Ask Lemmy

Yes, I wish I was multilingual but I’m monolingual. It’s amazing to be able to speak multiple languages and it opens up opportunities.

I’m a middle aged white male. Learning languages is difficult for me at my age because of time and effort needed. I would love to learn Spanish and Arabic though. Or perhaps Mandarin.

I am not yet bilingual, but if you asked any of my American friends, I am. I moved to Norway at 39, and 5 years later still struggle to understand spoken Norwegian. I speak and read it, in my opinion, okay. I really envy people who can at least understand a foreign language even if they can’t express themselves in it. You at least have some semblance of what’s going on even if you can’t fully participate.

In my experience, having English only as a mother tongue is awful in Europe/scandanavia. But growing up with any other language, having English as at least a 2nd language, wow look at all those open doors.

The US public school system does not set kids up for success, in their own country or abroad. The foreign language requirement in HS is a joke and effectively sets us up to be able to overconfidently order coffee and ask where the museum is if we ever get to travel abroad.

I have heard that they start out here in Norway with English pretty young (maybe 8-10yo?) as a requirement, and then add mandatory electives later in French, German, or Latin. I don’t have kids in school so this may not be 100% accurate.

I'm from Brazil and I'm very happy to have almost fluent english and crappy spanish.

It's also quite useful. Not only is english spoke everywhere online, but there where cases where my spanish was useful for my job.

I neither envy nor admire people that speak multiple languages fluently. It's a useful skill, but it's not strictly necessary where I live. If I lived in Europe, or near the border with a country that spoke another language, it would be more useful. But where I am, and where I've largely lived, it's a skill that's more useful than juggling, but less useful than being able to drive a car without getting in accidents.

I would largely suggest that most people should learn at least two languages though: English and Klingon. If you speak Klingon, you'll be able to fluently converse with nerds from any country. :)

Spanish, English, and some Japanese here. I feel it's easier to pick up underlying patterns in vocabulary between languages which in turn lets me understand the written form of other related languages (Portuguese and Italian due to Spanish, some Chinese too). I don't really consider monolingual to be all that different though I figure it can limit their ability to travel the world unhindered somewhat. I notice a very slight change in my personality depending on the language I'm speaking, like I get a little less patient when talking in Spanish and speak a little faster too.

The funny thing is - I think I was rather made to feel inferior. There was always that notion that I might fail because German is not my actual mother tongue. I was really good in school and got super bored in elementary. So my mom went to the principal to discuss whether I could at least for math join the higher grades or even skip a grade. This is when my school realized - based on my mother's heavy accent - that I had a migrational background and put me into a special ed after school program. It was degrading.

Right now our child is being raised bi(and a half)lingual. And while it is superficially considered great that she is being raised bilingual, we are also practically facing a lot of cynical behavior.

We were asked to speak German to her when she started kindergarten/preschool at 3 years old (which is actually not recommended to preserve the home language) so that she would have a faster time adjusting. Simultaneously, we are being told to avoid German at all cost and push her Russian much more by other groups, with the suggestion to make her learn how to write and read Russian at least a year before she starts school and not read German at all. We can't do it right no matter what.

She has a birth date that would qualify her to register for school a year earlier (she would regularly go a year earlier if we hadn't moved to another federal state), and it is already pretty clear they won't let her because they "want to make sure her German is good enough for school". She excels in both languages btw and is well above average in terms of expression and vocabulary, as we were told by her kindergarten teachers, yet still - we get the default answer that she will likely not be able to start school early because of her knowing Russian along with German.

So, no, in everyday life, I feel disadvantaged. It also highly depends on what language combo you look at. German and English? German and Spanish? Nice, wow, how amazing! German and Russian? German and Arabic? Ooof you will probably have difficulties in school, poor you. I'm not even going to start with the casual racism here.

