A very tiny bit of French, I can understand more than I can speak if they talk slowly, my French education was kind of shitty and it’s been well over a decade since high school since I’ve really used it so
I’ve been learning Esperanto on Duolingo, it’s been going pretty well, I’m just about at the point where I can confidently read a book without having too look up too many words. I’m far from fluent, but I getting there.
I get that you’re probably joking, but note that calling C++ etc. “languages” is at most synecdoche. A really common one, but still a figure of speech.
(Language has multiple functions; referential, directive, expressive, phatic, metalinguistic, poetic, metalinguistic etc. Those instruction sets used when programming are at best directive speech only, as they’re basically issuing commands to something.)
I got that you were probably joking. However, I’ve seen so many times people equating the human systems of communication with the computer instruction sets that… well, sorry for the knee-jerk reaction.
(Last time that I saw someone genuinely thinking that C++, Fortran, Python etc. were the same deal as Mandarin, English, Spanish etc., the muppet in question brought up code comments for an “ackshyually lol lmao”. Yup.)
This was in r/linguistics, by the way. And the moderators there were doing jack shit to inform the users. Even if one of them works with NLP, so you’d expect the person to be somewhat well versed in both Linguistics and basic programming.
The worst part? It wasn’t even the only time that I saw this conflation. I think that people get caught in the words, and miss that they’re referring to different concepts.
Fluent at talking and reading, but can’t write (horrible at spelling): Telugu (in two very different dialects)
Illiterate, but can understand everything spoken: Kannada
Can hold tourist level conversations and can read: German and Hindi
What is a tourist level conversation? Talk slowly, pronounce stuff weird, ask ppl to repeat some things if they go too fast or have an accent that’s different than the one I learned.
I’ve noticed that I only know languages in the indo-European and Dravidian families. Deliberating between whether to improve my Kannada or to learn a new east or south east Asian language next to increase my language family count.
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