How Many Languages Can You Speak?

[eclipse]

3 hours ago, Tenma said:

Yeah, contrary to most Asian-Americans, my parents actually wanted me to speak Tagalog as a child, but I actually refused to and just wanted to speak English. Now that I'm older, I realize that was a huge mistake but what can you do as a child? LOL. I'm just glad I was able to learn one part of it, and that I'm not completely separated from the language, you know? Haha

It's a generational thing, I think.  In my case, my mom didn't mind me learning Japanese, but my ancestors were the ones that immigrated.  Needless to say, mom was born and raised with English.

[Hello72207]

I am American and live in Florida. I speak a decent amount of Spanish, but not enough to consider myself fluent.

[Flying Shogi]

14 hours ago, Tenma said:

Yeah, contrary to most Asian-Americans, my parents actually wanted me to speak Tagalog as a child

While I have heard accounts of Asian American not being taught their parents' mother tongue because it'd "conflict" with their ability to learn English(in the context of US), I still find it to be a dumb reason. Second generation Asian American kids are most likely to use English as their primary language anyway but I suspect that most immigrant parents that moved to the US in their middle ages like my parents who did not and still do not speak English didn't think about it that way.

My parents never pushed me to continue learning Chinese but we speak a regional dialect at home so I guess the fear of me losing touch didn't really cross their minds. I did take Chinese in college for practice but I was never too far removed from the language anyway despite only using it home so maybe I should have taken Spanish instead.  

Edited November 19, 2020 by Flying Shogi

[Jotari]

Babies are bloody geniuses. They master an entire language without any context to work off of in about three years. And learning na second one simultaneously has never shown to provide any more difficultly. If the language is there and available a baby absolutely should be raised bilingual. Doesn't even matter what the languages are, just having two languages will help in learning more.

[ping]

German, English and, in theory, French. In practice, I didn't maintain my French at all after I dropped it after 5 years at school and apart from pronunciation, there's not a lot left of it. I could probably read aloud a text fairly convincingly, but without any clue what it is about. I also started an Italian course at school, but couldn't stand either teacher nor (most of) the class, so I dropped it after a few weeks. I remember enough of the pronunciation rules to not say Bres-kee-ah instead of Brescia, or to know why there's a "h" in "Spaghetti", at the very least.

I can also understand the local dialect from where my mum comes from with little problems, but not speak it beyond a handful of phrases and figures of speech.

[Benice]

I can speak english quite well, and have been learning french for ten years now. I can hold a sort of basic conversation, read and sort of write, but I'm not what I'd call fluent in it. Yet. I hope to learn German, Catalan and Spanish later on!

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

On 11/15/2020 at 11:54 PM, Jotari said:

Katakana seems much more manageable than hiragana (while Kanji is so hard even Japanese people can't do it!), which makes sense as it's something of a constructed language. And taking out my notebook and dedicating some time to it last week when I was cut off from the internet did provide fruitful for learning aiueo (as in just the vowel sounds by themselves), but I doubt I'll ever have the need or resolve to learn it in full. Though Duo Lingo is forcing me to recognize some more writing even if I'd rather learn purely through Romanji, so I might get there some day. I'm an English teacher by trade.

I'm learning Japanese right now - I took a class in college, years back, and have been re-learning most of the material over the past couple months (kamisama I saved the kyoukasho). Cringy non-grammatical weabish aside, I've actually had a much easier time with Hiragana than Katakana. Katakana characters tend to be simpler, but also more similar to one another (I swear, five of them are just diagonal strokes with varying diacritics). Plus, they appear much less frequently in most kinds of text (being limited to words and names of foreign origin). As for Kanji, as there are thousands, no one can be expected to know literally all of them. Still, I've managed to memorize more than a handful (numbers, days of the week, common verbs like "go" or "eat"). It's fun to find connections - like, the radicals for "sun" and "moon" show up in a lot of time-related kanji. Anyway, good luck on the language learning process! Even if you're doing it all-digital (with Duolingo), it might help to write the characters out, too.

What else? Well, English is my native language. The one I've spent the longest time learning, basically from middle school onwards, is Spanish. I haven't practiced in a while, and I doubt I could hold a competent conversation with a native hispanohablante, but I could probably speak enough to tread water in Mexico. One thing I really like about the language is, the pronunciations are almost always intuitive. And there are a lot of cognates, and near-cognates, with English.

