What Languages Do You Speak?

Started by QofQuimica
BU Medical Sciences
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What Languages Do You Speak?

  • Spanish

    Votes: 33 14.0%

  • French

    Votes: 20 8.5%

  • Other Romance Language (Italian, Portuguese)

    Votes: 5 2.1%

  • Other European Language

    Votes: 16 6.8%

  • Arabic

    Votes: 13 5.5%

  • Hindi

    Votes: 5 2.1%

  • Mandarin or Other Chinese Variant

    Votes: 22 9.4%

  • Other Asian Language

    Votes: 18 7.7%

  • African Language

    Votes: 3 1.3%

  • Other (Post Below)

    Votes: 10 4.3%

  • Multiple Languages Besides English (Post Below)

    Votes: 53 22.6%

  • English Only

    Votes: 37 15.7%
  • Total voters
    235
I speak English and Mandarin Chinese and Shanghainese (one of the Chinese dialects).
 
I'll just go with English only, although I took 4 years of German in high school and remember quite a bit. I took a semester of American Sign Language in college too that I wish I'd kept up with.


Hey Q, did you steal this poll idea from that spammer? 😛
 
Bulgarian and English (I am ESL) and I took 4 years of Spanish (so I know some basic spanish phrases/words 🙄)
 
Yey! I like this one and I'm hoping to meet other linguists in medicine.

I'm fluent in:
Italian (professional level)
Spanish (native level)
English (native level)
French (intermediate-advanced, and I've been neglecting this one)

Edit:

Oy to the vey! Oversharing. Sorry guys!
 
Last edited:
English (native), Portuguese (native), Japanese (professional level). I can understand Spanish fairly well, but can't really speak/write it myself. And I still remember some random French from high school.
 
After three years living outside the US in Romania, Hong Kong, Croatia, Germany, Gambia, South Africa and Sierra Leone, the sum total of my language abilities is insulting people in Mandinka, ordering a beer in German, and buying a kilo of cherries in Romanian. Why can't everyone just learn English?
 
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NightOwly said:
Yey! I like this one and I'm hoping to meet other linguists in medicine.

I'm fluent in:
Italian (professional level)
Spanish (native level)
English (native level)
French (intermediate-advanced, and I've been neglecting this one)

More than 10 years ago I began working as a medical interpreter to help pay for college in northern California. A lot of doctors dislike having to use interpreters, and I don't blame them, but I liked being paged from one department to the next, since being in the hospital room with the doctor and the patient has given me a unique insight into medicine.

Right now I'm balancing books and translations (staring at 38 pages from Bristol-Myers Squib due Wednesday, and an Italian cancer research study due tomorrow) while I volunteer in the "developing world" as the non-profit calls it, and though I recently resigned from my volunteer position in a free clinic, they haven't been able to find someone to replace me, and I'm still here. My responsibility is to help the non-profit communicate with Germany, since they don't speak Spanish, and interpret for the 2 specialists, a neurology physical therapy specialist and a neurosurgeon, which includes patient consults at the free clinic, training local volunteers to give physical therapy, and even talking to local reporters (tv and newspapers) to reach patients who may have been in accidents, strokes, and have brain damage. There are local doctors doing this too, but I only work with the Europeans volunteering here.

About 75% of the patients are turned away since there's no more room, and I'm surprised at how much need there is, I'm surprised at how young the patients are (motorcycle accidents) and I'm surprised how many people here don't understand the importance of treatment. Some feel if they're paralyzed (like hemiplegia or hemiparesis) after brain damage that their life is over, and they stay in bed, staring at the ceiling, counting their days, waiting to die, and the volunteers find out about cases through word of mouth and the specialists visit them at home, sometimes hours away in an isolated ranch to tell them that there are options. I've already seen patients regain mobility, and the smile in their face when they take their first steps is gold.

I'm hoping to start medicine in Europe in a couple months. I was already accepted a couple years back, but I didn't have the savings and final embassy documents that I finally have. I was sent to the beginning and I have one last test to take, and I'm studying hard, while I work and volunteer, and if all goes well, I start medical school in September.

Learning languages took me down roads I would have never imagined. I'm hoping I can continue to work abroad in global health ---but I doubt it, at least, I don't know how yet. Then again, global health is pretty much what a lot of US hospitals face already, just ask the doctors who walk into the exam room, only realize they can't communicate with their patient.

This is longer than I would like, but this is something I love with a passion, but I've learned to not talk about in real life, and I'm hoping there's a niche out there I don't yet know about...
Click to expand...

I envy you. I bet you could travel half the world without warring about communication issues. Besides, French and Italian are sexy and delicious, respectively.
 
Chip N Sawbones said:
After three years living outside the US in Romania, Hong Kong, Croatia, Germany, Gambia, South Africa and Sierra Leone, the sum total of my language abilities is insulting people in Mandinka, ordering a beer in German, and buying a kilo of cherries in Romanian. Why can't everyone just learn English?
Click to expand...

Mainly to troll you.
 
Welcome polyglots!

