Languages

I rerember we had this italian guy at school who spoke nada italian but french for some reason

 

Ahaha, hi there, mate! You are always welcome if you want to practice your italian or ask anything!

Why are you using the courtesy form? I am not a police officer or a teacher XD

Aber das geht!

In italy there are some regions which have more than one official language other than italian.
Aosta Valley is one of these, and its other official language is French. You may think i am lying, but it is not uncommon to find people who have italian citizenship and have always lived on italian soil but speak almost no italian, having as primary language German, French, Slovenian or others.

 

There is a 99% chance I'm the only one who speaks Assyrian. I'm Assyrian. I can tell you guys an entire history lesson about Assyrians.

 

please go on

 

In a separate thread, though. I'd be interested as well - but it's best if we keep this thread as the place to mainly discuss just languages.

Okay, I'll list all the languages I know (or those that I know bits of) below.

EDIT: Just realized after posting this that I got a bit carried away and wrote you an essay. :lol: I've put the whole thing in spoiler tags, so it doesn't bother those who don't want to read... I hope at least one person finds this interesting. :lol:

Spoiler

Polish is my native language. It was the main language in my life for almost the first ten years of my life, but my parents moved with me and my brother to England when I was almost ten years old. Ever since then, I've only been using Polish at my house or when talking to other Polish immigrants, on the rare occasion that I meet one. This includes Polish friends or just talking on the phone with my family when out and about. Apart from that, I use English everyday, as - obviously - it's necessary for life in an English-speaking community.

When I came to England, I knew no English. I went to an English school and used online translators to communicate with teachers, also receiving very basic language lessons at my primary school. I learned English naturally in less than a year I think, as I was able to talk to others on my own before the end of that school year. Still, I had a very heavy Eastern European accent back then and finding the right words when talking in English was incredibly difficult. Before the end of the next school year, I was already talking fluently in English - though still with a foreign accent.

Nowadays, about seven years since I came to England, I write English at a professional level and speak it at an almost native level (though sometimes I still struggle to find correct words, even though nowhere near as often as I used to). In conversations irl, especially with friends, I use a lot of the local English slang and sometimes even speak with a heavy local accent... but all of that can change depending on who I am talking to. Just like most people, I subconsciously change the way I speak depending on who I am conversing with. Generally, strangers from other year groups at school are surprised when they find out that I'm Polish. I'm guessing I still have a hint of my old foreign accent left, but it's too weak to be of any help to someone who is trying to figure out where I am from. I can, however, put on a good Eastern European accent (or at least my friends at school tell me so) - but that's not the way I naturally speak in English any more.

On the internet, my English vocabulary is much broader than the way I normally talk. This is probably due to the fact that I can write in English better than most of my British friends. This just sort of developed naturally, as my fascination with writing grew with time. Now I can write better in English than I can in Polish. Speaking is still easier for me in Polish, although I forget some words simply due to the amount of time I spent here.

Since Polish is a Slavic language, it has a lot in common with other Slavic languages, such as: Czech, Russian, Ukrainian and others - but especially Slovakian. I honestly can't say much about Slovakian myself, as I have pretty much no personal experience with it. All I can say about it is that once when on a trip in the Polish mountains, near the border with Slovakia, I heard a woman speaking a foreign Slavic language and could instantly tell it was Slovakian due to the very similar sounds it had to Polish. However, I did not understand a word of what she was saying. If I remember correctly, the last time I heard Czech spoken was a guy speaking it really fast and I got confused. On the other hand, I have on numerous occasions read short sentences in Czech with ease and understood many of them perfectly - but I have no idea whether my pronunciation was correct as I was going with how I would have read it had it been in Polish.

When it comes to Russian, I found it really confusing until I taught myself to read Russian Cyrillic about a year ago. Since then, I can read Russian (though very slowly) with an apparently decent pronunciation (except for instances were certain rules and exceptions of the language apply, which I get wrong completely). Now that I can read it, I've learned some Russian words. I sometimes even find written Russian quite easy to understand, because many words are identical with similar or same meanings to those in Polish. Sometimes I don't understand anything that the text I'm reading says, whilst at other times I can roughly translate whole sentences. Most of the time though, I can only pick out individual words.

Spoken Russian is a lot harder, where I can only understand individual words or, very rarely, some short sentences that sound similar or identical to Polish. As for sentences that I can say myself: I only know a few sayings and can say "Hi, how are you doing?/Hi, how are things?" and that's pretty much it - the rest are just random words I've remembered. I was going to start attending Russian courses a few days ago, but due to misinformation given to me - it looks like I won't be eligible to start that course until September.

When it comes to other languages, I can only say a few random phrases that I remember from my German lessons back in Poland and random words I've picked from many other mother tongues, but I would not be able to communicate in or understand any of those languages. Ukrainian is also somewhat readable to me due to the fact that it also uses Cyrillic, but it's a bit different and I haven't yet taken any steps to improve my understanding of that language.

TL;DR: I speak Polish and English fluently - I am sort of learning Russian.

 

Dat was the most interesting wall of text evah!

 

I think Blin is indeed a food like pancake. + it means fuck. (I know this from the Georgian word "blini" which means pancake).

Also the first translation wasn't like "man", but I think it's said in an angry way adding the word "fuck" at the end, you basically need to understand Russian to get it.

I speak Georgian, Greek and English. Also very little Russian and French, and learning some German from my gf. ^^!

I speak Greek better than the other two languages, since I live in Greece and I study here.

And that's pretty much about it ^^

 

The envy when people speaks more languages than you...

 

Mitt moderspråk är svenska

 

I agree :c

 

A mój język ojczysty to polski.

 

my native language is go-ga-ga, though I can no longer understand it.

 

Mother tongue: English.
Fluent: עברית

 

Native: bulgarian/български/ciryllic
Can speak and write properly(most of the time): english

 

My native language is Swedish. Ofcourse I am also good at english and I speak a little german.

 

thats amazing i wish i was as amazingly amazing as me :laugh:

 

Interesting... I was talking with a Lithuanian girl the other day and she said that she thought I was English until my friends told her that I'm Polish. Though I'm not sure just how Lithuanian she is, since only one of her parents comes from Lithuania and I think she herself has lived her whole life in England - or moved at a very young age. Also, to make things funnier, she has a Spanish name and a surname that sounds French. :lol: Anyway, so taking all of that into consideration, she probably has more in common with English people rather than Lithuanians - but I may be wrong. Either way, I'm really surprised that my accent sounds English to her, especially when (as I stated in my first post in this thread) one of my English friends has said before that I still sound like an Eastern European.

 

suomi finland perkele(native),english, german,forced mandatory swedish and mixed collection of words from russian, vietnamese and arabic/pashto