Russian at a Native level, because my parents speak it (so I can barely read)

German at a Native level, because I’ve been living in Germany the past 20 years.

English at a C2 level, just from school and because all my online activity and all my entertainment is in english.

And some French and Latin back from school, but learning those was horrible and I’d like to forget as much as I can.

I absolutely hate learning languages and hope that I will never have to do it again. But the reality of living in Europe is just that you never know whether you’ll wake up one day and decide to move to the Netherlands or Denmark because there are great jobs there 🤷

I wish I could speak multiple languages. I’m envious of people who have this skill. I’ve tried repeatedly to learn other languages and I still struggle. The education system in the US has failed so many of us on this front

Man, TED talks suck.

That guy scammed you into learning a conlang with the excuse that it does something that all languages do and nobody is even telling you.

Just learn a romance language if you want access to a family of concepts that will carry over easily, friend. It comes with the bonus of being able to talk to people.

Anyway, I’m often light on personal info here, but I’m in a bilingual territory, learned English as a kid, the basics of a couple others through life stuff and I get a few more through osmosis because all languages do that Esperanto trick.

Czech (native speaker) and English, but as I am now in Spain I wish I learned some Spanish, nobody here speaks any English. Yesterday some guy told me that only phrase that he knows is “Beer, very cold.” So that’s that.

Native spanish, fluent english, conversational german, few phrases in arabic. Can read latín and ancient greek at school level. Went to bilingual schools all the way through grade school, lived in different places around the world for short periods of time.

Native Arabic, fluent English, less fluent Japanese, bad Chinese.

Ojibway … or a dialect of Ojibway in northern Ontario. It’s my first language I spoke for about the first four years of my life and dominate language I spoke until I was about 13, then I started actually speaking English all the time starting at about 18. It took me years to get used to full on English conversation but now I’m comfortable in it. I still remember my Indigenous language but I seldom use it because I have no one to talk to any more. I don’t live close to my family or friends who speak it and even in my home community and group, the language is dying out. I think I’m pretty much the last generation who fully spoke the language because everyone after me speaks prominently English and Ojibway second (if they speak it at all).

So I can safely say that Ojibway is my first language and English is my second.

Cantonese, Mandarin and English. This is the basic languages for Hongkongers (which I am) and I refer to this as 2.5-lingual, because Cantonese and Mandarin are both Chinese.

Native German, fluent English, conversational Norwegian (and by extension passable Swedish; and I read 100% Danish but suck at speaking/listening comprehension), passable Dutch, Luxembourgish and French, and basic Chinese (mandarin).

Edit: And I passed Latin in high school (grades 5 through 10), so I do manage to read inscriptions in old buildings and churches, and pick up written Italian and Spanish because of it.

I speak a few.

English - Should start out with English since it’s the lingua franca even though it was my second language in two ways. The “native” language of my specific community was a pidgin, so I had access to half of the English language. I would learn this half and the other half later, and yet still be dragged down by my sloppy order of learning, my neurodivergence, and my “hermeneutic” thought process while engaging in dialogue.

Morse Code - My adoptive parents were huge with their communication business at the time. I have absolutely no memory of this, and it’s possible they may be exaggerating, but they told me they tried teaching me Morse Code before they taught me anything else to see if I would “pick it up”, and they said they stopped when it “worked too well”. It is true I have known how Morse Code works for as long as I remember (even though this isn’t saying a lot, the parts of my childhood I remember go back only as far as five years old).

Toki Pona - It is said to be the world’s easiest means of speaking to learn. I picked it up before my teen years, the Toki Pona half one year and the Toki Ma or Kokanu half years later.

Dothraki - I picked this because I really used to like Game of Thrones. Perhaps the only one I picked up neatly in one piece.

Other languages - Not fluently, but I also know bits and pieces of Tahitian, Maori, and Portuguese. Portuguese was my class of choice in middle school, but after I completed that class, the language mostly just vanished from me. Being the “kiwiphile” (Kiwi culture admirer) I come across as, I also would sneak Maori equivalences to sayings into projects and endeavors, such as an artist ID tagline saying “kia tau te aroha noa ki a koutou” (“grace be upon you”).

Native English, then Spanish, Portuguese and French, in order of proficiency. I speak Spanish all day at work, have a fair amount of Brazilian media and a sizable Brazilian population here that I interact with on occasion. Ironically, though I’ve been studying French the longest, I didn’t have any real use for it aside from reading after high school. Now, there’s a couple of French podcasts I’ll listen to, but I still find French television to be pretty boring, so I mostly get to use it at a French book club, on the rare occasions I can attend. Currently, about halfway through a degree to try and address how lopsided my skills in French have gotten, while also having an easy option to tick the box for jobs that want a degree, but don’t care what it’s in.

I still have a long list of languages I’d like to learn, but they tend to share the unfortunate characteristics of simultaneously being difficult to learn, while also having very limited practical application for me. One of these days, I’ll actually stick with learning something more useful again, like German, rather than going through Japanese, Icelandic, Finnish or Irish for another round to see if I can stick it out.

Swedish and English

I don’t know if it has changed, but when I attended school in the mid 90s here in Sweden, English was normally taught from year 4 in school (the year of your tenth birthday), and you keep taking English up through year 13 (including gymnasiet)

Hindi Urdu Gujrati Arabic (only reading) Russian (only reading)

Fluent in English. I can understand/read most Quebecois French from classes when I was a kid but zero ability to speak it. I know more Russian or Greek than French. Otherwise it’s just languages that aren’t super useful like Klingon or Latin.

Native English, forgotten my German, and refreshing my Japanese.