How Multilingual Is HAF?

[Sophus]

I've notice there are quite a number of multi-linguals here. How many languages do you speak?

Currently, I'm learning Norwegian. Finally attained a decent grasp on German, although still trying to become more fluent in it. And unfortunately I can speak some Spanish even though I'm annoyed by the language. Sorry to any Spanish speakers  

Some the reasons I bother to learn them:

- The literature (there are some great books in German alone that never get translated into English)
- Travel
- Spanish was from my school years. The only foreign language class they had.  lol

[JillSwift]

I speak some Spanish and a bit of Diné. Not anything like fluent, but hey.

[KDbeads]

English....

Chicken, dog, cat, mumble.....

[curiosityandthecat]

English, French, Chinese and Japanese, in that order. My Italian and Spanish are miserable.

[Sophus]

English, French, Chinese and Japanese, in that order. My Italian and Spanish are miserable.

Very nice! Which of those would you say is the most difficult?

[Tom62]

Dutch, English, German and French. And I also know some Portuguese and Polish, but not enough to hold an intelligent conversation.

[Tank]

Just English with humans.

BASIC, PLM, Assembler, HTML and Java with machines.

[Cecilie]

Fluently? Norwegian and English, duh. But as a Scandinavian I understand both Swedish and Danish. Although Danish is hard to understand at times it's easy to read. I can also understand some German.
EDIT: Oh, and I can order in a restaurant in French, does that count?

[curiosityandthecat]

English, French, Chinese and Japanese, in that order. My Italian and Spanish are miserable.

Very nice! Which of those would you say is the most difficult?

(Hope you can view Asian characters, haha.) To be honest, French and Chinese are about the same. Japanese is more difficult, in my opinion, because it's got tenses that rival Latin. Thankfully, once you can read Japanese, you can read Chinese, but not necessarily the other way around (as often Japanese will be a combination of kanji and hiragana/katakana, so the kanji is recognizable but the nuances in the grammar may be lost).

Here's an example of the Japanese conjugation of the verb 食べã,‹ (taberu) (to eat):

[spoiler:2ficldx0][/spoiler:2ficldx0]

Whereas the verb 吃 (chi1) is "to eat" in Chinese, but one verb covers everything. The only other version is 吃了 (chi1 le), which is essentially the past tense, indicating that the action has been completed. Very, very simple. No helping verbs; sometimes feels like, if translated directly, "caveman" English. Sentences like "I am going to the library" in English translate to æˆ'去圖書館 (wo3 qu4 tu2shu1guan3; literally, "I go library"). To add that you're going to go to the library later, there's no tense suffix for that. You just have to add a time.

Interestingly, 吃 in Chinese is "eat" but in Japanese,  åƒã,‹ means "to stutter." Likewise, 食べã,‹ in Japanese means "to eat" while in Chinese, 食, when pronounced shi2, means "animal feed" while when pronounced si4 means "to feed."  

[Sophus]

That's interesting Curio. I can't imagine the French grammar being as simple as Mandarin though? From what I can tell French is very similar to Spanish. You could probably hone your Italian and Spanish pretty quickly if you wanted to.

[Heretical Rants]

I suck at languages.

I do know enough Spanish to overhear mumbled conversations and read light novels(which is pretty much all I do all day, anyway), and I´ve been putting in multiple hours each day for the last year learning Japanese...

[philosoraptor]

Ich studierte Deutsch für fünf Jahre, aber meine sprechenden Fähigkeiten sind arm.  Ich kann Deutsch lesen, zwar.  

I have some rudimentary French, Spanish, and Esperanto skills as well.  English is my first language, and the only one I'm fluent in.

[Heretical Rants]

once you can read Japanese, you can read Chinese,

Haha, no.

The limit to the complexity of Chinese I can decypher based on my knowledge of Japanese is probably "made in China"　制造地：中国 and I still have no idea how those characters would be pronounced. I see it only as "system-create-land: china" and honestly, the first time I saw those first three characters together (that I actually was able to recognise them) I thought, "せã,,･ぞうち? つくち? WTF?"

That being said, yeah, it would probably be a lot easier for me to learn to read Chinese than it would be for someone who had never studied Japanese.

If you hadn´t said that æˆ'去圖書館= I am going to the library, I would have thought, "()... æˆ'が...ã,の...gone thingy? Eh... ???? しã,‡ã‹ã,"?　文書館(ã,,ã,"じã,‡ã‹ã,")?　Archives?"  
My conclusion would have been that maybe your archives, computer archives, or possibly your town´s house of records, had dissapeared.
I would have even less of a clue if you were to give me "simplified" characters.

[MariaEvri]

Greek and english

[curiosityandthecat]

once you can read Japanese, you can read Chinese,

Haha, no.

The limit to the complexity of Chinese I can decypher based on my knowledge of Japanese is probably "made in China"　制造地：中国 and I still have no idea how those characters would be pronounced. I see it only as "system-create-land: china" and honestly, the first time I saw those first three characters together (that I actually was able to recognise them) I thought, "せã,,･ぞうち? つくち? WTF?"

I'm basically going off of what my Chinese wife tells me.