Alternatively, in the languages I speak:
Welche Sprachen sprechen Sie? (Deutsch/German)
¿Qué idiomas habla usted? (Español/Spanish)
Quelle langue parlez-vous? (Français/French)
EDIT: These sentences are now up to date.
I only speak two languages: English and bad English.
straylian, and that’s about it.
Aw, I was gonna make that joke
French, English, German and a little spoken Japanese. I also studied latin
Edit: in French we say: « Quelles langues parlez-vous ? »
(Or, let’s be honest, more likely « Quelles langues parles-tu ? »)
t’parl’qu’a?
No, it is odd to use the singular imho. Of course it is not the polite form
Eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/6ocn38/quelles_langues_étrangères_parlez_vous/
Oh damn. It didn’t even occur to me that we were talking plural here lol
Obviously you’re right.
edit: I honestly hate the fact that English doesn’t have a non-vernacular way to distinguish between singular and plural in the 2nd person. Makes it so much harder to get my head around this sort of situation. “What languages do yous speak?” Would make it so much easier!
Yeah, it is the hardest thing when learning a new language. When you learn a new concept that your language doesn’t use. For example, in Latin, German and Japanese, the grammatical case is very important but totally irrelevant in French and English. So I try when I speak French or English to think about the case. That way it comes more naturally to me when speaking German or Japanese.
Yeah, the catch here is that it’s a feature that my native language does at least sort of have, just applied in a way that makes it not clear. When it’s a feature I’m completely unfamiliar with, I’m more likely to be on guard for it, if I’ve learnt it. But here I didn’t even think about it, because it was an element I am familiar with, so I never second-guessed my intuition, even though that intuition was wrong.
That precisely how the Scots and the Irish would ask it, the yanks would say “y’all”. It’s just the English who are fucking weird :)
Not particularly odd, just less formal. Much less of an issue with recent generations especially. Younger millennials and later don’t seem to care nearly as much in a lot of contexts. Honestly, outside professional interactions, I see and hear the “tu” a whole lot.
Was Sprachen Sie spricht? (Deutsch/German)
I’m not a native speaker, but I’m pretty sure it’s
Welche Sprachen sprechen Sie?
assuming you want to be formal, which feels a little weird to me in the context of an internet forum.
Edit: but to answer your question: fluent English, mehr als ein Bißchen Deutsch, y un poquito Español.
ein Bißchen Deutsch
BTW, this should be written as:
ein bisschen Deutsch
We switched from ß to ss in all words with a preceding short vowel in 1996: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschreibung_von_1996
So, it’s “Fuß” and “Maß”, because those are pronounced with a long vowel, but then “Fass” and “muss” and “Biss”, because those are pronounced with a short vowel.And in this case, “bisschen” is spelled with a small “b” for reasons that I’m not entirely sure are logical. 😅
It would be spelled with a capital letter, if “Bisschen” was a unit of measurement here (i.e. a small bite), like a “Liter” is.
But because it was used so much and without really referring to a specific measurement, it eventually began being spelled lowercase, similar to “wenig” or “etwas” (“ein wenig Deutsch”, “etwas Deutsch”). Apparently, this kind of word is called an “Indefinitpronomen”.https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/bisschen
vs.
https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bisschen (much rarer)Thanks! It’s surprisingly difficult to get Germans to correct me on things. Most of them are just happy that I can speak it at all, so they tell me not to worry about the little stuff. 😂
I would like to know how a native german speaker would say it. But I would say like you
Well, if I were to post it to a community on e.g. feddit.org, I would write it as:
Welche Fremdsprachen sprecht ihr so?
“Fremdsprachen” just means “foreign languages”, since I know that responding folks speak German.
Then “sprecht ihr” rather than “sprechen Sie”, because addressing a group of people with direct pronoun is unusual in German.
As someone else already said, using “Sie” is also far too formal for this context. People refer to each other as “Du” on most of the internet.
But “Welche Sprachen sprichst Du?” still gives me vibes of a marketing firm hoping to drive engagement by referring to people directly.And then the “so”, I have no idea what that is linguistically, but it basically makes the question more casual. It invites for people to tell a story or to have a chat.
Thanks for the detailed answer. Interestingly it is pretty similar to the idiomatic way to say it in French. Except for the “so”
“So” is indeed one of those small things that’s just colloquial to casual conversation in in Germany. To me personally it signals that you weren’t as exact with your question so you’re leaving it kinda open ended to some degree. But when it comes to Grammar no clue what this is.
It feels a bit similar to “do you speak any other languages or ~” because this leaves it less as a direct question and more as an open ended conversation, suggesting you just wanna know more and you’re not very particular in your question and in what you expect as an answer.
Sehr gut, danke! Muy bien!
It is indeed normal to use ‘du’ pretty much everywhere on the internet. Even in French i never see ‘vous’ (which to me feels more common than Sie in German usually).
Bist du sicher, dass du deutsch sprichst?
Thats what I thought too when reading the German sentence xd
Ja, aber mein Deutsch ist nicht perfekt.
Hast du Deutsch studiert?
