another language to understand yours. So, go ahead, learn a new word everyday in any random foreign language.

[stone.defender]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Scotland/comments/ig9jia/ive_discovered_that_almost_every_single_article/

the Scots version of Wikipedia is written by the same person - an American teenager who can’t speak Scots

Imagine: What if hundreds of Go books were written by 25 kyu

[gennan]

Native Dutch
Fluent in English
Conversational in German
Intermediate in French
Very basic conversation in Japanese (vocabulary of a few hundred words)

Studied Latin in school for 6 years (and from that may be able to understand parts of written Romance languages that I don’t speak or understand much when spoken)

Studied classical Greek in school for a few months (but I don’t remember much more than the alphabet and some words used in loan words, mostly scientific terms)

[KAOSkonfused]

I just saw something funny that I need to share:

Miranda Jewess (mirandajewess)

[Gia]

The whole thread!

[Barbanaira]

Junge junge.

[Barbanaira]

I just saw this right now, and you can make a similar thing with Rumantsch and other Romance languages:

@tonybe

giat; giatta; ???; giattella
giattina; giattin; giattinet; giattinè
giatun; —; giattatsch (I guess); giattun

But there’s giattet/giattetta for small cats, giatatsch/giatatscha for ugly and/or strong cats, giatinatsch/a for ugly small kats, giatatschin/a for small ugly cats, giattinet for cute small cats, giatettin for really small and tiny cats, giattinun for a bossy kitty, giattunin for a small boss cat…

So, -atsch makes it ugly, -un makes it big or bossy, -in makes it just small and/or the -kind of cute; -et makes it small and -cute; -è, -ella makes it also small and cute. Feel free to combine these as you see fit. It tends to get artificial, though.

[bugcat]

Hmm, we really lack that level of systematic inflection in English.

We have the diminutive -y (“kitty”) to make it cute, or you could use childish language to achieve the same effect (“Mr. Cat”), although this really presents the speaker as cute more than the cat. Reduplication is another possible diminutive technique, eg. “kitty-cat”.

If you wanted to make it seem big or ferocious you could substitute in a related noun like “tiger”, which would also carry some comedic effect. Or you could attach a prefix, eg. “mega-cat”, but this has a bit of a tabloid feel, eg. “Mega-Cat Terrorises Cambridge”.

English actually has a pretty good stock of diminutives. We have -ling, eg. “gosling”; in fact, “kitten” comes from “catling”. There’s also -let, eg. in the pejorative term “manlet”. And to top it off, there’s a rather formal Latinate suffix -cule (from -culus, eg. “homunculus”). For instance, micro-organisms were initially called “animalcules”.

As for old things, we have the Greco-Latin prefixes archaeo- (as in “archaeology”) and palaeo- (as in “paleontology” or “Palaeolithic”). But these can’t really be applied to describe the age of things, especially animals, but rather their position in time. eg. the phrase “paleo-cat” would imply a prehistoric type of cat, like a Smilodon.

You could even borrow corporate terminology humourously to describe a cat of especially superior quality (“cat+”) or inferior (“cat-lite”).

[bugcat]

One quirk of English is that because we only have a little systematic gender inflection (eg. emperor, empress; Nigel, Nigella), animals of different sexes can often be referred to by quite different terms.

A male horse is a stallion, the female a mare; the male cows, sheep, and badgers are bulls, rams, and brocks (the latter is a little obscure). The male cat is a tom; the female pig a sow, and so on. You can prefix with he- and she-, but this is used either poetically, humourously, or else is archaic. Many animals don’t have any gendered term, their sex not being specified unless considered relevant.

Similarly, there’s no standard way to refer to a juvenile animal. A cat has kittens, a dog has pups, a bear has cubs, a swan has signets. Animals with minor ontogeny (physical change with age) don’t get these terms, eg. lizards.

Animals in groups have no single term either. Birds mass in flocks, wolves and other predators in packs, large herbivores in herds, insects and vermin in swarms, fish in shoals or schools; and people in crowds, throngs, and even hordes. But there also more specific terms, usually used with a touch of humour, eg. a clowder of cats.

Our reliance on extra words for group-pluralisation is a lot like the ubiquitous use of counting words in Japanese.

[Gia]

@bugcat

animals of different sexes can often be referred to by quite different terms

This happens to other languages as well.

@bugcat

Animals in groups have no single term either.

I kinda envy that, we have a couple of words for animals in groups and we basically use one (to my knowledge).