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.
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. 😂
Sehr gut, danke! Muy bien!
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”
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!
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 :)
Yeah, sort of. I also use “yous” frequently as part of my dialect regularly. But it’s certainly an informal usage that I would not normally use in written communication.
I actually suspect, though I haven’t investigated it enough to be confident, that there may be something else going on. That there’s possibly a difference—in my dialect, at least—between 2nd person plural “multiple specific people” and “a general large audience”. And that “yous” might only be appropriate in the former.
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.
Welche Sprache sprechen Sie*
Was für eine Sprache du sprichst.
Keine Verständliche
Baguette, dutch, english and spanish, i love to speak all 4 equally but french is the equivalent of a having a migraine to write
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 informal ways of addressing people, both with their distinctive pronouns. Usually, when talking to people you don’t know personally, you’ll address them formally and then, when offered to, switch to the informal 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.
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.
(Spanish):
Mi lengua materna es el español.(English):
I speak English as my second language.(French):
Je parle rançais aussi, me pas aussi bien que l’anglais. (Ouais je sais, ce n’était pas un accident)(Japanese):
日本語も できるよ。2年ぐらい 勉強している。実際、去年 日本語能力試験を受けて、N4が できた。言語は 勉強の頑張れば、頑張るほど、よくできるよ。(Russian?):
When I was in highschool I started learning russian, but since then I’ve forgotten most of it, I can only say hi, good (morning/afternoon/evening) and other easy things. I don’t have a russian keyboard but it’s ‘Privyet’, ‘Dobraye utra’, ‘Dobrij bchyer’, ‘Spakoinai nochi’, ‘Spasiba’, ‘Izvinitye, ya nye ponimayu, ya nye goborit po-russkij’, ‘ya nichyevo nye snayu’.(German?):
Ich lerne Deutch im Moment mit meine Freundin. Aber ich bin nicht gut.Si quieres algunas observaciones… “¿Qué idiomas hablan ustedes?” Sería lo correcto (de acuerdo a la RAE). Creo que utilizaste la conjugación de la segunda persona singular del verbo hablar “tú hablas”, en vez del plural “ustedes hablan”. Et en français, je ne sais pas pourquoi, mais mon cerveau me dit que “¿Quelles langues parlez vous?” Va mieux. Und auf Deutch, ich denke dass “Welche Sprachen sprechen sie?” richtiger ist.
How do you learn kanji?
I lived for some time in Japan so I learned to talk and to read the kanji useful in the everyday life (like in the restaurant or the bus). But I feel like reading the news is still too hard and I do not even know where to start.
The best way to do it is to try reading an article and stop at every kanji you don’t know to look it up. It’s a slow process but the struggle’s what makes it easier to remember. Maybe try it with manga first as the panels help give context to what’s being said and the shounen stuff has hiragana above the kanji to help look it up.
I have a dictionary app called ‘akebi’ that shows me the words, the kanjis and the stroke order; and I also use google keyboard with the onscreen-drawing pad for japanese, so every kanji and kana I wrote on my previous comment was hand drawn by me. It takes a bit of time to get used to, but it really helps.
Also, learning about the origins of kanji, it’s radicals and history helps a lot, you’ll start creating connections in your head about pronunciation and meaning. You’ll associate meaning and sound to kanjis a lot faster that way. I’ve come to the point of hearing a word, learning it’s meaning and then I come up with the possible kanjis that make it up, and surprisingly I’m right 60 to 80% of the time!
Try calligraphy too. I learned all the kanjis that originated hiragana, and sometimes I see them in the wild and immediately know their pronunciation (60% of the time)
I’ts a matter of patience, and motivation, A LOT of motivation.
Thanks for the tips! It is motivating me actually :)
* Welche Sprache sprechen Sie?
Vee feel shpra her shprist doo, doo arsh lock
Bloß schwäbisch
𝔊𝔲𝔱𝔢𝔫 𝔄𝔟𝔢𝔫𝔡
in addition to my native brazilian portuguese, i’m fluent in english and basic to intermediate level in spanish and french. i can understand and speak roughly some german and russian too (started the courses, but never finished). my objective is to someday learn both german and russian up to intermediate level, and then go for some arabic, mandarin, kongo, nheengatu (an old creole language that mixed tupi-guarani and portuguese) and esperanto.
English and Scots Gaelic.
A bheil gàidhlid agad?
Very cool!
Dutch, English, French and German.
With a sliver of Latin from school, so I do understand morsels of Italian and Spanish
Is dutch your first language? How hard was it to learn german?
Yes Dutch is my first language. German can be strange to learn, much of the vocabulary is similar, but sometimes strangely divergent. The grammar is more straightforward, and more rigid, but can be hard to learn. Gender of the words is just gambling as I’ll never learn that by heart.
I much prefer french, tbh it feels more natural to me, maybe just because it’s a bit more distant, linguistically. Therefore it feels like it runs on different hardware, mentally.
Ma langue maternelle est le français. Je suis né et vis au Québec, d’une famille canadienne française assez typique. Mes habiletés d’écriture sont plutôt fortes à en croire mes notes à l’école, mais je les pratique très peu. Je ne le parle pas aussi bien que je l’écris…
Otherwise I’m pretty proficient in English. I’d say I’m more or less bilingual at this point. I cannot seem to enjoy fiction books nearly as much in the language though. I can’t really appreciate the differences in style well enough, I think.
Allô!
As-tu été frappé par l’inondation lol
Je suis en Montérégie, c’est très plat dans mon coin, donc non, heureusement. Mais l’eau s’est accumulée un peu partout dans le coin pareil, à des endroits où j’en avais jamais vu…
Euskaraz hitz egiten dut. (Basque language: I speak Basque)
Spanish is also my mother tongue. As you can see, I also speak English.
I’m a native Portuguese speaker, fluent in English and can understand Spanish and French. Despite having had 3 years of French in school, I can no longer speak properly, and my writing is really bad, but I can understand pretty well. Spanish just comes to me because of the similarities with Portuguese, I never formally learned it.
Same as you, but little Japanese here…
School languages are absolutely worthless unless you kept practising afterwards. You generally aren’t there wanting to learn and don’t have natural conversation partnerships to practice with.
Yeah, exactly! I was quite amazed at how fast my French degraded after I stopped having classes.