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Who here is bilingual?


How many languages can you speak?

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Finnish and English.

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I heard that Finnish has many synonyms overall. Is that true?

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I've never heard that. I don't think that Finnish has any more synonyms than other languages, but I could be wrong.

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English and a bit of Europe.

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As a liguaphile, this thread is irresistible, though my answer will be underwhelming. Full disclosure, I can't claim to be "bilingual," so only read on if bored.

Native U.S. English speaker, but coming from a musical family, being musical, was a professional radio/TV "jingle" singer in my youth, used to have perfect pitch, all of which I theorize gives me an ear for languages. Having been a lifelong fan of entertainment from the British Isles, along with two several week long visits to the big island, with travel amping my gregariousness to 11 , I have a special love for all the flavors and accents of English from there, as well as Australia, Canada and the U.S. Can usually place a native English speaker if not by city, (even a handful of parts of London) then at least region of each. Anyway...

Took close to five years of French from 12-17. Went to Paris as a teen and did ok. Four decades later, I'm quite rusty.

After 30 years in L.A., have picked up a bit of Spanish by osmosis. Many trips to Mexico, up and down Baja, Tabasco, and three weeks in Chiapas, where I had a brief love affair with a beautiful Mestisa who didn't speak a word of English, enough to have met her mom. Oh, and two weeks in Barcelona, where I got picked up by an Argentinian lass. Notice a pattern? Best way to learn a language. I can get by well enough, though hardly fluent.

At 12 our year was broken up in to French, Russian, Japanese and Latin. I can be polite in Russian and recite the alphabet.

Japanese, I can read and write in Katakana, the simplest alphabet, and guess what? Had a Japanese gf for a year, so can be polite, make myself generally understood, but do my best at restaurants.

German, can get by in Germany, Austria and parts of Switzerland, but their English is better than mine.

Italy, got by. Had no success wooing a cute bartender.

And can be polite in a bunch of others. Really lights people up when you make a little effort. Got offers to stay with locals regularly.

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I can speak a fair amount of korean.

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I speak English, Polish, and learned a little Latin when I was a teenager.

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Hi! Polish is a wonderful language. I find the script fascinating.

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It's a very rich but very complex language. There are so many different ways to say the same thing. You can have sentences in many different orders and they would all be correct but would have slightly different meanings depending on the context. There are also extra alphabet letters that have no analog in English, so it's difficult to even give an example of how to pronounce certain words.

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I lost a lot of it since being a child but knew 3 other languages before English. Still understand them but my parents stopped using them around me after I started school and struggled with English. I am working on Duolingo to relearn Ukrainian. I forgot a lot of the words but the cool thing is I still have a intuition on how the grammar is supposed to sound. English I really struggle with grammar but Ukrainian was my mother tongue and even tho I forgot how to say a lot of stuff I know how it is supposed to sound

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Norwegian and English. I Understand 2 more languages that I am not able to speak in Swedish and Danish.

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some people here will put i SPEAK bla bla bla language, but theres a huge difference between knowing some words, saying "where is...?" and being able to have a real conversation in this language, like in english.

thats really speaking another language.

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