Learning a new language is enriching -- it automatically unlocks so much culture and entertainment.
currently: russian (native), english and german secondary
wikipedia has explanation for the phrase
https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/да_нет,_наверное
if i'm saying this phrase to somebody, then i'm suggesting that something may not be truth, in plain english it means "probably not" or "i guess not"
Haha my friend introduced me to Little Big... starting with the BIG D song...
> i'm suggesting that something may not be truth
Ahh yes I remember now. Thanks for the link :) !
Makes me sad, in some ways, because it used to be “more than one”.
(I’m Canadian and have fluent English and French by virtue of education and marriage, and have learned and can still get by in Spanish. My Turkish, Arabic, and German have all faded, my Greek was never that great, and I may still be able to order two large beers in Polish.)
Learned English through early exposure to computer stuff, later enhanced by learning the grammar from school and becoming fluent by watching English language movies, books, and using it on Usenet and IRC.
One side of my family has some Italian background but unfortunately it didn't reach me and then 4 years of Italian in school left me with some very basic level knowledge. But I'm currently trying to improve that with Duolingo and Italian language subreddits.
7 years of French with (again unfortunately) 3 different terrible teacher. Can't even order a coffee in French.
7 years of Latin. Basically no fluency :-) but I still retain some reading skills. It was by far the best foreign language education I had. In hindsight, I find it surprising that no other class taught you almost no history or culture of the particular language.
With Latin classes I learned so much about history, culture and literature, even if I forgot every bit of Latin words and grammar, it still would have been worthwhile.
I have conversational fluency in Japanese, as I live in Japan and have a Japanese wife.
I'd like to learn Korean or Thai, as we travel to those places often (at least before the pandemic). I've learned the Korean alphabet, memorizing it on the airplane over there, the first time I went, actually. I can read Korean aloud, such as when ordering at a restaurant, but I sure as hell don't know what any of the sounds I am making mean. It's fun to go to a restaurant, order something, and be surprised at what comes to your table.
Among my friends in western Europe speaking three conversational (usually native, English + French or German) seems to be the norm while being able to understand (but not speak) usually 1 or 2 more, depending on where they life, work and their education.
Some countries have it a bit easier (e.g Dutch and German are close, I think that Italian, Spanish and Portuguese are also close, etc).
As an aside, I don't consider German to be a language I speak or even understand perfectly when I hear it, but being equipped with all those languages reading papers in German is a walk in the park.
I find when reading a news article in Italian I can get the bones of the article (bank robbery, police chase, no injuries, size of sum stolen) but not the meat (so we’re the robbers caught or did they get away?)
I do speak both portuguse (native) and fluent spanish to the point that native speakers sometimes thinking i am also native spanish speaker, but it almost fell like cheating the pool because both languages are so close.
One fun point, i never really took proper Spanish classes, i started working with Spanish customer in 2008 and just took a 3 or 4 classes just to get the basics for the job interview i had to do. I got fluent actually speaking with our customer all over latin america.
Beside those i also speak english that i learned mostly by playing video games.
That might be true of an HN poll but I would be surprised if it were of an exhaustive survey of the world population.
Some anecdata:
My (former) in laws in large country in Western Europe speak only one language and it isn’t English. Likewise of own family in Australia (I’m not living there) I am the only polyglot. I know plenty of people in the UK who speak only English.
Even in my (100% remote) company, while all business is conducted in English we have some on the team who are only really functional in their country’s language and rely on zoom translation (which I only learnt of on Thursday). I happen to speak their language so in 1:1 conversations we used that.
they might have learned english in school, but in practice would get lost the second they have to apply the knowledge
I know enough Spanish to read it or generally understand what's being said, but not speak it.
Currently trying to get to that same level with my wife's native tongue, but it's not romance nor germanic so significantly more difficult (for me).
I'm at the same time improving my English and starting to learn Standard Chinese ( Mandarim ).
In any case, I speak two languages natively, one of which is English.
I for one don't know the intent of the question. Is there a reason the poster phrased it as "foreign languages" instead of "multilingual," or is that a language difference?
From a different perspective, English and French are both foreign languages, brought to the land by colonizers.