English and French fluently. English is my mother tongue. French I learned in an immersion program in primary school. I didn’t study french at all in highschool or postsecondary, and always hated it during primary because my parents put me in immersion to “challenge” me. I started working for the Canadian federal government after uni, and they have pretty robust training programs for getting to full french fluency from any starting skill level. Plus, there’s a bit of a glass ceiling for monolingual public servants in the federal government.
Recently started dating a Chinese girl and so I’m trying to teach myself a bit of Chinese. It’s not as hard as I expected it to be, but it is very hard. In many ways it’s the opposite experience of learning French relative to English. Learning French, the vocabulary is pretty easy and the grammar is very hard. Learning Chinese, the grammar is dead easy but the vocabulary is really hard.
English is my native language. I have a smattering of Malay from early childhood (my mother’s first language), and have limited proficiency in ASL, German, Spanish, Italian, Irish, French, and Finnish (my proudest language moment was purchasing an apple from an old farmer in Helsinki who spoke no English). I also know a tiny amount of Japanese.
I’m contemplating whether to work on my existing proficiency or add a con-lang to the mix like Esperanto or Belter Creole.
Nothing interesting really, I might get the opportunity to move to Finland for a year, so I’ve practiced Finnish through Duolingo if that becomes a reality :)
Are all those Germans really different enough to count separately?
Like, I wouldn’t know how to distinguish my fluency in American English from British English. And that’s not even getting to Canadian, Australian, Irish… the differences are far more cultural than linguistic.
I’m fluent in Spanish and English, speak like a first grader in Japanese, and read Italian and Portuguese a little. I can even read Greek and Russian a little but that’s more because I used their letters all the time in engineering and math stuff.
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