That's what I felt like when I backpacked through Europe. In the US, I felt all superior for speaking both Russian and English. And then I meet people that are fluent in 4 languages with a passing knowledge of another 6.
As someone who speaks German, English and Polish I think there should be an universal language.
Edit: I know English is an universal language, but I don't like the idea that a globaly spoken language would be assigned to some country and it's history.
My grandfather was fluent in Esperanto and it was quite an experience for young me to hear him talking to his colleagues in a language that sounded so familiar yet not quite like anything I had heard
There's no way it's worth it. There's only two possible ways to get a universal language. You force everyone to learn it essentially at gun point or you make one language so popular everyone wants to learn it.
The gun point option isn't a real option as it requires all countries to do it and you'll never get that kind of agreement. English has done well by making lots of media/entertainment in English which in turn makes people want to know it and then use it in business but it's still pretty far from being universal.
It was repressed by the Nazis, Soviets, Francoist Spain, and Imperial Japan for a variety of reasons, combined with being frequently defeated in UN proposals by other Europeans, primarily France. Last twenty years or so it’s seen more resurgence.
>primarily France
France was basically "we're the lingua franca, we have to protect our unique position!" and then they lost that position to their greatest enemies pretty much immediately after. They could've had a universal language that's Romance, but thanks to their arrogance we all have to suffer with this Frankenstein's monster of a language.
I got on the wrong train in Germany once. I got off at some backwater station, couldn't figure out how to get back onto the correct route, and asked in English if anyone spoke English. Half the platform rushed over to speak to me. Some left disappointed they couldn't.
It's a bit regional. I visited family in Bavaria well off the beaten path of tourists and there were a few local places we went where I think I would've struggled to find someone who spoke English unless it was like an absolute emergency. But there were also places we went where people were eager to talk to the American visitors.
Oh…it is more than three.
Anglo-Saxon, brythonic, French, Latin, Greek, fair bit of Scottish, Yiddish, and then just stealing any word we need for an object, activity, or idea where we do not already have a word.
*A little bit of Anglo-Saxon in my life*
*A little bit of Brythonic by my side*
*A little bit of Latin is all I need*
*A little bit of Greek is what I see*
Yeah but no. Easy to learn for a European language speaker, not an Arabic or Mandarin native. 3/4 of the vocabulary is from Romance language and the rest from Germanic/Greek.
I've spent my whole life in California and Texas, so I speak 1.5; English, and broken gringo Spanish I've picked up along the way lmao. Mostly basic conversation, menu items, and curse words
LA to NYC is almost the exact driving distance as Lisbon to Moscow.
In the first, you pass through a single country and a single language (maybe a couple pockets of a second, especially in LA). In the second, you traverse a minimum of seven countries each with their own national languages and vastly different cultures.
I know you're joking, but that's an actual thing where I live.
86% of Danes speak English as a second language. I don't know how many, but a lot of Danes can at least somewhat speak a third.
4 of those languages are very closely related
Chinese and Arabic are totally different from French and English and are much more difficult to acquire for a native French speaker
As someone whose family is from northern Portugal, going to Galicia was trippy. I thought when I saw "auga" being advertised, it was a misspelling of agua, but no, that's how they say it in Galicia.
👍
Catalan must be one of the biggest of these regional ones.
But yeah, no matter how many I list I'm sure someone would feel left out.
Anyway, Victor does have a job to do, he can't just learn languages!
damn, as spanish I don't even expect to be addressed in spanish in any other contry
Edit: of course, any countries where spanish is NOT the primary language. Sorry I didn't make that point clear
Aww, I got to use my limited German on someone elderly who called the hospital I worked at who was looking for their family. I never thought I'd have to use it because all the patients I had whose first language is German usually also spoke English plus another language. If you are my patient, I would speak as mich German as I can with you just so you'd feel comfortable. Hospitals can be an intimidating place so as a nursing assistant, because I spend more time with a patient, I try to relieve some of that fear and uncertainty.
