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Poll: How many (natural) languages are you fluent in?

24 points by solipsist ↗ HN
This is strictly referring to natural languages, not programming languages.

On a side note, I wonder if we have anyone like Emil Krebs here on HN: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Krebs

46 comments

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gsivil
Being a foreigner in US for some quite sometime I tend to feel that I am not fluent in any language at the moment. Typically I could say that I have "mastered" 2 languages! My definition for being a master of a language can easily be different than yours.
pan69
I know what you're saying. There is a big difference between speaking a foreign language and expressing yourself in a foreign language. E.g. finding your way around town asking for directions and simple conversations is very different then telling about that funny thing that happened to you the other day.
anto1ne
To me the former is not being fluent, it's just knowing basics, the later is being fluent. But then there's being bilingual which is a completely different level, much more difficult to reach than being fluent IMO.
abraham
Including programming languages?
mahmud
NO.

Why do people conflate the two?

bendmorris
Because we use the same word to describe both.
mahmud
If you want to take this to its logical conclusion, then language is nothing but a fixed set of "alphabet", and a set of rules that generate infinite strings from this alphabet in some meaningful combination.

Alright, I will start: I am fluent in the language of traffic signs.

bendmorris
The confusion isn't coming from conceptual similarity, though. It's coming from the use of the word "language" which has multiple, distinct connotations. Traffic signs are never referred to as "language." Both spoken and programming languages are.
[deleted]
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barrkel
I'll bet that if you talk to designers and road layout experts, they'll freely talk about the "language of traffic signs". I'd also hazard a guess that people who are not programmers or familiar with how it all works would not refer to what we work with as a language, but as "code", "mathematics", "bits and bytes" etc.
mahmud
The numerical-analysis community refers to software as "codes" :-)

I have recently seen a SIAM book that even had it in the title.

gruseom
Oops, misclick downvote. I agree with you. It's an unfortunate human cognitive weakness to assume that things with the same label are the same.
mahmud
You don't know how ironic that comment is.

I'm all jumpy with glee reading it.

"misclick downvote" ..

Do you realize the up and down buttons are IDENTICAL in "syntax" but different in "semantics"? Isometry :-)

abraham
On a programming language centret website you have to be specific in terms and descriptions.
dheerosaur
Fluency generally includes speech fluency. I haven't met a person who speaks in code. With all the abstraction, looping going around, it is difficult to speak in one of the programming languages.
baddox
I had to follow the non-link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Krebs to be able to tell if you meant programming languages or natural languages. It's the latter.
solipsist
Should have known there would be confusion on a site where so many of us are programmers. Thanks for pointing this out; I've now added clarification to the question.
nmw2
Does this include artificial languages?
Sephr
I'd assume so, provided that it's not extremely basic.
pan69
Apparently there are people who are fluent in Klingon. Not sure where I read it the other day, but there was this couple who raised one of their children to speak fluent Klingon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon

Qapla!

jarek
There are native Esperanto speakers. As in they learned it from their parents as children. It still blows my mind that an idea can be this powerful.
tomrod
Cebuano Boholanon Winary English
boyter
I voted for 1 although I have what I would call a "supermarket" level of Chinese (Mandarin). I can converse for about 20 minutes assuming I have never met the person before before running out of things to say :)
jarek
20 minutes straight is damn impressive. I would have classified that as fluent. (Though I guess it depends on knowledge of business/academic/etc language.)
aphyr
I'm only fluent in English, but at some point or another I've held basic conversations in four other languages (Norwegian, Spanish, Japanese, and American Sign Language).

I think if I had the occasion to actually use these languages I would have progressed to fluency. As it stands each one just overlays the previous ones. Attempting to speak a Spanish sentence results in something like:

[spanish subject] [spanish verb] [spanish object] [japanese version of the same verb, fully inflected]

Happily, ASL (my current language of study) doesn't conflict with anything else. :)

kingkilr
English and Hebrew, highschool German never stuck.
ptn
Spanish is my mother language, I'm fluent in English, did 1.5 years of Chinese, and I'm planning to start with German this year.
sayhello
Does that include dialects? For instance I speak French and English on a bilingual level, but also a type of French creole.