The other language I have experience in is German, which I practiced for a few months (through Duolingo) before visiting my sister in Germany. Ich bin nicht gut. There are a lot of similar words to English, but I was never good at the pronunciation.

[Jotari]

40 minutes ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

I'm learning Japanese right now - I took a class in college, years back, and have been re-learning most of the material over the past couple months (kamisama I saved the kyoukasho). Cringy non-grammatical weabish aside, I've actually had a much easier time with Hiragana than Katakana. Katakana characters tend to be simpler, but also more similar to one another (I swear, five of them are just diagonal strokes with varying diacritics). Plus, they appear much less frequently in most kinds of text (being limited to words and names of foreign origin).

I can see the logic in that. A lot of Katakana is obnoxiously similar. I don't have much grand ambition to learn to read either though. Most of my Japanese comes more from actual use with native speakers as I live in Japan than active studying. And when it comes to writing, English  (or for menus, pictures) is generally ubiquitous enough that it isn't needed. It'd be nice to read some Japanese only books and games that were never translated, but there's already a tonne of stuff in English I'll likely never finish reading in this life time already. Most of the good stuff has been translated already by people who would understand the nuance far better than I would even if I knuckled down to study.

40 minutes ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

As for Kanji, as there are thousands, no one can be expected to know literally all of them. Still, I've managed to memorize more than a handful (numbers, days of the week, common verbs like "go" or "eat"). It's fun to find connections - like, the radicals for "sun" and "moon" show up in a lot of time-related kanji. Anyway, good luck on the language learning process! Even if you're doing it all-digital (with Duolingo), it might help to write the characters out, too.

No joke, there's a gameshow here where the whole premise is recognizing and writing Kanji. There's people who have actively trained to write the language and they still frequently get it wrong (at least when under the pressure of a timer). I like Kanji, especially for how it's used for meaning in names, but there's something I just find so funny about a language so complex that a native speaker being able to write it is considered an achievement (that being said being able to write in any language is actually a phenomenally complex skill that requires an immense level of precision, it's a real testament to human evolution that we can do it so easily). Meanwhile a billion or so Chinese people actually do use this written language daily (well with some various types of simplifications, which just seems to make things look blockier).

[L3xandr3]

On 11/17/2020 at 12:42 PM, eclipse said:

Because English is three languages in a trenchcoat.

Hehaha! That's my new favorite way of describing English. Very good, this line!

[Oersted_LAL]

Does Idiocy count as a second language?

[Jotari]

1 hour ago, Oersted_LAL said:

Does Idiocy count as a second language?

No, only a first.

[scigeek101]

On 11/20/2020 at 10:03 AM, Jotari said:

No joke, there's a gameshow here where the whole premise is recognizing and writing Kanji. There's people who have actively trained to write the language and they still frequently get it wrong (at least when under the pressure of a timer). I like Kanji, especially for how it's used for meaning in names, but there's something I just find so funny about a language so complex that a native speaker being able to write it is considered an achievement .

My viewpoint on this has always been that it's basically the equivalent of a spelling bee. No English speaker can possibly know or be able to spell perfectly every word off the top of their head so we have contests for the obscure ones. 

Likewise to a Japanese person the idea of a spelling bee would be utterly bizzare to them in their language since words are written the way they sound 99.9% of the time with few exceptions. For that matter Spanish or German spelling bees would also make little sense. 

 

Modern Japanese has had a number of "spelling reforms" over the years including some of the same "simplified characters" that you see with Chinese. It's why you've got words like Yen with an initial Ye sound despite that not really existing in modern Japanese anymore. The old way of writing it and pronouncing it stuck in the west but it's not reflective of how it's currently written or pronounced in Japan. Most of the redundant kana were removed after WWII except for づ because of it's use in certain Kanji compounds. Likewise character standardizations similar to Chinese resulted in characters like 國　or 會 being simplified to 国 and 会 though the simplified forms were already in wide use for handwriting and were based on older I believe Ming Dynasty era varients that had been in use. 

Originally Japanese would have been entirely written using borrowed Chinese characters, some Buddhist monks devised a system of phonetic notation for sutras based on Kanji radicals and that became Katakana. Hiragana came about as a heavily stylized cursive style of phonetic Kanji that was supposed to be easy for women to learn but eventually saw widespread adoption. Though before WWII Katakana was still the standard script in use for most public material. 

Chinese character reform is ankther interesting topic but unfortunately I know far less about that. I believe it is said that the First Emperor of China implemented a standardized set of characters throughout his empire to facilitate communication compared to the old way of every region having different characters for their different dialects.

