Languages

English, some German, almost fluent in Spanish, and learning  Japanese. 
 

Born and raised in the USA but still feel like English is my second language on occasion. lol

two years of Spanish and can barely communicate anything beyond Hola and Adios. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

None of you will be surprised to hear that I consider myself extremely well-spoken in English. 

I can also speak a limited amount of Spanish, German when I'm drunk (not kidding,) and with a little refresh, I can say very rudimentary things in Italian (knowing Spanish helps with that quite a bit). 

Latvian, english, russian and some lithuanian.

One on a good day .

I can oreder beer in a few languages.

First thing I learn when entering a new country, but quickily forget what I learned the minute we leave the current country.

I can speak German at a conversational level, I think C1 was the official level I got to if my memory serves correctly. However it has definitely deteriorated in the last few years since I left.

I learnt Indonesian at highschool for 3 years and never progressed beyond fucking useless 😂 

Georgian (ქართული) Still learning. Small country with it's own language.  Nothing like Turkish or Russian.  This is the alphabet.

KidKawi,

May I ask what the motivation for learning Georgian is? I assume family heritage or a partner?

good luck man, learning languages is so difficult, even when they have common foundations and alphabet to English. So I don’t envy the task.

Really cool though. The bigger the task, the bigger the reward/satisfaction.

I’m fluent in English and sarcasm. 

Holy crap, if that fifth symbol is an “e” that would suck to write out repeatedly. Looks more like art than an alphabet but then again so does Japanese to me. Speaking of Japanese, I’ve heard that’s the most difficult language to learn?

I do recall now that I’m fluent in Pig Latin. Ixnay on the hombre. Uckfay ouyay.😂

Fluent in redneck Texican.

Get by in English. 

Some Spanish, and Canadian. 

My wife is Georgian.  I'm 47 so its pretty difficult trying to remember the words, plus different areas use different words.  Its a PITA, lol.

I have kids so I'm having to learn mumble. Also, if you master that you can understand

when people speak with a potato in their mouth, very similar pronunciation and dialect.

So bonus points for that.

TM

Good catch! ha  Dont know what that 5th symbol is, its missing a couple letters.  An 'E' is a backwards C. Better diagram below.  Each letter is a specific sound not multiple sounds like English.  So if you learn the sounds you can read but might not know what you're saying.  The alphabet has more characters and doesnt follow the English alphabet.

"aah, buh, guh, duh, ay, vuh, zuh...."

So true. Mumble speak is rampant amongst teenagers. Has to be similar to cavemen times. 
 

Japanese is crazy because of all the statuses inherent in their culture. 

There are basically three tenses to be aware of, and each one has its own syntax. They change based on your situation. 
I could call you, him, her, or them by three different pronouns each, depending on whether the people involved are familiar, semi-formal, or formal. In addition, people "above" or "below" me in rank would be assigned different levels of formality. As I understand it, all nouns are subject to these rules, not just people.

For instance, my family is familiar to me, and I would speak to my wife and kids in the familiar. However, my children might address me in the semi-formal way. They would address a friend of mine who comes over in the strictest formal way, probably. 
I would address my boss in the most formal way. He might reciprocate and do the same, or address me semi-formally. However, I might talk to my coworkers about him in the semi-formal way myself. Oh, and if he and I were having beers after work, it would be right back to familiar, unless others from work were also there - that calls for semi-formal in most cases. I think...

Japanese is frighteningly difficult and very subjective.

One other thing about Japanese is that they don't seem to use the word "the," even in their own language. The concept is foreign to them. They simply say, "Motorcycle is broken," or "I am going to store." 

When I first started at one of the OEMs, I realized that the language barrier was sometimes going to be an issue. All the Japanese executives speak English, but some are better than others. To help compensate, the Americans bend their syntax to the Japanese way, in order to eliminate some words which might simply confuse the listener. The result is that we Americans would often talk to the Japanese in a manner that sounded like Jerry Lewis making fun of them! (I was appalled at first, until I realized what was going on!  I thought, "Holy crap! You can't say that!!!") You'd seriously get cancelled if you spoke to someone on a college campus like that. 

There's no "the" in Georgian either, or the F anf TH sound. (Its funny watching them say father).

Also have different proper and casual words.

It's kinda humorous to listen to the lady at my favorite Chinese take out place try to sort out "Karl".

Rs & Ls are evidently an issue. 

Japanese is a relatively simple language to speak and understand.   The rules of pronunciation are simple with very few exceptions.  Unlike English which is 95% exceptions to the supposed rules.

Now, reading and writing Japanese is another story.  There are 4 alphabets used.  Romaji, Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji.  Romaji is simply Japanese transliterated with our Roman alphabet (think Yamaha, Kawasaki, etc).  Hiragana and Katakana are both phonetic alphabets with 48 characters each, so they are easily learnable.   Kanji is a whole different beast.  It is a logographic alphabet (evolved from Chinese characters).  Since it is not phonetic, there is no rhyme or reason to learning the characters.  It's essentially one gigantic memorization drill. Kanji number in the the thousands.  It is a massive chore for anyone who did not grow up a native speaker and begin learning Kanji as a child.

You lost me at four alphabets are used. Lol

you obviously know some Japanese. How in the heck did you learn and retain it?

Sadly due to the war, my grandparents made my mom stop speaking German. 

Clearly they were worried about being attacked by non-Germans even though they had been here for a couple of generations. 

The only time I heard German at Grandma's was when I was fucking up, or when Papa fucked up.

Schieze? Simple.

Or, "Schuhe im Haus", or nicht I'm diese haus".

Ever hear this one, Karl?

Verdammte Schieze!

Yeah, that was a regular in Papa's shop.

Generally directed towards whatever I was "fucking up".

😂😂

I can translate ebonics & jive !  

Did you hear about the Ebonics transvestite?

Susan B. Anthony

HA!