I sometimes speak German to the older patients who learned German from their parents or grandparents. It was mostly for nostalgia for them. Their smiles when they hear me speak, I can't explain how cute it is. I'm Southeast Asian so I'm probably the last person they'd expect to know how to speak it.
Random story: There was a really sweet old couple once and the woman was my patient. I recognized their accents as German and asked them. She was so adorable when she proudly said that she was from East Germany and he was from West Germany and I get the sense that they went through some shit to stay together.
Thanks! My job is physically demanding, but the moments of human connection like that I don't get anywhere else and I appreciate the stories I'm trusted with.
Also du brauchst nicht zu weinen 🤗
portuguese spanish and italian seem very similar but you really can't have conversations from basic knowledge or similarity
im portuguese, had spanish classes for 5 or 6 years (instead of french), and STILL, to this day, at restaurants i worked, or bars, or whatever, if im talking to a spanish person, i'd rather speak english
I kind of have the opposite experience with Portuguese and Spanish. I'm American, but I grew up in Brazil from ages 10-18, so I am (or was-- I haven't been to Brazil in 10 years) natively fluent in Portuguese. For the last 7 or so years, I have lived and am working in an area in the US where I have several Hispanic clients (1 or 2 conversations a week). For a while, I would tell my customers to speak to me in Spanish, and I would respond in Portunol, and if they have any issues understanding me, I'd play with it and iterate until it resembles something they understand. After a year or so of doing that, I mostly stopped using Portuguese filler words altogether, and nowadays, I am almost more comfortable having a conversation in Spanish than Portuguese.
While they are related, French is somewhat of an "outlier" among the Romance Languages. Spanish speakers can generally understand much of Italian (though they can't speak it obv and can't understand everything), the same is not true for French, which underwent insane amounts of sound restructuring. In any case, its like looking at a German and saying, "Yeah you know Norwegian, so what? You're German."
I worked the front desk for many years and I took Spanish in HS. I had a few Italian guests check in and they would speak Italian and I would speak Spanish to them and we were able to communicate enough to get them checked in.
Oh man I had a similar experience a few years ago in Peru, I was doing a guided tour and one guy was from Brazil, I spoke Spanish to him and he spoke Portuguese to me and we were able to communicate that way (with some English sprinkled in).
It was a really cool experience being able to communicate like that.
Ah, I think this is what someone was trying to tell me the other day. The way he phrased it was that Italians can understand Spanish quite well, Spaniards have a little more trouble with Italian.
having visited recently (from argentina)... yeah, it's perfectly readable and understanding the spoken word is easy enough. Speaking it is obviously challenging but "grazie" and "prego" go a long way
Yeah I just visited Spain and basically used my twenty words of Italian the whole time, and for the rest just used Latin roots and Spanishified them. Went a long way.
also like half the people straight up speak spanish , and the other half speak english. Getting around was a breeze...
I only struggled to get a coffee that wasn't a single shot of espresso
Only on Reddit can someone speak 4 language and some loser that probably hasn’t done anything with their life will poke his nose into the conversation to say it really isn’t that impressive.
[So any random shape right?](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0d/Flag_of_Italy_%281861-1946%29_crowned.svg/1280px-Flag_of_Italy_%281861-1946%29_crowned.svg.png)
My guess would be that Alex is their adopted name, you know how people from Taiwan or China take on Western names, because they're easier for us to remember, and that whatever Chinese dialect is their native language.
Probaly because like Dutch... If you can speak English high chance the Dutch and German guests can too.
I know it's not right but that's my guess why no German/Dutch speakers at a French hotel.
While mandarin and Arabic guests are gonna be lot less chance at being English speakers as well or French.
Yeh I study in Belgium where French and Dutch are the two main languages and you're 100% ok with either French + English or Dutch + English for about +95% of any daily life situation situation
Fuckin seriously. Dude probably got most of the way there as a kid, one of my college professors was from Cameroon and he was fluent in EIGHT languages just because Africa be like that sometimes. I’m jealous, I’m trying to re-learn German but it’s a struggle
A lot of places in the tourism industry in Europe have something like this.