 

Much later on following the communist revolution something like a 4 step plan was put in place to gradually phase out characters and replace them with "Pinyin" or romanization of Chinese. 

I believe the example was to move along, for example the character for car changed something like [車 车 che] with the total romanization being the final step, and the middle steps being the gradual replacement of certain characters with others over a 40 year period if memory serves. 

However ultimately this language reform was halted following the initial step. Resulting in a number of common characters and radicals simplified but the vast majority of characters being left alone. I think this is because it was realized that when romanized fully Chinese becomes difficult to understand and slower to read. The initial education requirements for literacy are very high but there are a number of benefits after you learn it such as being able to better understand certain terms by "sight" where similar words would be difficult to grasp if written in romanization. 

Chinese is to Japanese as Latin and Greek is to English so I'll give an example. 

Unicycle, if you are unfamiliar with the word, might not be readily understandable if you don't know the root Uni meaning one and cycle meaning wheel. 

Ichirinsha, the Japanese word for unicycle is equally difficult to understand on sight if you don't know the meaning on sight. But the Kanji 一(one)輪(wheel)車(car) you can get an idea of what it means if you know the meaning of the elements that make it. 

 

For common items this isn't a big deal but for more obscure things like scientific terms, medical terms, or legal terms this can naturally be a pretty good benefit to comprehension. It really isn't something that carries into spoken language and is only apparent in the written script. There are too many homophones and similar sounding words in Japanese and Chinese that it makes a romanization a bit obtuse and unwieldy to use. I feel like Korean and Vietnamese both suffer from this a bit. But I am admittingly quite shit at both of those languages.

Some people will say that the post revolution language reforms were primarily intended to make it difficult for the laymen to access pre-revolution literature without party approval, and I think there is definitely some truth to that, but I seriously doubt that is the primary reason for it's implementation and subsequent failure. 

 

 

 

[Jotari]

3 minutes ago, scigeek101 said:

My viewpoint on this has always been that it's basically the equivalent of a spelling bee. No English speaker can possibly know or be able to spell perfectly every word off the top of their head so we have contests for the obscure ones. 

Likewise to a Japanese person the idea of a spelling bee would be utterly bizzare to them in their language since words are written the way they sound 99.9% of the time with few exceptions. For that matter Spanish or German spelling bees would also make little sense. 

Comparing it to a spelling bee probably is pretty apt. Nevertheless, I'd stay true to what I said here

On 11/20/2020 at 10:03 AM, Jotari said:

 I just find so funny about a language so complex that a native speaker being able to write it is considered an achievement

Even if it's referring to English too. Our spelling be messed up! At the attempts to reform it have similarly failed.

 

[scigeek101]

11 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Comparing it to a spelling bee probably is pretty apt. Nevertheless, I'd stay true to what I said here

Even if it's referring to English too. Our spelling be messed up! At the attempts to reform it have similarly failed.

 

Yeah it's all true. I just think people tend to have an opinion that some languages are innately harder than others but I think that most languages tend to more or less evolve and balance out to approximately the same level of difficulty to their native speakers. They are all a bit different though. 

 

I think that languages really just meet the needs of their speakers. Some obscure tribal languages have really bizarre qualities because they serve a small community and haven't evolved to encompass certain concepts that you need in a large civilization. 

Like I recall studying one Amazonian language that didn't really have words for numbers beyond a singular and a plural. Of course they'd have a way to express a concept like "3", but it would have to be done like "1 and 1 and 1" or something like that. They didn't need a word for it because their society didn't have a need to express numbers often or in large quantities. I think they only had a hundred people or so. 

 

But when it comes to our modern societies they are all fairly similar in a lot of regards so things tend to be fairly similar across languages when all is said and done. But the manner in which they accomplish their goals can very wildly. 

Spelling is a weird one because it seems a fairly unique to english problem. In terms of difficulty I'd say it's about on par with Chinese characters ultimately but the learning curve is reversed. English writing has fewer elements but more ways to combine them. Chinese has more elements but less variety in it's combinations if that makes sense? Granted there are enough exceptions and weirdness that any oversimplification like this really doesn't do anything much justice. 

 

[Jotari]

19 hours ago, scigeek101 said:

Yeah it's all true. I just think people tend to have an opinion that some languages are innately harder than others but I think that most languages tend to more or less evolve and balance out to approximately the same level of difficulty to their native speakers. They are all a bit different though. 

