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Languages ! Pad Patter 3.6.17

Languages you speak at home

  • Just English

    Votes: 26 76.5%

  • English & 1 other

    Votes: 6 17.6%

  • Other language - please tell us which one

    Votes: 2 5.9%
  • Total voters
    34
bellbird

bellbird

Well-Known Member
Pollywog
Joined
Oct 10, 2010
Messages
17,351
Part of what i love about our digi community is how memory keeping is international. I know a lot of us speak, read & write some form of English but is it what you speak at home & do you speak any others? Did you learn any in school?

DD has put post-it's with German words on objects around the house, she started Japanese too but isn't at the post-it stage yet. I learnt Italian (a dialect) thru family & for a few years at school. My French is pretty pathetic ...
 
We only speak English officially at home but Melody and I are both learning Italian, and we are all (very casually) learning AUSLAN (Australian Sign Language).
At school I had to take Japanese, and I can still count, but that's about it. I always wanted to learn French but never got around to it and now, because Melody wanted to learn Italian, I have taken up Italian with her. We are still very much beginners, but we test each other and it is a lot of fun to do it together!

On a side note. If you are looking to learn a language, I strongly recommend Duolingo. It is amazing!!
 
we only speak English. I took Spanish in school, but it was grammatical and not conversational, so I have (after all these years) an ability to read and understand some. I like to test it on some of the girls scrap pages here:)
 
We all speak English at home, but learnt Afrikaans at school, so can read, write and speak Afrikaans.
I was born in Germany and can speak, read and understand German.
 
I speak English and Spanish fluently. I prefer english for reading and writing though but can read and write in spanish too.
 
We only speak English at home. I took two years of French in high school, but I barely remember any of it. I wish I had kept up with that.
 
All of us in my family speak English 99% of the time, but we all know at least a little bit of other languages, especially my husband. He can speak pretty well in French, and I think he knows a decent amount of German and Chinese too. We've picked up a tiny bit of Swedish since my husband's brother's wife is Swedish. We love language! I considered myself to have the Spanish-speaking ability of a native Spanish-speaking preschooler ;) when I was around high school graduation and early college. I completed 4 years of high school Spanish and another semester in college. But since I left teaching in the 90's and moved to Virginia, pretty much the only practice I've had with it is Dora The Explorer. I can still say some important sentences and remember the basics of conjugation but I've lost a lot from disuse. But I had a very stumbling conversation with a new Spanish-speaking neighbor a month or two ago! That was such great brain exercise! :D
 
Just English here. My daughter ... I hope, will break this .... she was just inducted into the Spanish National Honor Society this past week which means she pledges to continue with her Spanish studies in HS ... she'll be in Honors 4 as a Jr and AP English as a senior. I hope she continues to learn and study in college as well. I wish I would have continued with Spanish past HS but I didn't. I took 2 years of French and 3 of Spanish. I've forgotten most of what I learned. My husband was doing the Rosetta Stone stuff for awhile, in order to learn Spanish. Work got crazy so he put it aside for awhile ... but the funny story is that he must of been listening right before surgery. When he woke up the nurses said he was speaking all in Spanish!!! He has no memory of this but the nurses got a good laugh. And were commenting "didn't he speak all English before he went under?".
 
English. I took a whole slew of French growing up, and probably could have a conversation or write a simple paragraph, but nowhere near what I used to be able to speak/write!
 
I only speak English. My father only spoke Finnish in his home until he went to school, as his parents moved here from Finland. Also my husband's father spoke Finnish as that was the same in his case. I remember as a child sitting and listening to all the elders speak to each other in Finnish and wish I could understand them. But for some reason they never taught it to their children. I really wish I would of asked to be taught! Now they are all passed away, one of the things you think about as an adult. What you wish you would of........ Sometimes I think I should get on-line and learn the basics as I would love to visit there one day.
 
We only speak English at home, though we both love languages. I am both amazed and put to shame by the rest of the world that learns both their own language and English or another as well as a matter of course!

I know quite a bit of Latin and some French and Spanish, but rarely use it. When I do use it, I tend to start a sentence in one language and accidentally throw in bits of the others as I go due to lack of practice. Darren is fairly fluent in Russian both in reading and in conversation (he once had very different career goals and learned it then), and he's been refreshing his memory lately with Duolingo on his iPhone. I may have to join him in learning that one.
 
I took 6 years of French in high school & college and I can still read it fairly well. I wouldn't say that I can still speak it very well.

We don't speak any other languages.
 
My native language is German but we are a bilingual household because my husband is British.

On top of English I had French and Latin in school. I can get by as a tourist in Italy, but if you have little opportunity to speak a language it gets buried and becomes passive knowledge.
 
English here, as well. I took Spanish in junior high. I can't converse in it, but I can sure conjugate verbs! That's all my teacher had us do. What a waste of time. But having grown up in the Los Angeles area where we were surrounded by Spanish speakers, I picked up more here and there. I can speak it from the written word, but can't understand what I've spoken.

I took Swedish for a while in College. One day my professor stopped me in the middle of me reading out loud and asked where I was from. He wasn't surprised when I said SoCal. Why? Well, he asked me if I could please try to speak my Swedish without a Spanish accent. Seriously! The two alphabets are very similar, so I just automatically defaulted to Spanish when reading! I'm currently trying to brush up on my Swedish and I'm finding I'm mixing up my Swedish and Spanish all the time. EEk! :duh
 
We speak English in our home. But my husband knows Spanish and our daughter took Latin so knows that some. I took French in school but don't speak it. Just remember a few words here and there. And we have a son who speaks Korean.
 
Difficult poll, I miss the "multiple" option.

Dutch - native language
English - fluent
German - I can speak and understand (spoken and written) normal conversations. Having friends and family there, as well as it being 5 minutes to the border forced me to learn the language.
French - basic, really basic. I graduated high school with French, but I have forgotten most if it by now.
 
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Chippi said:
because Melody wanted to learn Italian, I have taken up Italian with her.
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that's great (i think it's easier to start out young with these things)
Chippi said:
I strongly recommend Duolingo.
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apparently my son (8y.o) saw his sister on there doing German and signed himself up - and has been going through the Swedish and Norwegian sections lol
 
cfile said:
an ability to read and understand some. I like to test it on some of the girls scrap pages here
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me too with my (limited) French - i think the Canadian French must be a little different to what i learnt (but it's probably more likely that it's my sub-par French skills)
 
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