What languages do you know?

When you say something has a cell in Chinese, it means talent. And I am stating that I have no talent in Chinese. I have probably been taught wrong tho hehe since it aint my native language.

English (tea and crumpets)

Indonesian (even if it is my native language i’m not very good at it. I can make sentences and understand people though.)

French (I know nouns and certain phrases but am unable to make full sentences without a translator)

Japan (uh, Omae wa Mou Shindeiru? idk man)

Arabic (أنا فقط أمزح معك. لا أستطيع التحدث باللغة العربية لإنقاذ حياتي)

I speak English quite well, and Igbo not as well.

On Pidgin English (TL:DR) I speak Nigerian Pidgin and it counts as a language, don't fucking read this it's more than 300 letters long.

There are some out there who count Nigerian Pidgin as a language of its own (for numerous reasons), and going by their description, that would be my native tongue. I don’t speak it as much as I do English, but especially when speaking to people in person, it tends to dominate my speech whenever I try speaking English.

I would agree with the description because it is so distant from Common English (things like American English and British English) grammatically that it might as well be.

For instance, the word “be” in Common English is represented by three different words: “dey”, “na”, and “bi”. No person marking, either (so you say “my name bi Orchard”, for instance, but even this depends on context).

dey

The first one is used adjectivally and for locations. One wound not say “it is small” but “it dey tiny”, and one would not say “I am at school” but “i dey for school”.

na

The second is really weird since no equivalent really exists in English. It’s used to mark the focus of a sentence; either some contrasting information or something which you want to place emphasis on. If I were to say “my name na Orchard”, I would be placing emphasis on “Orchard”. Another example is “na only u o”, which literally means “it is only you”, but would be used when someone does something that’s odd or out of place.

bi

The third is used when you are literally saying X is Y. Not that X is a type of Y, or that X has qualities of Y, but that X is literally Y. This is why it doesn’t permit adjectives or locations. You would say “my name bi Orchard” and not “my name dey Orchard” because Orchard is literally what your name is.

There are other grammatical quirks like:

  1. Using the verb “pass” for the comparative and superlative in adjectives,

  2. Relying on reduplication for multiple things (like “lie lie” to refer to someone who lies frequently, “small small” to refer to something that is really small or the act of doing something in small steps or gradually,

  3. Using “them” in a construction similar to Japanese’s “-tachi” to refer to a group of people in which the person is included (e.g. Orchard them (self), they too dey talk eh) → Orchard (and his people) talk too much (emphatic)),

  4. a fuck ton of particles used to express information on the emotion of the user, most of which don’t have rigid equivalents in English (like “chai”, “sef”, “eh”, “eeh”, “eewo”, “chey”, “oo”, “oo” (equivalent to “uh oh” in tone but not quite in meaning"),

  5. Oh yeah, and its pronunciation in comparison to British and American English is really different. One example of this is the complete inexistence of the sound “th”, and the fact that the sounds “p”, “t”, and “k” are for the most part pronounced without aspiration. So you end up in a situation where “they”, “day”, and “dey” sound exactly the same.

  6. There are way less vowels in Nigerian Pidgin than in most western English dialects, leading to even more homophones.

  7. The sound “r” used immediately before a consonant or at the end of a word like in “car” or “person” just gets fucking removed, leading to even MORE homophones. Not even like the vowel becomes longer or something, the consonant just dips.

  8. Tone weirdness. Like how “person” (pronounced pesin) will act tonally in the same way as in English except in some cases, where the second syllable now takes a higher tone than the first (as far as I’m concerned this is just sporadic, I use them without much pattern to it)

  9. Almost forgot something really important. Most prepositions in English are replaced with one: “for”. It can mean to, for, on, at, about, etc. This grammatical feature is probably from Igbo which ALSO only has one, but the only Nigerian languages I know anything even remotely substantial about are Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, and Fulani.

It’s a spectrum though, so the farther removed from English your Pidgin English is grammatically, the more “correct” it is. Correct in this case refers not necessarily to being right or wrong, but to being experienced or inexperienced.

Not an exhaustive list.

Same.

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ik what it means, but i haven’t really seen it used for things like languages lol

French mfs be like oui oui… how bout you suck on my wi wi instead… :weary:

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mb i’m sorry for anyone who had to read that, i was hacked.

. . .

Italian and English

I’m trying to learn French and since I studied some of it during middle school, I can ‘try’ to understand some sentences; sometimes I even get some of them right!

don’t imagine it’d be too difficult

portuguese/english

French is my first language so using it isn’t a problem
English is my second language, I don’t really have any problem with writing but I never use it verbally so my pronounciation is very bad

I don’t really know anything about other languages, but I can at least try to understand the general meaning of written sentences in Spanish and stuff like that because many words are similarly written (even if they don’t always mean the same thing)

svedish

din mamma äter gräs från min trädgård

le peepee

im pretty sure people aren’t supposed to shove wii remotes in their mouths

Что, черт возьми, это английский, ты под кайфом?

A handful of German and Spanish, also knows British/Scottish dialect and slang if you count that.

I can also sing foreign songs from random countries such as La Marseillaise and Im Hashem Lo Yivneh Bayis

Im Chinese by heritage but Im shit at Mandarin

English

I took spanish in high school but I forgot most of what I learned in there. I can probably say a sentence to you in spanish but I can’t hold a conversation in spanish.

i used to know a shit ton of vietnamese from my parents at an early age but learning english degraded my vietnamese knowledge over time until i’m at the very basics like “xin chao” and “sao com may” idk i can’t spell them either

besides that, i only know a bit of french and spanish, and perhaps i might learn japanese in the future

Λοιπόν, η μητρική μου γλώσσα είναι τα Ελληνικά… Μάντεψε γιατί. (Greek.)
I can of course speak English, as most, if not all people here do.
Pero, tambien puedo hablar Espanol, aunque no sé como hablar con mucha fluidez. (Spanish.)
Et, je sais un peu de Francais aussi. (French.)
I am probably going to learn either Chinese, Norwegian or Korean in the future though, because of the profession I am planning/hoping to have.

However, if I were to rank them in order of how fluent I am/ what proficiency I have in these languages… Well, it’s already there.

a very marginal amount of spanish