See this is where it gets hard to establish why this is, is it because in media in terms of America, Canada, Britain and Australia other countries have learned English to accommodate with this large media market and therefore causing the British population to not worry too much about learning second languages or is it just 'cause were a bunch of lazy ****s who think we're better than the rest of Europe...

very limited french.

I can speak almost all former Yugoslav languages except for Slovenian and Macedonian, but I primarily speak Serbian. I can also speak English, Arabic, a bit of Russian and Korean, and a very little French...

Actually I was thinking more about the business/academic standards across the globe. Any multinational corporation will do business in English. Over here, even Turkish companies give their employees higher salaries if they are able to speak English. A lot of Turkish universities give classes in English (not English classes, I mean the language actually spoken in the university is English). Nearly every university student in Korea or Japan will take English as either a requirement of their degree, or just because they view it to be necessary.

It's not just hollywood movies and the media that's driving this. It's not that "we" think we're better than the rest of the world, it's that the rest of the world has long since decided that English is the global language and that in the grand scheme of thing they'll get left behind if they don't learn the language. If you go back to the colonial era, England not only spread their kingdom all over the world but they established a VERY long history of the English language being imposed on foreign cultures. For the most part, that hasn't really changed much.

English is my main language.

I'm Chinese, so I speak Mandarin though very badly (I'm planning to learn it properly once I graduate, go to one of those language schools)

Text book french. I'm doing it for IB :D

Fluent in English.

Currently in second year of Spanish in high school.

English obviously.

My Irish is ok, and i learned French in school but i've forgotten most of it :D haha

I'd love to learn Chinese though, it's a more useful language than French or German.

Other than English, I speak Italian rather fluently. My dad's side of the family are Italian and I also learnt it from years 7 - 12 at high school. I'm kinda losing it now though, since I don't use it, if you know what I mean. But people tell me if I went to Italy or if I was forced to use it, it would come straight back... like riding a bike?

Fluent English and Swedish.
Sort of intermediate Spanish and Icelandic.
Basic German.

Icelandic is a different case though because while I can read and speak it, I can't really write it since I picked it up by listening to other people. I lived in Iceland back in 2007 but never took any classes so I haven't learned grammar or spelling properly.

And of course, being Swedish makes it really easy to understand Norwegian and Danish. And since I know the Scandinavian languages, English and a little German I can also understand (written) Dutch fairly easily.

Try watching italian movies.

Fluent Russian and English.

Ha ha, sve jugoslovenske jezike osim slovenackog i makedonskog, kazes? To je bas puno istih jezika :laughing:

Anyway, besides Serbian, I speak English and I know a bit of French.

Fluent English, good Irish, mediocre French and Japanese.

Spanish French English and Icelandic.

learning Hungarian. it's awful.

it's an agglutinative language which means words get built from pieces into massive monstrosities. prepositions become prefixes and suffixes. everything gets different endings depending on what part of the sentence it is (nouns alone have 18 cases, each with a different conjugation.)

but wost of all, most verbs can be either definite or indefinite depending on whether the action is transitive or intransitive, and whether the object is direct or indirect. naturally, each case takes a different conjugation. in the sentences "i bought cheese" and "i bought this cheese", the verb 'bought' takes different conjugations!

oh, and did i mention that Hungarian has 14 vowels!? (a, á, e, é, i, í, o, ó, ö, ő, u, ú, ü, ű)

lol why? I think Hungarian is fun :D Of course, I don't understand a word of it but it sounds interesting :D

it's awful because it's a very difficult language to learn, and i don't particularly want to learn it. but i married a Hungarian and moved to Hungary, so that's the way of the world :)

This is my nightmare scenario.

How many people worldwide speak hungarian?

i speak english.... and if i were stranded in mexico i know just enough spanish to stay alive :p:

I just read up on Hungary in general, and I have to say that this portion of World history is the most interesting to me. While speaking it isn't my thing, living there must be cooler than hell. Thats Cradle of Civilization territory.

Wikipedia:

marrying a hungarian and moving there is your nightmare scenario? that's an oddly specific nightmare.

What I find fascinating is that Hungarian (along with Finnish) is so different from anything else spoken in Europe they had to invent a whole language group of their own...:laughing:

Plus, it sounds hilarious.

haven't heard it, but I believe the Basque language is also in its own language group, but its been awhile since I read that so I may be way off.

Jib - Moving to a place where I can't speak the language. Though my nightmares tend to be specific as hell.

edit: noise, where are you from originally? And how did you meet your significant other?

English and Spanish, I'm sad that the population of spanish-speaking people where I live isn't higher, just having that immersion would be great, but *sigh*, not that many in the midwest of the US. The only option to speak better, is to travel abroad and learn, or stay in class at college and get the most out of those four years.

If I could, I'd learn Japanese first, then try out Zulu, that sounds like a challenge

basque is an isolate (no family), hungarian is part of a larger family (uralic > finno-ugric > ugric > hungarian)

i'm from the US (Colorado). met her there just before moving to London for grad school. then moved to Budapest after i got my degree.

Hungarian has two living relatives - Finnish and Estonian. the three are mutually unintelligible. i've been to Estonia a few times, and can't understand a word of what they say!

does the language really sound that funny? i hear words rather than just noises so it's hard to judge.

Sounds like Portuguese to me.

It sounds like gibberish! :laughing:

I fluently speak English and Spanish and I know some basic Dutch and French.

Right, thats what I said.

Fluent in French and English!
here, if you're Franco-Anglo bilingual, you can land jobs like crazy.

Right now I'm learning japanese. I can say a few absurdist sentences but so far i know like... no kanji.

A lot... 4 actually... English, French, Arabic, and Spanish are fluent... I can't read or write in Arabic though... I can get by in Italian, and Swahili...

I dream in French and Spanish a lot... I dunno why either...

I'm fluent in typonese

I'm fluent in Slovene and English I can also speak Serbian, Croatian, French and understand a little Spanish and Italian

Slovene and Serbian are fairly similar, aren't they? I know Serbian and Croatian are almost identical.

It's very easy, I seriously recommend it. It's really no different from any other alphabet...one symbol per sound, super straightforward.

English and Spanish.

They're from the same group of languages. I can understand lots of Slovene, but if I respond in Serbian they don't get it right away, or they think I said something else because the pronounciations are quite different, and pronounciation is quite key in Balkan languages.

I can speak Serbian, English, and a lot of French. Mostly I speak English now, except with my Serbian friends and family, just because I live in Canada now.

Spanish & English.