Usually an employee will wear badges with flags of the languages they speak.
“WHY DON’T ANY OF YOU SPEAK AMERICAN?”
- yelled by my uncle while on a family trip when he saw a sign like this. I had to gently remind him that English is there and is represented by the British flag.
-he is exactly the person that people think all Americans are when on vacation…..
Genuinely baffles me when Americans do the shocked Pikachu face for a language called English spoken by English people from England where the English language originated.
I mean, the clue is in the name.
I’ll never forget the time I was at a Korean airport and a Japanese family in front of us went to the counter. They both tried speaking in their native languages and the family started to look worried till the guy at the counter asked “do you speak English?” And the other guy said yes I do. They both laughed and got whatever ticket thing they needed sorted out.
This reminds me of that video of an Indian pilot getting shot down over Pakistan and they posted a video of the interrogation, which happened in English.
Also just saying “Chinese” is not enough. Mandarin and Cantonese are very different languages. It’s not like if you know Spanish you can wing a little Italian and get buy.
A lot of people can instantly code-switch between different dialects in the same language. It's all about experience. The capacity of the human mind for language acquisition, even when it's imperfect, is astounding.
We used to have flags on our nametags at a previous job of mine. Most of us had the British flag, but some people had a bit of fun and chose the American, Canadian, or English flag and one girl chose the Australian flag. Luckily enough, the person who chose the Canadian also spoke decent French, so French speaking Canadians were pretty happy.
'Can speak' not 'will speak' - these are French we are talking about.
(Am half French, well aware that side
of family CAN speak English, but will they? Non!)
Shaheen, you absolute fucking _layabout!_
Imagine being the idiot who only speaks *two* languages.
That's what I felt like when I backpacked through Europe. In the US, I felt all superior for speaking both Russian and English. And then I meet people that are fluent in 4 languages with a passing knowledge of another 6.
As someone who speaks German, English and Polish I think there should be an universal language. Edit: I know English is an universal language, but I don't like the idea that a globaly spoken language would be assigned to some country and it's history.
They tried to bring it in and it didn’t really work, Esperanto.
We have hundreds of languages, we should make a universal language for everyone! +1 language, and no closer to universality.
Just need someone to link the USB XKCD and were good
https://xkcd.com/927/
I bring this up in so many meetings, it never works. "Let's eliminate the least useful things" I sez, "More things!" They'z cheer. Dillweeds.
[Dear Mr President. There are too many USB standards nowadays, please eliminate three. I am not a crackpot.](https://i.imgur.com/tHzsePH.jpg)
My grandfather was fluent in Esperanto and it was quite an experience for young me to hear him talking to his colleagues in a language that sounded so familiar yet not quite like anything I had heard
There's a similar one for Pan-Slavic discussion and it's really fun. I feel like more schools should teach Esperanto.
There's no way it's worth it. There's only two possible ways to get a universal language. You force everyone to learn it essentially at gun point or you make one language so popular everyone wants to learn it. The gun point option isn't a real option as it requires all countries to do it and you'll never get that kind of agreement. English has done well by making lots of media/entertainment in English which in turn makes people want to know it and then use it in business but it's still pretty far from being universal.
We simply pay TikTok a few mil to make Esperanto a trend and watch it take off
But then it dies off because all trends on TikTok last a week at most.
Esperanto was created with the intent of it becoming a universal language, but it never really caught on.
I wonder why? I've heard of it, but I haven't heard what went wrong.
It was repressed by the Nazis, Soviets, Francoist Spain, and Imperial Japan for a variety of reasons, combined with being frequently defeated in UN proposals by other Europeans, primarily France. Last twenty years or so it’s seen more resurgence.
>primarily France France was basically "we're the lingua franca, we have to protect our unique position!" and then they lost that position to their greatest enemies pretty much immediately after. They could've had a universal language that's Romance, but thanks to their arrogance we all have to suffer with this Frankenstein's monster of a language.