 

I think that languages really just meet the needs of their speakers. Some obscure tribal languages have really bizarre qualities because they serve a small community and haven't evolved to encompass certain concepts that you need in a large civilization. 

Like I recall studying one Amazonian language that didn't really have words for numbers beyond a singular and a plural. Of course they'd have a way to express a concept like "3", but it would have to be done like "1 and 1 and 1" or something like that. They didn't need a word for it because their society didn't have a need to express numbers often or in large quantities. I think they only had a hundred people or so. 

 

But when it comes to our modern societies they are all fairly similar in a lot of regards so things tend to be fairly similar across languages when all is said and done. But the manner in which they accomplish their goals can very wildly. 

Spelling is a weird one because it seems a fairly unique to english problem. In terms of difficulty I'd say it's about on par with Chinese characters ultimately but the learning curve is reversed. English writing has fewer elements but more ways to combine them. Chinese has more elements but less variety in it's combinations if that makes sense? Granted there are enough exceptions and weirdness that any oversimplification like this really doesn't do anything much justice. 

 

I think some languages are just harder than others though. Like Chinese is a really hard language to learn due to how tonal it is, and earlier in the thread a native Chinese speaker agreed with me. Japanese, it's writing system aside, is actually quite an easy language I find as it's syllables are all really clear and distinct with very little to no blending at all, the language also lends itself very easy to repetition of phrases which is helpful for actual speaking. And then you have languages that gender all their nouns and there's no feasible way to learn how to correctly refer to something without memorizing the gender of every single noun. And just plain the number of irregular verbs (and irregular tenses) a language might have is something that's going to make it objectively easier or harder than learning verbs in a comparable language. If a language has no concept of 3 then that's one less aspect of the language you need to familiarize with, so it does make the language easier. Of course consequently a tribal language like that might have more complex syllable use, at least coming from a distant language (and what your native language is is obviously going to affect how easy other languages are to earn). Pretty much all languages will have their strong and weak points so it wouldn't be easy to measure, but I think some reasonably objective grading would be possible (and at the top would probably be a constructed language like Esperanto which hasn't had the time to evolve as many bad habits as natural languages).

[scigeek101]

I definitely think you could make a pretty authoritative list of language difficulty based on the number of hours needed to reach fluency. But there are a few problems. One is the definition of fluency needs to be established and I don't think an objective definition can truly exist. We would also need to decide whether literacy is important. (I would argue that the spoken and written word are different enough they should be treated as separate skills entirely but you can't truly reach mastery in one without the other in practice imho) 

I also think you need to divide the list up depending on at the very least the language family the learner is coming from, but their native language is better. 

 

There's a lot of debate over say, what romance languages are easier than others for English speakers to learn. Is Spanish easier than French? How about Italian? It's hard to judge. 

But we can almost certainly say they are easier to learn than German. Which is much much easier to learn than Chinese, Korean or Japanese. 

 

But what about if we are in the case of a Japanese native speaker? Korean is the easiest for them because of its grammatical similarities and proximity. Chinese is again quite difficult because of tones but the grammar and writing are of no real consequence as they share a literary history akin to how English shares one with French and Latin. 

You get to the European languages and the Japanese speaker will have difficulties with grammar, pronunciations, etc. Spanish might still be easier for the Japanese learner over English, but by this point the distinction has become largely academic. 

It's of no coincidence that Japanese often have poor English skills compared to Europeans. It's simply that the languages are much more alien to each other than languages that developed in closer contact. 

 

Esperanto is an interesting example. I love the idea of constructed languages but I don't think they are universally feasible. Esperanto is very eurocentric not that it's a bad thing that it is, the creator was european after all, but the language is of much less use for it's intended purpose once you start moving to the more far flung language families. 

Modern Chinese is interesting because it shares several aspects of a constructed language. I do believe Mandarin of today was developed from the kind of court language that was used in China to facilitate the communication across their vast empire where many dialects bled the lines between what was and was not an entirely different language. It's really not much different than Europe in that regard where the church and the language of Latin was used as a kind of universal communication tool among the educated. 