I speak English (well, American anyway), and enough French and German to stumble through a vacation. Used to be darn near fluent in both of those, but haven't used them hardly at all in 25 years at this point. There truly is something to the "use it or lose it" phrase. Thankfully it comes back quickly with some intensive immersion.

I also speak Mom and Wife fluently. Anyone who has been a mother of teenagers or a spouse knows exactly what I mean. :meanie:
 
English (native), Took 4 years of Academic French in High School and was an exchange student. Currently taking Cajun French for my required foreign language.

Know enough German to get around.
Just enough Spanish from working on the ambulance/911 phones to treat a patient.
 
English, Tagalog, understand more Spanish than can speak but am working on being fluent, took a year of German so I only know a little. Every time I meet a person that knows another language, I learn a phrase, so I know random stuff.


~M
 
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English is my mother tongue, I can read Dutch novels and carry on a reasonably intelligent conversation and ask in Dutch for any clarification I might need. Dutch in a German accent usually works as a German substitute, and I can now talk **** about people in Khmer (Cambodian). Used to speak decent Arabic, but it is seriously rusty now, and have scraps of Georgian.
 
I speak some languages, none of which are Spanish. I better get on that if I plan on practicing in California one day.
 
English (American) is my native language. I speak fluent German, conversational American Sign Language and intermediate Spanish.

I also want to learn French, Italian, Russian and Japanese.
 
Ibn Alnafis MD said:
French and Italian are sexy and delicious, respectively.
Click to expand...

They do feel nice rolling off the tongue 😛

Once someone asked David Letterman if he spoke any languages,
and he said "I thought I spoke French, but then I went to France and I realized that I didn't." :uhno:

That was 6 months before my study abroad departure to Italy.
Oh, I dove right in and worked at it. 🤣


ShyRem said:
I also speak Mom and Wife fluently.
Click to expand...

:laugh:
 
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People clearly have much better linguistic abilities than me. It took me more than five years living in America to become truly fluent in English. I cannot fathom being fluent after spending couple months in a country or taking few classes.
 
English is one of the more difficult languages. Most languages are logical, have rules rarely broken, pronounciation is clearly regulated and dialects and accents not so pronounced. Here in America you can go to the south to the bayou and hardly understand those folks even if you are a native American citizen. Our rules of the language are broken all the time, pronounciation rules almost nonexistent, structure has gone so far astray as to be unrecognizable. Idiom and street slang are rampant in our language. I find it amazing anyone from another country can understand us at all when they come here. Heck, just watch an episode of swamp people .... They have to frickin subtitle (and at times translate) it and they are supposedly speaking English!
 
My favorite example of the screwy english language:

What does BOW spell?

Let's see... There's Bow. (bou)

Hmmm.... What kind of bow?

1. To bend the knee or body or incline the head, as in reverence, submission, salutation, recognition, or acknowledgment.

2. To yield; submit: to bow to the inevitable.

3. To cause to submit; subdue; crush.

4. To cause to stoop or incline: Age had bowed his head.

5. The forward end of a vessel or airship.

Ok, so let me get this straight: This can mean to submit or to crush....aren't those sort of diametrical opposites?

It can also mean to cause something to bend...or the state of being bent....both the cause and the effect?

....or it can be the front of a boat or plane?

But wait...we ain't through yet. There's the other pronunciation:

Bow (boh)

1. A flexible strip of wood or other material, bent by a string stretched between its ends, for shooting arrows: He drew the bow and sent the arrow to its target.

2. A bend or curve.

3. Also called bowknot. a looped knot composed of two or more loops and two ends, as for tying together the ends of a ribbon or string.

4. A long rod, originally curved but now nearly straight, with horsehairs stretched from one end to the other, used for playing on a musical instrument of the violin and viol families.

5. A U-shaped piece for placing under an animal's neck to hold a yoke.

6. The part of a key grasped by the fingers.

7. The loop on the stem of a watch by which the watch is attached to a chain or the like.

English....

Home of three letter words from hell.
 
^ Yeah, that all the way. The lack of logic in our language is definitely interesting. I remember taking standardized tests as a kid. All of my scores would be great except spelling, which was still good but definitely a noticeable dip down from the others, because it never seemed really logical to me.

I never really thought about all the three letter words that have half a dozen different meanings though. That's really got to suck to learn
 
pronounciation. Let's talk about comb/bomb/tomb. All with -omb at the end, however pronounced VERY differently.

cohm
bahm
toom

I mean, really... can't we make up our minds here?
 
While I know that Anglophones love to talk about how "messed up" English is, as a former professional linguist, there is no principled way of saying it is "harder" than another language. First, all languages ever have polysemy (the same set of sounds having multiple meanings). English has a bit more than, say, Inuit, but that's just because English doesn't explicitly mark the difference between different classes of words in most contexts ("bank" can be a noun or present tense verb, so long as the subject isn't third person singular). Many languages are e same way, though, like Dutch or Chinese or Thai.

