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.
Aw, I was gonna make that joke
straylian, and that’s about it.
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. 😂
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).
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”
“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.
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 ? »)
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 :)
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.
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.
t’parl’qu’a?
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?
Ja, ich have studiert für ein lange Zeit.
Erste, im Schule an, dann später von mir selbst.
Ich kann spreche etwas Deutsch mit helfe von ein Übersetzer mag DeepL oder Microsoft.
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?”.
Ah, danke.
Welche Sprache sprechen Sie*
Welche SpracheN with n
Fair point.
Was für eine Sprache du sprichst.
Keine Verständliche
* Welche Sprache sprechen Sie?
Vee feel shpra her shprist doo, doo arsh lock
*Du… Benutzen wir Sie hier wirklich?
Situationsbedingt ist siezen besser. Nicht das ein User meint seinen Chef im deutschen Zweig zu beeindrucken :D
- I have spoken English since birth.
- Je parle français depuis l’âge de 7 ans, parce que je l’apprenais à l’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. 😉
“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.
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.
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.
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.
(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 :)
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.
Baguette, dutch, english and spanish, i love to speak all 4 equally but french is the equivalent of a having a migraine to write
Bloß schwäbisch
𝔊𝔲𝔱𝔢𝔫 𝔄𝔟𝔢𝔫𝔡
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.
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.
