Can you speak Chinese and what other languages do you speak?

b787

Captain
I can read Japanese kanji (Chinese ideograms) so i can read Chinese air force, but Chinese and Japanese use differeny ideograms so sometimes i do not understand besides that i can read

Spanish, Portuguese English well, a little of Russian and some Japanese
 

SteelBird

Colonel
It's great that you can speak so many languages. Languages used to be a tool for me to earn a living. My languages knowledge is limited to Asian languages except English. They are Khmer, Vietnamese, Chinese and English. Among those, I speak three dialects of Chinese. They are Mandarin, Cantonese and Taechiev. The funny thing is that no matter what language I speak, people say I speak like a foreigner.
 

subotai1

Junior Member
Registered Member
I can read Chinese and understand spoken Mandarin at about 90%. My spoken Mandarin ability is at about 50%. Vietnamese is at about 40%. Can read and write German with decent fluency. And can read the Latin based languages at about 50%.

My undergrad and graduate work was Linguistics and AI/ML.
 

PiSigma

"the engineer"
English and mandarin Chinese. Learned German, Russian and Japanese when young from grandparents but after 20+ years of not using it, don't remember anything.

My wife speaks Portuguese, so she can wing Spanish and Italian pretty easily. And she still remembers her German pretty well.

Neither of us remember French from our school days. Canadian education for French in English provinces are terrible. Also just don't need it, so 20+ of not using it means I remember maybe 10 words.

Between the two of us, we got at least English, Chinese, Portuguese, spanish covered with some Italian and German.

I think some people are just better with languages. My grandfather speaks Chinese, English, German, Russian, Japanese and Latin fluently. Even not using certain languages like Japanese for 40+ years, he remembered everything on a vacation trip. Same with English, whenever he is in canada, he remembers his English. He spend 1/3 of his year in Germany before, so his German is probably best. He said he doesn't remember much russian, but I don't believe him since he also "doesn't remeber" Japanese.

Whereas for me, not using it for a few years means I forget everything. Maybe have to do with fluency, I was never fluent and only learned for a short while. Whereas he was fluent.
 

solarz

Brigadier
I can speak and write English, French, and Chinese (mandarin). I can understand Shanghainese perfectly fine, but cannot speak it very well.

Even though my mother tongue is Chinese, I feel that I have a better mastery of English, having grown up in Canada. My French used to be good, back when I was attending french schools, but I haven't used it in 20 years.
 
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