Second, there is just no sense in which English grammar is less "logical" than any other language. Natural human languages are very messy things, and in many respects English is blessedly free of arbitrary variation that bedevils second language leathers. The intersection of grammatical gender and case-marking, forinstance, like you find in German or Serbo-Croat - not only do the endings of words change depending on whether they are subjects or objects or possessives, but how one endings change depends on totally arbitrary classes that words fall into without any clear rhyme or reason. You just have to memorize it. This get ridiculous in languages like Swahili, which has a noun declension for oblong or cylindrical things (eight noun classes in total, I believe).

I won't even address the English lexicon and borrowing - suffice it to say, all lanaguages everywhere have always borrowed words from their neighbors and other societies with which ey have come into contact, though a very, very few like Icelandic have tended to coin calcques ("translations") instead of borrowing. English used to do this back in the day - gospel ("gods spell") is an attempt to make the Greek evangelos comprehensible to a sixth century audience - but has for whatever reason mostly stopped. Not entirely, though - we say "worldview" and not "Weltsanschauung."

English spelling is awful compared to, say, Finnish, but is as ridiculous as French spelling, more or less, and is less of a barrier to literacy than Chinese script or even defective syllabaries like those used for Khmer or Burmese.
 
fluently: English, Italian, Spanish (learned in that order)
abilities comparable to a 4 year old: Portuguese, French, and Female
phrases native speakers taught me: Albanian, Romanian, Twi, Arabic

I don't really dream in Italian or Spanish anymore, but when I did it was like being on an acid trip...not that I'd know.
 
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clausewitz2 said:
I won't even address the English lexicon and borrowing - suffice it to say, all lanaguages everywhere have always borrowed words from their neighbors and other societies with which ey have come into contact, though a very, very few like Icelandic have tended to coin calcques ("translations") instead of borrowing. English used to do this back in the day - gospel ("gods spell") is an attempt to make the Greek evangelos comprehensible to a sixth century audience - but has for whatever reason mostly stopped. Not entirely, though -
Click to expand...

"Faccio babysitter part-time solo weekends, troppo stress."

Love the borrowing, an Italian said that to me once and when I asked how well they spoke English they said, "I only know the swear words." (in Italian).
 
clausewitz2 said:
Second, there is just no sense in which English grammar is less "logical" than any other language. Natural human languages are very messy things, and in many respects English is blessedly free of arbitrary variation that bedevils second language leathers. The intersection of grammatical gender and case-marking, forinstance, like you find in German or Serbo-Croat - not only do the endings of words change depending on whether they are subjects or objects or possessives, but how one endings change depends on totally arbitrary classes that words fall into without any clear rhyme or reason. You just have to memorize it. This get ridiculous in languages like Swahili, which has a noun declension for oblong or cylindrical things (eight noun classes in total, I believe).
Click to expand...

Swahili has _at least_ 8 noun classes. Depending on how generous you are being when you count, you could easily arrive at a number of 10 to 12. The noun class often (but not always) relates to the beginning syllable of the word, at least, so you seldom have to separately memorize the class for each new word you learn. But pretty much everyone needs appropriate agreement with a noun - the verb has to agree with the noun class of the subject and separately with the object. Adjectives have to agree with the word they describe.

People will sometimes claim that the m-/mi- class is for oblong or cylindrical things, but that's really a gross oversimplification. Many of the oldest bantu words in that class clearly are (trees and arms spring to mind), some could be if you think about them right (rivers), and some simply are not (pillows). n-/n- is said to be the class for loanwords, but the words for books and matches are borrowed from arabic and/or hindi and are ki-/vi-. Ki-/vi-, meanwhile, is usually described as being "things" (and how vague of a description is that?), and especially diminutive things, but rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses are (more or less) in the ki-/vi- class, despite being clearly non-diminutive non-things.

There's extra fun in that only indigenous Bantu adjectives have to agree with their nouns. So the colors red, black and white take agreement (interestingly, every language or language family with three colors seems to pick red, black and white as their three), but orange, blue, purple, green, grey, etc all do not. The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 8 take agreement, but 6, 7, 9, and 10 do not. In formal proper Swahili, larger numbers take agreement only in the final ones digit. So 25 is spoken as "twenty and five", where the five takes agreement. Most speakers outside of Zanzibar, however, don't bother with this.

So yeah, Swahili has it's complications when it comes to noun classes. Once you get past that, however, it's a very logical language, with very little in the way of exceptions to gramatical rules, and a relatively small set of word-roots that give rise to a tremendous number of nouns, verbs, and adjectives in a fairly straightforward and understandable way.
 
I speak American English and code switch with "ghetto-ese" and for those that don't think it's a language, go to inner city Detroit and see how well you do 😉 I can follow some Mexican Spanish an Italian.
 
I wouldn't say I am fluent in any language other than english, but if we categorized proficiency levels as basic, intermediate, advanced, as well as conversational or professional, my linguistic repertoire looks something like this:

English: Fluent
Spanish: Intermediate Professional
Russian: Basic Conversational
German: Basic Conversational

🙂
 
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