Which languages do you speak?

[Root]

I think we're a pretty multilingual bunch on this board, but I'd be interested to actually find out how many languages we each speak, what they are, how well they are spoken, and why/how they were learnt.

I'll start off. I speak two, I am learning one more, and I have learnt two others in the past but forgotten them almost entirely.

Spoken:
English, natively, of course;
Finnish, fluently, because my mother was Finnish. I was raised bilingually and I moved to Finland a couple of years ago.

Learning:
Swedish, just beginning, because it's an official language of Finland and it's compulsory to learn it at all levels of education.

Lapsed:
Italian, once moderately, because I took it for GCSE and got a "B";
French, always appallingly, because I had to learn it for many years at school but never understood the rules of it at all.

Now you

[Steeevooo]

I speak English, Español and Essex.

[snudge27]

Spoken
English (Native speaker)

German (Fluent. I've been learning German since my first year of high school in 1999 and carried it on to A-Level as well as doing a module at university in 2008/9. Since then I've lived in Berlin for a year).

French (Tourist standard. Learned it for five years at high school, studying it to GCSE level. I still speak it when I go to France and it comes back fairly easily.)

Spanish (Tourist standard. Learned it for two years at high school/sixth form and added to my knowledge before a holiday to a Spanish-speaking country.)

Lapsed
Japanese (Took an evening class at sixth form back in 2004/5).

Russian (Same as Japanese)

[al]

Spoken
English
French - Tourist Standard, studied to GCSE at school

Lapsed
German - compulsory for 1 year at school, but I found it bad enough dealing with the masculine and feminine words in French, without adding in neuter.
British Sign Language - Studied at night school as a way of getting out of the house.

[Starkey7]

Fluent English
Very good written and good informal conversational Polish, ropey business Polish
German is okay except that my mind just defaults to Polish
Franglais

[Garion]

Fluent:
English

Decent amount:
Welsh

Basic:
French

Nearly nothing:
German, Spanish

[tubeguru]

Fluent:

English
Bollocks

GCSE/A-level/passable if I went there on my own:

French

Written only:

Latin

[greatkingrat]

Bonjour

Je m'appelle Peter. Je suis 28 ans.

Er, that's about it!

[tubeguru]

Bonjour

Je m'appelle Peter. Je suis 28 ans.

Er, that's about it!

J'ai 28 ans ...

[tubeguru]

Oui, mais je faisais remarquer son erreur ecolier.

Ou quelque chose ...

[RichieG]

Je ne parle Français pas. Tu parle Anglais?

[tubeguru]

Je ne parle Français pas. Tu parle Anglais?

Je ne parle pas Francais ...

It must be my pedantry night.

[RichieG]

Good point well made.

If I thought of it sooner though, I could've said that it was deliberately done to prove my point, but actually it was just a slip up this evening...

Plus the fact that I've never had to say it in my life (although I was tempted to say it in my GCSE French speaking exam...)

[tubeguru]

With the "I do not" thing, you usually have "je ne", followed by a verb, present tense (parle), the negative (pas), and then the noun (Francais).

It's the same as us saying "I speak French not" instead of "I do not speak French".

[Root]

"I speak French not" reminds me of the Borat film.