Let's get this thread going. Post below what languages you speak, and how well you speak them, using this scale:
1 - Basic conversational skills. You could reasonably easily hold a 5 - 10 minute conversation with a native speaker. You would have difficulty if put in a situation where you need to use the language for other tasks, however.
2 - Intermediate - You would do well if dropped in a country where this is the only spoken language, however living there for a long period of time would still be difficult.
3 - Good - You could speak this language for long periods of time with only minor difficulties. You can tell time and do other work with numbers, go grocery shopping, etc. Conversation is easy.
4 - Fluent - You speak this language fluently and if not for your accent and minor hiccups, could pass as a native speaker to non-native speakers.
5 - Native - This is your native tongue.
You can put a .5 if you're kind of halfway between each, except for a 4.5 obviously. Being able to speak a few words and 1 or 2 phrases doesn't count.
Mine are:
English - 5 - Native French - 3.5 - Learned growing up German - 2.5 - Taking courses in University, can do the examples in 3 but may struggle speaking for long periods of time.
OP here, I could also say Russian at a 1 level, but it's iffy. Used to be at a 2 while learning it but I dropped it a while ago and forget a lot of it. Aside from the swearing and very basic stuff.
Luis Sanders
I'm assuming you mean 5 for English, and therefore a 4 for Mandarin?
Nicholas Wright
English - 5 Mandarin - 1 or 2? It depends on the situation. If I had my phone which has a Mandarin dictionary app on it, it would make life much easier
Grayson Nguyen
What convinced you to learn Mandarin? For most it's that it's the most common language but I'm just curious.
Daniel Peterson
I was having a look through a prospectus for a University and looking through the Business degree section. I came across Business Management and Chinese. There was the option to do a few other languages instead of Chinese.
I decided that if I'm going to do a language, I might as well turn the dial up to 11. A lot of people in the UK study Spanish, French or German at some point in their lives, but most people only do the compulsory 3 years of "study" in Secondary School. When they finish they can't really speak the language they studied.
I did German for 3 years and French for a year (because I was one of the smart kids who they thought could cope with two languages at a time) but I can barely remember any French, and my German isn't much better.
Saying that I'm studying Mandarin at university really makes you stick out amongst the people who did the bare minimum in French, German, and Spanish
Joseph Carter
English - 5. Spanish - 4. I learned this from primary school up through an advanced literature class in high school, and I can still hold a relatively extensive conversation, read books/articles, and enjoy movies/TV in Spanish. I do stumble a bit sometimes, but for the most part I am fluent in Spanish. Portuguese - 3.5. I'm close to completing the tree in Duolingo for this and I've taken to listening to bossa nova recently, but I fall back on Spanish a lot to support myself. I'm hoping to lose that crutch at some point. Turkish - 2.5. I've held medium-length conversations in Turkish and I can kinda make out some articles/prose, but I'm still not quite that good. I can also understand a handfull of Azeri, Turkmen, and surprisingly Uzbek, but only at a very basic level. Ukrainian - 1.5. Turkish helped me understand how cases work, it's just that Ukrainian has a billion exceptions and irregularities for when to use cases and how. Fortunately I have a friend from Ukraine, so I can practice it whenever.
Nathan Wright
Spanish - 5 English - I guess 4 Swedish - 4, but my English is way better Italian - I'm trying to learn a bit now
Joseph Parker
English - 5 French - 3 Mandarin - 1 Greek - 0.5 (my listening/reading comprehension is about 1.5-2, but my speaking/writing ability is absolute beginner tier)
I'm hoping to get French up to fluency, have at least working knowledge of Mandarin, and be at least conversational in Greek.
Dylan Wood
Being from the only bilingual province in Canada, French was mandatory for me up until grade 11, I took it then but didn't bother in grade 12 because we weren't learning anything, they had just been regurgitating the same shit for the past 3 years, I knew the language well enough. My options in University were Arabic, German, Spanish, Mandarin, and Gaelic. Already having learnt cyrillic, I didn't want to learn a more fucked up writing system so I axed Mandarin and Arabic, and I wanted to learn a language that wasn't on its last leg, so not Gaelic. I went with Spanish as it would be easiest with my English and French background, but the course with the best prof filled up so I went to German. I still take to spanish very well and I guess I could put myself at a 1 - 2 but I never bothered to actively pursue learning it so I don't like to say I can speak it.
French - 5 English - 5 Spanish - 4 but reading literature remains somewhat difficult
I study languages so it's basically my only skill.
