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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

I speak English, Español and Essex.

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)

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.

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

Fluent:
English

Decent amount:
Welsh

Basic:
French

Nearly nothing:
German, Spanish

Fluent:

English
Bollocks

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

French

Written only:

Latin

Bonjour

Je m'appelle Peter. Je suis 28 ans.

Er, that's about it!

greatkingrat wrote:Bonjour

Je m'appelle Peter. Je suis 28 ans.

Er, that's about it!

J'ai 28 ans ...

Oui, mais je faisais remarquer son erreur ecolier.

Ou quelque chose ...

Je ne parle Français pas. Tu parle Anglais?

RichieG wrote:Je ne parle Français pas. Tu parle Anglais?

Je ne parle pas Francais ...

It must be my pedantry night.

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...)

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".

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