Are any of you here multi-lingual? (For lack of a better phrase.)
I have a basic understanding ("basic" means I can visually understand the language by reading and that I know several phrases and words but cannot truly converse) of 8 languages:
1. Spanish (I studied Spanish, very diligently, for six years in school)
2. Catalan (I taught myself this language after hearing about it in high school and running across a dictionary in a book store and thinking it was beautiful)
3. Italian (I actually subconciously started learning Italian before I learned Spanish, around the age of 12 or 13 because I had seen just about every Fellini movie on video at the time and picked up a lot of Italian)
4. French
5. Portuguese
6. German (was introduced to it around the same time I started studying Spanish seriously)
7. Danish (learned it online from a father-son team during 2000; all I recall from memory is "How are you," but I can understand most Scandinavian languages online)
8. Dutch (because it was similar to German)
Maybe I should note that by the time I got to college I was quite familiar with Yiddish (although I am not at all Jewish). I used to really like Yiddish klezmer music when I was a teenager and I learned the language that way. A couple of years ago there was a lady who worked at the library in my town who understood Yiddish so that was what we spoke whenever we didn't want anyone to understand what we said.
Another reason I know all the Romance languages (except Romanian) is because once you learn one, you can learn them all.
I also understand the Cyrillic alphabet.
So what languages do you folks know, and how many?
Last edited by hilarythebaker on 24 May 2005, 10:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.