Parker Jackson
OP here I'm assuming you're from the East Coast? I'm from NB and going to uni in NS, only my friends at school from QC, NB, NS, PEI, and NFLD can speak french. Idk if the west coast just doesn't care but I've yet to speak someone from that part of Canada with more than mediocre French.
Jason Peterson
So what's your German level at? or are you just close enough to the border that you come up as a German flag?
Didn't know it existed mayne. I'm cool with people using whatever scale they please.
John Kelly
Russian 5 Ukrainian 4.5 English 4 Spanish 3.5 French 0.5
Joshua Murphy
>Didn't know it existed mayne. It's on every textbook in the EU m8
Ryan Brooks
Spanish 5 English 4 French 3
How different is Russian from Ukrainian?
William Walker
>primary country for English >UK wew lad
Alexander Brooks
Look at my flag buddy. Sadly I'm too poor to travel and haven't left leafland, getting my passport next month though so here's hoping.
Ethan Howard
yeah same for Spanish, Mexico has 3x Spain's population.
Nathan Thomas
I think it means where the country is best known for originating from, or where it has the highest percentage of speakers, not the highest amount. May be wrong though idk I didn't make the pic.
As someone who knows a bit of Russian, and also knows history, apparently many in the USSR days considered it just a dialect of Russian. Not saying that's accurate, because they do have significant differences, but they are fairly similar. Kind of like a French/Spanish or German/Dutch thing. Of course I don't speak Ukrainian and he could tell us better.
Lincoln Flores
Forgot to respond to you, look here:
Ayden Reed
Russian 5 English 4 French 1 :/
Nicholas Nguyen
I'm from Ontario, but I kept studying French until Grade 11 and then after several years of not using it, started brushing up on it again.
Grayson Edwards
Actually no, my Spanish's gotten pretty rusty after months of virtually no practice, I'm knocking it down to 3 or even 2.5.
Galician and Spanish, I guess. Maybe Portuguese and Spanish.
No it wasn't. It was more or less always considered a separate entity, e.g. there were two edicts in the Imperial times banning or restricting publications in Ukrainian and its usage at schools; they referred to it by a different name, but banning something obviously means recognizing it as a standalone idiom first. In the Soviet times Ukrainian was actually codified, and even promoted during two periods of Ukrainization.
Easton Cruz
>Spanish 5 >English 4 >German 0.5
Colton Collins
I was just going off of what I had been told by an old math teacher of mine whos parents were of polish and Ukrainian origin. Guess I was wrong, my bad.
Eli Turner
Swedish - 5 English - 4 Spanish - 1.5
Would be interesting to do US SAT/ACT and see what I get on the english parts.
Carson Rivera
The Canadian Ukrainian diaspora is a bunch of cunts to be honest, whining is about as crucial to them as breathing.
James Phillips
Yea I kind of picked up on that, but I've only known 2 Ukrainians and the 1 teacher with Ukrainian heritage so I didn't know for sure.
Adrian Ortiz
Telugu - 5 English - 5 Hindi/urdu - 4 Tamil - 2 Spanish - 2 Japanese - 2
Leo Carter
Finnish 5 English 4 German 2.5
Lucas Williams
Slovene - 5 English - 4 German - 2
Eli Smith
Norwegian - 5 English - 3.5 German - 2 Pashto - 1 Kurdish - 1 Russian - 1
Caleb Perez
Ukrainian is not a Russian dialect, but you can think of it as a transitional language between Russian and Slovak or Polish. Thing is, I speak Slovak natively and some Russian as a foreign language, and I understand 90 percent of Ukrainian using my knowledge of BOTH languages. Usually, words that are nothing like Russian are similiar to our Slovak words and words that are nothing like Slovak are like Russian words. It is kinda like Catalan connecting Spanish and Occitan. Ukrainian is a separate language, but it is the most understandable East Slavic language for West Slavs.
Camden Peterson
I know that it's a seperate language, I was just told by an old teacher of Ukrainian heritage that during Soviet days, because of the similarities, some Russians living in or near Ukraine just considered it a dialect of Russian.
Nolan Harris
>78 million but there are about 100 million, also in Austria + Switzerland + Italy and microstates
Adam Barnes
German - 5 English - 4 French - 3 Russian - 1
Jacob Johnson
Russian- 4 English- 1
Austin Bell
English - 5 - Native Spanish- 3 - Live in Spain Italian - 1 - Currently studying