It would help to know the motivation for the poll for my vote to be meaningful e.g. if you're trying to correlate language proficiency with intelligence/business acumen for instance or creativity/flexibility based on different ways of thinking as per the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity)

mahmud
There are entire countries where everyone speaks >= 3 languages. This poll would be more meaningful if we banned the Swiss. Also, most educated people from Indian subcontinent speak three language; their local tongue, the nation's lingua franca, and English.

Rule of thumb is: sizable minority language + official/ruling language + one international language:

Cantonese / Mandarin / English

Swedish / Finish / English

Tamazighi / Arabic / French

Basque / Castilian / English

I speak 3 and read another 3. My father is fluent in 5 and can bullshit in Russian. My maternal grandmother speaks 7; but she can't read or write :-)

cloudhead
Most Swiss don't speak more than one or two languages.
sushumna
well said and very true "Also, most educated people from Indian subcontinent speak three language". I speak TELUGU,ENGLISH,HINDI (S/R/W), TAMIL(only S :)
copper
> I speak 3 and read another 3

Doesn't that mean you can speak 6?

The Indian subcontinent usually gets complicated, as there are usually a /lot/ of local dialects that people speak, and some of them may arguably deserve to be separate languages - at least, the speakers usually think so :)

mahmud
Doesn't that mean you can speak 6?

No. It's possible to read formal prose in a language without speaking it.

Polite/learned communication, specially in writing, is often contrived and limited, often resembling an archaic form of the language. It's very possible to read formal text in a language, and glean meaning from it based on your expertise in the language family. Though you would be helpless in the street.

dheerosaur
I am fluent in Telugu(from Southern India), English and Hindi in that order. I want to learn Japanese and one of Deutsch and Italiano.
nandemo
I suppose Emil Krebs wasn't really proficient in 60+ languages, but had enough command of basic grammar and vocabulary to maintain a certain level of conversation in each of them.

Something like the Fluent in 3 Months guy, who has learned 7 foreign languages as an adult:

http://www.fluentin3months.com/

gruseom
It's not impossible, because with each language you learn it gets easier to learn related languages.

The joke about the linguist Roman Jakobson was that he spoke 30 languages, each with a foreign accent.

kloncks
Fluent in: Arabic, English, French

Want to learn: Hebrew, German, Russian, Hindi (in that order)

a-priori
I know a guy who, if I remember this correctly, is half Lebanese, half Italian, was raised in Germany and now lives in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. From that he speaks French, Arabic, Italian, German and English.

Another fellow I also met in Switzerland says he speaks six languages. He speaks English, French, Serbian, Russian and Romanian that I know of. I don't know what the other one was. His advice? Date women from different countries and learn their language.

Of course, being an anglophone Canadian who only knows a paltry amount of French despite studying it in school for nine years, people like this are just amazing.

mdemare
Define fluent, and define language.

I can read novels in Dutch, English, German, French, Spanish, Swedish, and Italian, but only hold a meaningful conversation in the first two, so I chose 2 languages in the poll.

I can read without much problems: Flemish, Afrikaans, Frisian, Norwegian (nynorsk and bokmål), Danish, Catalan, Portuguese, (and, I discovered by accident, Interlingua, an artificial language - truly a well designed language!), purely because these languages are so similar to the ones I already know.

If you speak Dutch, you also speak accented Flemish and broken Afrikaans. If you speak Danish, you can also understand Swedish and Norwegian.

But sadly, if you speak English, there are no languages that you get for free.

johanbev
> If you speak Dutch, you also speak accented Flemish and broken Afrikaans. If you speak Danish, you can also understand Swedish and Norwegian.

It is true that these languages are really close. But I woudn't say that danes in general understand spoken Norwegian or Swedish (though Norwegians usually do understand the others better). If you speak Danish as a foreign language, I'd be really impressed if you could have anything resembling a natural conversation with a norwegian or a swede.

clueless123
Two fluently (Spanish & English) Two broken (Mandarin & Brazilian Portuguese)

Question: What are you called if you speak 3 languages? A: Trilingual Two ? A: Bilingual One ? A: American ! :)

Sorry.. could not help my self..

jensnockert
Are the requirements for 'fluent' going down?

I do not think I am fluent in english, sure, I can keep a professional, academic or personal conversation in english for any length of time without any real problem. On the other hand, if I meet a native speaker, I notice how much worse than them I am at finding words and how my language does not flow as it does for a native speaker.

(I know english and swedish, knew french and studied spanish and japanese. Would love to study chinese at some point too, I find their writing system very interesting.)