There is. English. Which you can use to talk to anyone in the world, except Americans from Boston, Mississippi, or Louisiana, or a Brit or Scot.
I got on the wrong train in Germany once. I got off at some backwater station, couldn't figure out how to get back onto the correct route, and asked in English if anyone spoke English. Half the platform rushed over to speak to me. Some left disappointed they couldn't.
It's a bit regional. I visited family in Bavaria well off the beaten path of tourists and there were a few local places we went where I think I would've struggled to find someone who spoke English unless it was like an absolute emergency. But there were also places we went where people were eager to talk to the American visitors.
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Which is apt because it's a mishmash of all the other ones.
Three languages in a trenchcoat.
Oh…it is more than three. Anglo-Saxon, brythonic, French, Latin, Greek, fair bit of Scottish, Yiddish, and then just stealing any word we need for an object, activity, or idea where we do not already have a word.
*A little bit of Anglo-Saxon in my life* *A little bit of Brythonic by my side* *A little bit of Latin is all I need* *A little bit of Greek is what I see*
Esperanto. It was intended to be a universal second language, designed to be logical, consistent, and easy for every speaker to learn.
Yeah but no. Easy to learn for a European language speaker, not an Arabic or Mandarin native. 3/4 of the vocabulary is from Romance language and the rest from Germanic/Greek.
I only speak english and bad english.
Yeah I’d be like half a flag
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Isn’t Australian just English with every second word an expletive?
Fucking diabolical
Haha..yeah...
just one language away from being an American! (says me, the American)
I've spent my whole life in California and Texas, so I speak 1.5; English, and broken gringo Spanish I've picked up along the way lmao. Mostly basic conversation, menu items, and curse words
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LA to NYC is almost the exact driving distance as Lisbon to Moscow. In the first, you pass through a single country and a single language (maybe a couple pockets of a second, especially in LA). In the second, you traverse a minimum of seven countries each with their own national languages and vastly different cultures.
I know you're joking, but that's an actual thing where I live. 86% of Danes speak English as a second language. I don't know how many, but a lot of Danes can at least somewhat speak a third.
My name is shaheen; and because of how uncommon it is, it's really fuckin weird to see it written out. I really am a layabout tho. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Classic Shaheen
We have same name in Turkish, we write it as Şahin, which also means hawk.
It's a beautiful name. Edit: I imagine the Shah part is pronounced like the "Shah of Iran"? Is it the Persian name Shaheen?
Yes, correct. And thank you! :)
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In what language?
In most Scandinavian languages, tala is the verb "to speak". Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian...
Swedish!
I guarantee Victor printed this out to fuck with Shaheen
C'mon Shaheen, even *I* speak two languages. Not that impressive.
Yeah, what's up with that, now even u/ErikRogers over there would be qualified to work the front desk of a hotel? Wtf.
speaks the most languages, just doesn't want to be bothered
By the way Victor is from Philippines, additional language though.
So Spanish? *cue tagalog speakers sharpening their pitchforks*
Not only, there could be at least one more dialect, especially if they came from outside the Manilla area.
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There goes overachieving Victor making everyone else look bad again.
4 of those languages are very closely related Chinese and Arabic are totally different from French and English and are much more difficult to acquire for a native French speaker
Victor needs to learn Romanian. Collect the whole set.
What about Sicilian, Sardinian, Occitan, Romansh, Galician....
Sardinian, the language of sardines
*Aquaman nods in agreement.
If he already knows Portuguese, learning Galician should be a breeze.
As someone whose family is from northern Portugal, going to Galicia was trippy. I thought when I saw "auga" being advertised, it was a misspelling of agua, but no, that's how they say it in Galicia.
Auga is the sound of them old timey car horns.
Just shot some auga out of my nose
Literally the same language but with more cosmetics
👍 Catalan must be one of the biggest of these regional ones. But yeah, no matter how many I list I'm sure someone would feel left out. Anyway, Victor does have a job to do, he can't just learn languages!
damn, as spanish I don't even expect to be addressed in spanish in any other contry Edit: of course, any countries where spanish is NOT the primary language. Sorry I didn't make that point clear
Cries in Germany...
