Which languages do you speak?

Four people speak Japanese two of which at conversational level. Any other crazy guys that started from hiragana, katakana, and kanji like me? My progresses are so slow that I’m planning a trip in Japan when I’ll be 80 or so…

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You want to talk to @Icedrinker. He’s the best authority I’ve found on OGS for learning Japanese. He doesn’t put his head in the forums much though.

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I am learning Japanese currently but don’t hold out much hope of being able to hold a conversation in the near future!

Otherwise it’s English, French (not as good as it should be) and German (basic and mostly forgotten)

I did have a time where I enjoyed learning tongue twisters in other languages but now can only remember the approximate translations in English:
King carol buys Queen Carolina a coral coloured necklace (Polish)
Fisherman Fritz fishes the freshest fish (German)
Something about a rat nibbling the king’s bottle of wine or something (Romanian)

Things like that

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Here’s something I’ve always been curious about.

When I look at Japanese articles I can sometimes gather enough information from the kanji present to get at least a small idea of what is being written about. How much are you Japanese speakers able to understand when looking at something written in Chinese?

I’d imagine it’s a similar feeling to when I look at Japanese, but maybe not because the Chinese characters jump out really easily from the rest of the Japanese text.

For example, how much of this would you be able to make out?


比如说我这样打几个字,你们能看懂多少?

怎么一说要打字就不知道说什么…… 随便讲几句有关围棋的话吧。围棋是一个很好玩的二人游戏(别想歪了)。围棋起源于中国,至今已有四千多年的历史。

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I am a native Greek speaker and I really liked English a lot, so I speak and write it fluently, but I learned English in the same way I learned Greek. This means that I have no clue about any of the rules and tenses of the language, but, despite that glaring issue, I rarely mess my sentences up.

That used to frustrate my English teacher soooo much. :smiley:
Initially she thought that I was pulling her leg pretending not to know, but eventually she caught on that I really couldn’t remember any of the rules and she would gnash her teeth at me.

Teacher: So, what is the answer to that sentence transformation?
Me: - gives the correct answer -
Teacher: And why is that so ?
Me: I don’t know.
Teacher: Aaaaaarrrgggg, not again!
Me: :innocent:

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What I can read is:

我 (myself) 打 (hit something) 字 (character), 能看 (ability watching), 多少 more or less?

No idea what that’s supposed to be…

要 (required) 打字 hitting the character 就 about that, 不 not 知 know 道 the road…

Something about not knowing the characters?

then something about 围棋, which is most likely 囲碁, i.e. go, and 好 liking to 玩 play with 二人 two people? The 起原 origin of go is 中国 Chinese, now around 4000 many years 四千多年 in the 史 history

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@Vsotvep

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There’s some characters that make no sense at the place where they stand, like 的 (and so on) and 有 (to have), so I guess those have grammatical functions

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That’s really interesting! That’s basically how I feel trying to read Japanese even if it has a lot of kanji. Like I kind of almost know what’s being talked about, but it doesn’t make a ton of sense and is really hard to follow

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I’m italian.
I can manage a conversation in english and I studied french and latin in high school.
I know few words of spanish and enjoy very much mimicking any other languages, even if don’t understand a word.
I’m a kind of human parrot. :laughing:

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I recognise the numbers 1, 2, and 4 :joy:

I regret not recognising people :cry:

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Привет всем людам кто читаете по Руски!

Я не умею читать по Японски, но Я думал что будет интересно как много людей будут ругатса что ни могут читать по Руски! Увидем скоро!

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Yes, we should all show off our language skills

¿Dónde está la biblioteca?

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(I suggest watching on YT and not embedded, comments will help)

Fischers Fritze fischt frische Fische.

Also nice:
Brautkleid bleibt Brautkleid und Blaukraut bleibt Blaukraut.

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The Russian version of this tongue twister is:

Karl from Karla stole the corals, but Karla from Karl stole the clarinet

Карл у Клары украл коралы

А Клара у Карла украла кларнет

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Native English speaker (grew up in the USA). I’m also ok with Danish, but nowhere near enough. I could survive, if necessary, but I couldn’t really hold a conversation. I should probably study more

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@Gia, since you have started this interesting discussion, what about a statistical resume of OGS community multilingualism? :innocent: It’s a hard job, I know…

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My abilities extend as far as my spreadsheets, I can’t compete with the beautiful graphs I’ve seen.