English and ɥsolƃuƎ uɐᴉlɐɹʇsn∀
Was Sprachen Sie spricht?Welche Sprachen sprechen Sie? (Deutsch/German)/\ that’s the more formal way of addressing either a single person or multiple (yeah, this formal pronoun is a bit weird and can be read multiple ways). If you wanna address a group of people more informally: “Welche Sprachen sprecht ihr?”.
I’m able to speak German (native speaker) and English (fluent).
Also, as a German speaker, I’d like to correct the question in the post:
Formal would be “Welche Sprachen sprechen Sie?”.
More fitting for a casual environment (such as Lemmy) would be “Welche Sprachen sprecht Ihr?” though :)
This is, because in German there are formal and casual ways of addressing people. Usually, when talking to people you don’t know personally, you’ll address them formally and then, when offered to, switch to the casual style once you know them. Online or among the younger generation it is much more common to just use the informal case though.
Welche Sprachen sprecht ihr?
Would be correct. The capital “Ihr” is used when addressing nobility.
Welche Sprache sprechen Sie*
Welche SpracheN with n
Fair point.
Was für eine Sprache du sprichts.
Keine Verständliche
- I have spoken English since birth.
- Je parle français depuis l’âge de 7 ans, parce que je l’apprenais en école.
- Estudiaba el español en la escuela secundaria.
- Jag lär mig svenska i fler än tio år.
- Ich kann etwas Deutsch lesen und verstehen.
And thanks to my Swedish, I can read a surprising amount of Danish and Norwegian.
I would call myself proficient in French, passable in Spanish, barely functional in Swedish, and I can get by in German in a very banal emergency. 😉
Huh…where’d you learn Swedish?
Mostly self study from a variety of sources. I lived part time in Stockholm for four years, but it was far easier than I’d expected to speak only English, so although my reading and writing improved, my speaking and listening didn’t. Every time I tried, they switched to English on me. I don’t blame them.
Now I’m a bit stuck: I can’t find much to listen to that’s at my level. I’m past the beginner stuff but can’t keep up with Swedish spoken at full speed.
Just go for volume. Listen to a lot of stuff at full speed and eventually it will start making sense.
“à l’école”, but otherwise flawless. You don’t see complex sentences with properly conjugated verbs from a lot of second language speakers, so I have a feeling your French is indeed pretty good.
No notes on your German. It sounds more formal than when I’d tell a friend but it def sounds right to me.
Thank you. What little I can speak or write is very firmly 1980s textbook German.
Jag lär mig svenska i fler är 10 år
That sentence, while clear on what you want to communicate, is quite clearly not written by a native Swede.
I am a native Swede and this is how I would reformat it:
“Jag har studerat Svenska i mer än 10 år.”
If I wanted to be less formal I’d use the slang “pluggat” instead of “studerat”
“Jag har pluggat Svenska i mer än 10 år.”
Unsurprising. I’m still well in the stage where I’m formulating thoughts in English, then translating into Swedish. Very occasionally something pops out spontaneously, fully-formed, and in Swedish.
I’m mostly thrilled to have got “i” right there, because I haven’t quite memorized i/på with time expressions. It will come.
How well does your formulation convey the nuance that I’ve been learning (off and on, often passively), but often not actively studying? The verbs “att studera”/“att plugga” feel more to me like actively working, but of course, my feelings in this regard are more about English “study” than those Swedish words.
The suggestion I made tells others that you have actively studied the subject.
If you want to say that you have studied actively, but sporadically, you would say something like:
“Jag har väl studerat Svenska lite till och från under typ 10 år nu”
That is a causal way of saying it.
If you have only passively learned the subject, I would phrase it like this:
“De senaste 10 åren har jag hört och läst mycket Svenska, och har då lärt mig en del.”
This puts focus on how you were exposed to a subject and what you learned from it
“till och från” is a new one for me, so thank you. I would have used “här och där”.
The last formulation makes perfect sense to me. I like to think I could even have written it.
Tusentack för att du tog tid för att förklara lite.
fluent in Maltese (native) and English. Conversational in Italian. I was one of the last generations to grow up without the internet, so we had to watch TV. And we’re in close proximty to italy so we could get their channels. It is much less common nowadays for kids to also know Italian here. But people my age have no idea what Dragon Ball Z sounds like in english. We all watched it in Italian.
I can speak the official language of 67 different nations.
Very cool!
it’s english
Very cool!
I speak Arabic both Egypt and formal in in edition to English
Hey, if you don’t mind me asking, is the whole Khelif story a thing in Egypt?
Yeah I think so from what I read
Did it cause people to start discussing trans issues? (I know she’s not trans)
Yes
Do you feel it was a topic before this happened?
Not exactly
I wonder what those few must be like, who finally decide to stand up for themselves now. May god be with them.
Mi parolas iomete da Esperanton, y yo hablo tambien un poquito Español, pero medyo fluent ako sa Pilipino, ang wika taga sa Pilipinas. I’m pretty good at English, too.
Mi esperis vidi tro da esperantistoj en Lemmy!
I know enough Spanish to embarrass myself. I know enough of Nahuatl to understand some glyphs. I speak English at an American level, which is greasy.
你會哪些語言？(Traditional Chinese)
That’s about it. I am an interpreter and translator between English and Chinese.
Which Chinese language?
Mandarin. I can speak Taiwanese as well.