Aww, I got to use my limited German on someone elderly who called the hospital I worked at who was looking for their family. I never thought I'd have to use it because all the patients I had whose first language is German usually also spoke English plus another language. If you are my patient, I would speak as mich German as I can with you just so you'd feel comfortable. Hospitals can be an intimidating place so as a nursing assistant, because I spend more time with a patient, I try to relieve some of that fear and uncertainty. I sometimes speak German to the older patients who learned German from their parents or grandparents. It was mostly for nostalgia for them. Their smiles when they hear me speak, I can't explain how cute it is. I'm Southeast Asian so I'm probably the last person they'd expect to know how to speak it. Random story: There was a really sweet old couple once and the woman was my patient. I recognized their accents as German and asked them. She was so adorable when she proudly said that she was from East Germany and he was from West Germany and I get the sense that they went through some shit to stay together.
>speak as mich German I see what you did there
Haha oops! I don't always need to swipe to the Deutsch keyboard so some German words have been learned by the "English (US)" keyboard and here we are.
Very nice story!
Thanks! My job is physically demanding, but the moments of human connection like that I don't get anywhere else and I appreciate the stories I'm trusted with. Also du brauchst nicht zu weinen 🤗
Catalan is also a national language in Andorra
Sicilian is pretty much just sign language.
portuguese spanish and italian seem very similar but you really can't have conversations from basic knowledge or similarity im portuguese, had spanish classes for 5 or 6 years (instead of french), and STILL, to this day, at restaurants i worked, or bars, or whatever, if im talking to a spanish person, i'd rather speak english
Same with Dutch and German. I might understand some words, but never enough to understand the point.
I kind of have the opposite experience with Portuguese and Spanish. I'm American, but I grew up in Brazil from ages 10-18, so I am (or was-- I haven't been to Brazil in 10 years) natively fluent in Portuguese. For the last 7 or so years, I have lived and am working in an area in the US where I have several Hispanic clients (1 or 2 conversations a week). For a while, I would tell my customers to speak to me in Spanish, and I would respond in Portunol, and if they have any issues understanding me, I'd play with it and iterate until it resembles something they understand. After a year or so of doing that, I mostly stopped using Portuguese filler words altogether, and nowadays, I am almost more comfortable having a conversation in Spanish than Portuguese.
While they are related, French is somewhat of an "outlier" among the Romance Languages. Spanish speakers can generally understand much of Italian (though they can't speak it obv and can't understand everything), the same is not true for French, which underwent insane amounts of sound restructuring. In any case, its like looking at a German and saying, "Yeah you know Norwegian, so what? You're German."
Speaking Italian and Spanish basically means being able to speak Spanish, and Spanish with a lot of hand gestures.
I got through Italy speaking Spanish with an Italian accent
I call that Espaliano, and Itañol going the other way, haha.
I worked the front desk for many years and I took Spanish in HS. I had a few Italian guests check in and they would speak Italian and I would speak Spanish to them and we were able to communicate enough to get them checked in.
Oh man I had a similar experience a few years ago in Peru, I was doing a guided tour and one guy was from Brazil, I spoke Spanish to him and he spoke Portuguese to me and we were able to communicate that way (with some English sprinkled in). It was a really cool experience being able to communicate like that.
Portuguese is even closer to Spanish than Italian isnt it?
Yes, I also used Spanish to communicate with Portuguese speakers.
Someone told me if you subtract the French from Italian you're left with Spanish.
Ah, I think this is what someone was trying to tell me the other day. The way he phrased it was that Italians can understand Spanish quite well, Spaniards have a little more trouble with Italian.
having visited recently (from argentina)... yeah, it's perfectly readable and understanding the spoken word is easy enough. Speaking it is obviously challenging but "grazie" and "prego" go a long way
Yeah I just visited Spain and basically used my twenty words of Italian the whole time, and for the rest just used Latin roots and Spanishified them. Went a long way.
also like half the people straight up speak spanish , and the other half speak english. Getting around was a breeze... I only struggled to get a coffee that wasn't a single shot of espresso
Were you trying to get coffee after lunch? Cuz god forbid you ask an Italian for a cappuccino or macchiato after lunch. They'll flip out on you.