 

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

Japanese, it's writing system aside, is actually quite an easy language I find as it's syllables are all really clear and distinct with very little to no blending at all, 

I agree that Japanese is a very easy language when it comes to pronunciation. Beyond that though, I think that even if we ignore the writing system, Japanese is an extremely difficult language for English speakers to learn with a slew of concepts that are alien to English. Irregular verbs are extremely uncommon but you make up for it with different verbs for different level of politeness that change depending on who you speak to, verb conjugations (adjective conguations as well) that delve into a number of concepts that are grammatically alien to English. Volitional? Passive? Causitive? Causitive-passive? That thing they do where your verb ending changes based on whether or not you've seen something with your own eyes or whether or not it's 2nd hand information.  Once you wrap your head around them they aren't so bad as the conjugations are regular. But these concepts are difficult to grasp for native English speakers sometimes and even they line between what is and isn't a verb conjugation or a separate word is blurry. Hell that's another debate entirely is what exactly a Japanese "word" is, it's not like English they don't have spaces to clearly delineate. 

Then there are particles and the need to differentiate wether or not your subject is a subject or a topic. Or even whether or not to include a subject at all. Then there's the issue of homophones and the downsides to the double edged sword of no tones and simple pronunciation means there are only about 50 sounds in the language so a lot of words sound the same or very similar. 

Then there is the kicker if you want to get really far down the rabbit hole. Contrary to popular opinion, there are essentially "tones" in Japanese. 

Not anything like Chinese. Japanese only has two, and it's not that big of a deal if you get one wrong. But it's still really hard to understand people if the, shall we say rhythm of their speech deviates from the norm too much. 

Writing system is just the preverbial tip of the iceberg. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Jotari]

1 hour ago, scigeek101 said:

I definitely think you could make a pretty authoritative list of language difficulty based on the number of hours needed to reach fluency. But there are a few problems. One is the definition of fluency needs to be established and I don't think an objective definition can truly exist. We would also need to decide whether literacy is important. (I would argue that the spoken and written word are different enough they should be treated as separate skills entirely but you can't truly reach mastery in one without the other in practice imho) 

I also think you need to divide the list up depending on at the very least the language family the learner is coming from, but their native language is better. 

 

There's a lot of debate over say, what romance languages are easier than others for English speakers to learn. Is Spanish easier than French? How about Italian? It's hard to judge. 

But we can almost certainly say they are easier to learn than German. Which is much much easier to learn than Chinese, Korean or Japanese. 

 

But what about if we are in the case of a Japanese native speaker? Korean is the easiest for them because of its grammatical similarities and proximity. Chinese is again quite difficult because of tones but the grammar and writing are of no real consequence as they share a literary history akin to how English shares one with French and Latin. 

You get to the European languages and the Japanese speaker will have difficulties with grammar, pronunciations, etc. Spanish might still be easier for the Japanese learner over English, but by this point the distinction has become largely academic. 

It's of no coincidence that Japanese often have poor English skills compared to Europeans. It's simply that the languages are much more alien to each other than languages that developed in closer contact. 

 

Esperanto is an interesting example. I love the idea of constructed languages but I don't think they are universally feasible. Esperanto is very eurocentric not that it's a bad thing that it is, the creator was european after all, but the language is of much less use for it's intended purpose once you start moving to the more far flung language families. 

Modern Chinese is interesting because it shares several aspects of a constructed language. I do believe Mandarin of today was developed from the kind of court language that was used in China to facilitate the communication across their vast empire where many dialects bled the lines between what was and was not an entirely different language. It's really not much different than Europe in that regard where the church and the language of Latin was used as a kind of universal communication tool among the educated. 

 

I agree that Japanese is a very easy language when it comes to pronunciation. Beyond that though, I think that even if we ignore the writing system, Japanese is an extremely difficult language for English speakers to learn with a slew of concepts that are alien to English. Irregular verbs are extremely uncommon but you make up for it with different verbs for different level of politeness that change depending on who you speak to, verb conjugations (adjective conguations as well) that delve into a number of concepts that are grammatically alien to English. Volitional? Passive? Causitive? Causitive-passive? That thing they do where your verb ending changes based on whether or not you've seen something with your own eyes or whether or not it's 2nd hand information.  Once you wrap your head around them they aren't so bad as the conjugations are regular. But these concepts are difficult to grasp for native English speakers sometimes and even they line between what is and isn't a verb conjugation or a separate word is blurry. Hell that's another debate entirely is what exactly a Japanese "word" is, it's not like English they don't have spaces to clearly delineate. 

Then there are particles and the need to differentiate wether or not your subject is a subject or a topic. Or even whether or not to include a subject at all. Then there's the issue of homophones and the downsides to the double edged sword of no tones and simple pronunciation means there are only about 50 sounds in the language so a lot of words sound the same or very similar. 

