Well, I guess it’s not absolute monoglottism. My multiple serious attempts at learning Japanese have left me with a few kanji and a chunk of the kana, and the odd grammatical word and structure. My go at learning Latin, where I actually bought some textbooks, did get me to the level where I could use a small vocabulary, conjugations, and verbs to contruct sentences (but only in the present tense). I only understood a minority even of the verb conjugations though.
I’ve always liked linguistics a lot, so I end up looking at a lot of languages and then stopping when it gets too hard or I realise I can’t pronounce their syllables: see Korean, Sanskrit, Nahuatl…
primarily written text:
long ago excellent: Latin hence basic understanding of: French, Italian, Spanish, … Dutch, because of the very close relationship to northwestern German
very basic skills: once about 800 Chinese characters (traditional)
Few words: Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, ancient Greek
(I just like foreign writing systems.)
I actually began to study Chinese ideographs just out of curiosity,
because I wanted to know the meaning of those few lines in the
song “I like Chinese” by Monty Python: “Wo ai zhong guo ren…” and
how to write it.
Wow I am very surprised with the diversity in here! Nice topic.
native speaker: Portuguese (BR)
Fluent: English
Basic: German (I lived a few months there but didn’t got beyond 5-10 words conversations)
And as @ayaros, I get some free points with Spanish and written French and Italian
A cool idea would be to learn languages in a sequence dictated by geography. So, let’s say you’re an English native like me. Bordering England is Wales, so you might learn Welsh. Then if you learn Scots Gaelic your linguistic area has grown to the whole of Britain, whereupon you could (mentally) cross the Irish Sea (taking the time to learn Manx) and pick up Irish. After three other Celtic languages it shouldn’t be too hard, right? Then if you collect the various dialects of Norman French from the English channel, you’re ready to gaze over at the continent…
Native spanish, fluent and good level in danish (family danish), english decent and german, good level (went to a german school). Started to learn russian but with small progress and the same with arabian (fosha) but could manage basic sentences to move around.
Native English speaker. I can speak French if need be, but people’s eyes are going to glaze over while they wait for me to painfully put a sentence together. And I don’t have a good ear for Acadian French, it’s quite different. I still want to know, who’s this Marcy Beaucoup I keep hearing about?
I know a miniscule amount of Spanish I guess, enough for emergencies.
and a lot of sub-categories (often very different each from the other) are not represented in this map.
@Gia: you know, we have also two well-known spots where it is spoken Griko (a relict still present of the ancient presence of Greeks in the South of Italy).
We used to say that the French are our cousins, but the Greeks are our brothers, so deep are the roots of the Romans with the Ancient Greeks. Nevertheless respective languages and the alphabets are so different.