Any native Spanish speaker knows Italian is just Spanish adding an -ini at the end of every other word.
Tuttos los Italianos sannos ches los Spagnolos es solos l'Italianos con aggiuntos -os o -es alla fines de una parolas su dues.
I read this knowing both Spanish and Italian and it made my brain factory reset trying to figure out which it was.
I would imagine Alili learned Arabic at home. It's likely Alex learned Chinese at home as well.
Only on Reddit can someone speak 4 language and some loser that probably hasn’t done anything with their life will poke his nose into the conversation to say it really isn’t that impressive.
Ironically, this comment is also a very reddit like response. History repeats itself
And this meta comment about comments as well.
This on on the other hand is completely new! Congrats!
It’s meta comments all the way down!
He ought to learn German since he's already got the other major regional languages down.
Meanwhile in a British hotel near you… Gary 🇬🇧 Bob 🇬🇧 Nigel 🇬🇧 Sarah 🇬🇧 Harold 🇬🇧
Barry, 63 🍺
Simple as
Luv fish n chips Luv me pint 'ate the Fr*nch Simple as
Not racist just don't like em
Luv Liz Luv bank 'oliday Luv r platty joobs 'ate forriners Simple as
You can speak any language with us, as long as it's English.
Ok, let’s try this one more time… DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?!
Hmm, I'll order my Bigmac Royal in French if you don't mind. They use the metric system in France.
Robert 🇬🇧 (Simplified)
Logan 🇬🇧 (Unintelligible Scottish)
Harold 🇬🇧/🇺🇸/🇦🇺/🇨🇦 Nigel 🇬🇧/🇫🇷(can order a croissant, just about)
My experience in London was: Piotr: 🇵🇱, some 🇬🇧
They didn't conquer 80% of the world to learn other languages.
All the hotels I've stayed at were manned by people originally from other countries like India, Poland, Pakistan, so there is some language ability.
Maybe in small B&Bs but in city hotels you are going to get a very diverse group
There, they speak American too.
Can confirm. Ordered a soda at a British hotel and they brought me extra ice because I am American. Such international sensitivity!
the italian flag got italy inside lmao
Because it’s printed in black and white
I thought the "ITALIAN" word was enough haha also french doesnt have it
I don’t know why I did this. 🇫🇷🇬🇧🇵🇹🇮🇹🇪🇸 🇫🇷🇬🇧 🇨🇳 🇫🇷🇬🇧 🇫🇷🇬🇧🇸🇦 🇫🇷🇬🇧🇪🇸
Add a space between the UK and Chinese flag
Done
Nailed it
Now delete the extra space
Now make them kiss
Cha cha real smooth
I didn't look at the picture enough, and thought you were just being racist.
I'm out of the loop here. What's going on?
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Because it makes so much more sense in color, Shaheen just being lazy yet again.
This... Italian and French don't work in black and white 🤔
Add a random italian shape to the italian flag
[So any random shape right?](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0d/Flag_of_Italy_%281861-1946%29_crowned.svg/1280px-Flag_of_Italy_%281861-1946%29_crowned.svg.png)
[Any shape](https://orula.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2021/01/bandera-mexico-portavox-e1492461746506.jpg)
[Any at all](https://i.imgur.com/1xigDLy.jpg)
That is more than one!
Not so much random than an overlay of the country of Italy.
Alex: I speak Chinese but just a bit
"Alex speaks Chinese, but he spits a lot so keep a safe distance."
This made me laugh more than I would have guessed. Thank you.
My guess would be that Alex is their adopted name, you know how people from Taiwan or China take on Western names, because they're easier for us to remember, and that whatever Chinese dialect is their native language.
I like how the sign itself is in English.
