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English: natively German: gets rustier every day. portugese and spanish: enough to make my way around a bar is all. By no means is it smooth when I speak either of these two, but the native people don't seem to mind because I'm at least trying to speak something not english.
Posts: 2208 | Registered: Feb 2004
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English (native language) Hebrew (semi-fluent, though these days when I try to say something in Hebrew it tends to come out as Japanese) Japanese (conversational, though slightly rusty) Spanish (vaguely remembered from high school)
I also know some miscellaneous scraps of Quenya.
And since we're apparently counting programming languages, I'll add Python to the list.
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English: native German: used to be near-fluent, but now at the "academic research" level (I can follow the TV news and can read a book with a dictionary on hand.) Bengali/Hindi: a few words and phrases, although I'm planning on auditing a year-long intensive Hindi course next year
I know that Abhi can speak/understand at least Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Marathi, Maithili, and Assamese (and English, of course). Comes from being an Army brat in India, as well as studying Sanskrit in school for 8 years. Now, if only I can convince him to become a US citizen and join the CIA for the language signing bonus...
Posts: 2409 | Registered: Sep 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Jhai: English: native German: used to be near-fluent, but now at the "academic research" level (I can follow the TV news and can read a book with a dictionary on hand.) Bengali/Hindi: a few words and phrases, although I'm planning on auditing a year-long intensive Hindi course next year
I know that Abhi can speak/understand at least Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Marathi, Maithili, and Assamese (and English, of course). Comes from being an Army brat in India, as well as studying Sanskrit in school for 8 years. Now, if only I can convince him to become a US citizen and join the CIA for the language signing bonus...
Are those languages in high demand at the CIA?
I had a friend who was Chaldean, he spoke or could at least understand a half dozen different Arabic languages, I can't remember them all. Assyrian, Arabic, Chaldean, Farsi, and a couple others. He went to the CIA and turned in an application to be a translator for them, but they turned him down because he couldn't read and write those languages. And that's in languages that are in VERY high demand.
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quote:Originally posted by Jhai: I know that Abhi can speak/understand at least Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Marathi, Maithili, and Assamese (and English, of course). Comes from being an Army brat in India, as well as studying Sanskrit in school for 8 years. Now, if only I can convince him to become a US citizen and join the CIA for the language signing bonus...
Are those languages in high demand at the CIA?
I know I've read somewhere (probably on a recruiting flyer at my college's job fair) that Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, and Gujarati all had signing bonuses. Abhi reads and writes Hindi & Bengali, and could probably pick up all the others quickly, since they share similar scripts (except Urdu, which is a modified version of the Arabic script).
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I bet he'd get Urdu quickly, too. The alphabet is phonetic. Plus, it is increasingly written with roman characters, so he could just start writing it like that until he picked up the alphabet.
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C++, Java, enough shell-script to get around, random bits of Lisp, Ruby and Tcl. And I used to be fluent in Turbo Pascal, but I don't know if I still am.
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Tzadik was complaining earlier this evening that I didn't post about him in this thread. Apparently he can't do it himself because that would be...something bad.
So! My husband speaks
Slovak Hungarian Czech English French
and has forgotten Russian.
I'm leaving out languages he doesn't actually speak fluently, as the list of passively understood or partially spoken languages would be pretty long.
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SELECT Language, SkillLevel AS 'Skill Level' FROM LanguagesIKnow WHERE SkillLevel > 0 ORDER BY SkillLevel DESC
Posts: 172 | Registered: Aug 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Saephon: English as my native language. Took several years of Spanish, and I got quite good at it...not perfectly fluent though.
Am now taking Japanese and after only six weeks I'm coming along surprisingly well I picked up my nearest manga last night and I can't believe I was able to read several lines of dialogue. Screw Kanji though >_> <_<
This is strange, I was about to write nearly this exact same post.
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I used to be very fluent in Maori and went to a school where we weren't allowed to speak English. However, in the ten plus years since I stopped studying Maori, I've lost most of the fluency in speaking although I can still generally understand most of what I read or people say.
I also took Japanese and French at school but sadly about all I can remember is greetings and how to count!
Posts: 1431 | Registered: Aug 2003
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In order of fluency: English(native) Spanish(not fluent, but I can convey my meaning, at least haltingly, and understand what's said, at least if it's said slowly enough.) French(self-teaching in all my non-existent free time that I feel like studying French) Italian(I can understand some... a little... and only get the vague meaning of what's being said usually, if that)
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I picked up my nearest manga last night and I can't believe I was able to read several lines of dialogue. Screw Kanji though >_> <_< 