Then there is the kicker if you want to get really far down the rabbit hole. Contrary to popular opinion, there are essentially "tones" in Japanese. 

Not anything like Chinese. Japanese only has two, and it's not that big of a deal if you get one wrong. But it's still really hard to understand people if the, shall we say rhythm of their speech deviates from the norm too much. 

Writing system is just the preverbial tip of the iceberg. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In other words it's really complex. Ranking languages objectively is probably theoretically possible, but everyone in the world is going to go into it with bias stemming from their native language(s) and no one is ever going to have the time to learn all languages in the world to fluency. Speaking is hard.

[scigeek101]

Yeah you'd need to have perfect knowledge of all languages to be able to make any kind of judgment. 

 

The best you can hope for is a comparison list of a small group of languages. But bias from the native language isn't exactly the right word. It has something more to do with brain development when you are a kid. Your brain isn't predisposed to any particular language but you will over time learn to filter out meaningful inputs from inputs that have no meaning and these tend to become set for most people.

It's one of the reasons why direct translations really suck. For individual sentences you often have to add or remove information for them to make sense in the target language. But this all tends to balance out over the course of a long passage or conversation for instance. But there really aren't one to one correspondence between even simple things like noun meanings when you want to get into it. 

It's like the "is cereal a soup" question. 

Cereal isn't a soup, because our culture has decided it's not. But if you want to get into pendantic arguments sure, it could be considered one. 

A wasp and a bee are different insects but if you are speaking Japanese they aren't. 

Blue and Green we can both agree on the meaning but what color is this 🚦? Japanese will give you a different answer than an American. But this is because the Japanese word for 青 overlaps between the English Blue and Green and the textbook only pics one since there is anotjer word that is more green but not another word for blue. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Rei Rei]

My language knowledge varies according to whatever I'm speaking. Like, Portuguese is my mother language and I'm fluent in English. Also, I am able to communicate in Spanish and French, and I have basic, bare minimum knowledge of Italian and Japanese.

French is, and I cannot stress this enough, so fucking hard to comprehend when it's spoken.

[Blade of Light]

I can only speak German and English now, but I used to be able to speak (and I'm not talking about writing and reading) Latin. Basically, my mother got so pissed when I almost failed an entire school year because of Latin that she relearned some basic Latin and started chatting with me in Latin for a little bit. Didn't really help with my grades, though.´, I almost failed the next year regardless

[Jotari]

7 minutes ago, Blade of Light said:

I can only speak German and English now, but I used to be able to speak (and I'm not talking about writing and reading) Latin. Basically, my mother got so pissed when I almost failed an entire school year because of Latin that she relearned some basic Latin and started chatting with me in Latin for a little bit. Didn't really help with my grades, though.´, I almost failed the next year regardless

Ha. Cool, but for tests it's a bit of the wrong focus when oral Latin is virtually non existent.

[defensedefumer]

I'm Singaporean, and can speak both English and Mandarin. In university I learnt Italian as a side module for 6 months, and continue my lessons via Duolingo.

A lot of my wife's friends are Japanese, so I only know certain Japanese phrases.

[Blaiddyd]

I can speak Norwegian, Polish and English fluently.

[Theolexluna]

On 11/17/2020 at 2:37 PM, LJ_Tenma said:

Heyyy another Filipino-American!

I grew up around Tagalog (but was born and raised in America), but my understanding grew more than my speaking ability. I'm in this weird limbo between understanding it perfectly fine, but speaking like a kindergartener.

I'm also pretty conversational in Korean and Hawaiian, and my speaking in both these languages are sadly better than my Tagalog LOL.

I also had the same problem but I was born and raised in the Philippines. I refused to speak tagalog and never spoke it during my filipino classes but it got better with practice. When I was younger I get confused vocab belonged to with language as I got older I understood which belonged to which. I did last year take some tagalog classes for a summer program here with a class and I kinda got some feedback to watch more filipino movies which i honestly don't like because of repetitive theme.

[Jotari]

51 minutes ago, Theolexluna said:

I also had the same problem but I was born and raised in the Philippines. I refused to speak tagalog and never spoke it during my filipino classes but it got better with practice. When I was younger I get confused vocab belonged to with language as I got older I understood which belonged to which. I did last year take some tagalog classes for a summer program here with a class and I kinda got some feedback to watch more filipino movies which i honestly don't like because of repetitive theme.

Is the repetitive theme cheating? Every Filpino movie I've seen bar one was about cheating XD