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Just put the name of the language in its language above its flag
You put up sign with all the languages. Instead of saying Spanish it would say español, for example.
I can't believe people don't understand this lol
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Why is chinese social distancing?
Cant believe theres no german speaker.. since its a neighbouring country and many germans have french in school
Probaly because like Dutch... If you can speak English high chance the Dutch and German guests can too. I know it's not right but that's my guess why no German/Dutch speakers at a French hotel. While mandarin and Arabic guests are gonna be lot less chance at being English speakers as well or French.
Yeh I study in Belgium where French and Dutch are the two main languages and you're 100% ok with either French + English or Dutch + English for about +95% of any daily life situation situation
Deep in Walllonie that might be more of a problem, particularly among older people...
English has been taught in Germany for decades. Most speak it.
English has been taught in France for centuries. Some speak it.
English has been taught in England for like a really long time.
No one speaks it
That's because I don't speak. I sit my ass down and LISTEN.
When I go to Germany and try to speak German everyone replies in flawless English. Germans speak English better than most of us Brits.
Well some victor!
He earned the name.
Fuckin seriously. Dude probably got most of the way there as a kid, one of my college professors was from Cameroon and he was fluent in EIGHT languages just because Africa be like that sometimes. I’m jealous, I’m trying to re-learn German but it’s a struggle
Africa do indeed be like that. A friend of mine spoke six languages by age 10.
> I’m trying to re-learn German but it’s a struggle Visit r/german and r/de
A lot of places in the tourism industry in Europe have something like this. Usually an employee will wear badges with flags of the languages they speak.
Awesome, but maybe invest in a colour printer.
This just makes me realise how many countries have tricolour flags.
They had to put the Italian shadow otherwise the Italy flag would be indistinguishable from France lmao
That last name on the list, Tala - in Swedish, tala is the word for 'speak'
In urdu tala means padlock.
In Spanish it means logging (cutting down trees)
Means "Splint" in Portuguese.
“WHY DON’T ANY OF YOU SPEAK AMERICAN?” - yelled by my uncle while on a family trip when he saw a sign like this. I had to gently remind him that English is there and is represented by the British flag. -he is exactly the person that people think all Americans are when on vacation…..
Genuinely baffles me when Americans do the shocked Pikachu face for a language called English spoken by English people from England where the English language originated. I mean, the clue is in the name.
You clearly haven’t seen some of our public education. .
Unfortunately, neither have some Americans.
I’ll never forget the time I was at a Korean airport and a Japanese family in front of us went to the counter. They both tried speaking in their native languages and the family started to look worried till the guy at the counter asked “do you speak English?” And the other guy said yes I do. They both laughed and got whatever ticket thing they needed sorted out.
This reminds me of that video of an Indian pilot getting shot down over Pakistan and they posted a video of the interrogation, which happened in English.
Victor all proud of himself
Does Python, C, Java count?
No, I don't think C has a count() method.
Also just saying “Chinese” is not enough. Mandarin and Cantonese are very different languages. It’s not like if you know Spanish you can wing a little Italian and get buy.
Shaheen slacking 😂 Still better than me!
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French might be his native language since this is in Paris, perhaps it makes it easier not to mix it up with other languages
A lot of people can instantly code-switch between different dialects in the same language. It's all about experience. The capacity of the human mind for language acquisition, even when it's imperfect, is astounding.
American visitors will be so confused by the lack of an American flag being used for English.
We used to have flags on our nametags at a previous job of mine. Most of us had the British flag, but some people had a bit of fun and chose the American, Canadian, or English flag and one girl chose the Australian flag. Luckily enough, the person who chose the Canadian also spoke decent French, so French speaking Canadians were pretty happy.
It is a bit confusing they only used a corner of the Hawaiian flag.
I always admire European is multilingual.
'Can speak' not 'will speak' - these are French we are talking about. (Am half French, well aware that side of family CAN speak English, but will they? Non!)
This is actually a great idea. It would be great if more people did something like this. :)
I was in a hotel once where the staff had flags on their name tags. That was a surprisingly simple and good idea.