It's not like I feel superior, I feel pitty for those that didn't have the opportunity to develop more than 1 language in their infancy, it affects brain development in a major way and it definitely is easier to go from 2 to 3. Even here in Spain, I do feel that there are more english speaking people in the Basque Country (where people natively tend to know two VERY grammatically different languages by default) than the rest of Spain. Everyone learns english in school, yet I feel like we retain more? Idk, that might be naive nationalism.

Am I superior? No. Did I have a superior infancy learning process as far as languages go? Yes.

I'm fluent in Basque, Spanish and English. I sorta kinda somewhat understand most Latin languages, as most natives do.

Monolingual, and yes I envy multilingual people. It's simply better.

I flunked Spanish and French so I think I just have poor language learning aptitude.

I love learning languages because it constantly reassures me how similar we all are regardless of superficial differences.

Every time I visited a new country for the first several years I was traveling it was like "oh, but what if the rumors are true and-" and then I'd talk to a couple people and everyone would be like "I value good food, intimacy, housing, and expressing myself". Maybe they paint, maybe they're a programmer, intellectually/physically disabled or a pilot, but people are, in my mind, undoubtedly people first, just like all the other people.

Now I've been traveling for 15 years and I don't worry about "them" in a new country being any different than everyone else I know. Chinese are Texans are Guatemalans are people, people, people and you have everything in common with them.

English, Mandarin, Spanish, and I'm crappy to mid in a bunch of others.

I don't think I'm better than them, but it sure seems like I feel better about myself than they feel about themselves. I doubt that has anything to do with number of languages, though.

English, Spanish, Latin

I did have a bit of a superiority complex in high school, but that's because I was fluent in Japanese which was considered a "cool" language that basically no one else at HS was fluent in. But after that not much. Besides I don't think most people would realize or care that I'm fluent in three languages

Now I live in a city where most people are multilingual and I don't speak the local language (French) despite all the other languages I speak or understand so... I definitely feel inferior, but I don't think that's what you are asking

I am fluent in Chinese/Japanese/English; my Japanese got way worse after HS but I can still read news/play videogames and hold up a conversation. I've learned a bit of German and French so I have some basic reading comprehension

It bothers me to be monolingual. But I have zero contacts with which to interact on a daily and practice all the German I learned at my university.

I speak Dutch and English fluently, I can have a conversation in French and German and I can read Italian, Spanish and the Nordic languages.

Being able to make myself understood in a large part of the world is a comforting thought, but does not much for my self-esteem. I would think that it should be the default to be taught foreign languages at school. If you are in a non-English (and possibly Spanish) speaking country and you refuse to learn other langugages, then I would consider you to be a bigoted idiot. I am not talking learning disabilities here, I am talking explicit unwillingness.

I sincerely have no idea how other people may feel about (not) speaking foreign languages, it's up to them. Also, it's not a competition with a single winner and many losers. It's like being able to draw (I love doing that, I'm shit at it) or to dance (I can't, but I love watching dance and ballet).

Personally, I don't feel better because of the languages I speak. It's just a decision I made, and then a question of putting in the required work (aka, time and efforts). But I am happy to be able to read/speak those languages.

As an avid reader, it's something I always considered a necessity as I wanted to be able read books in their native language in order to fully appreciate them. It's also so much better when interacting with other people, even for someone as shy as I am, to be able to speak in their native language even poorly and in a limited way (I'm not fluent in all of the few languages I understand, far from it).

I think it's important to mention that as I too often met people that are afraid to learn and even more so that are unable to speak in a foreign language because they worry so much about being judged. It's true we all are bad when we're starting out but that's still a real sad mistake to let that stop us as a vast majority of people will be more than welcoming to anyone trying to speak their language. For the record, I say that as someone who is monstrously shy (like, really) and speaks with a terrible French accent. So, I know perfectly well what it's like to feel intimidated ;)

The one language I would love the most to learn but never managed to is Chinese.

There are writers, thinkers, and poets I would love to read not in a translation (and many more that are not even available in translation, sadly). But it's also so complex to the point of being intimidating... This year, I almost managed to convince myself to apply to one of the schools teaching Chinese, here in Paris, but money and, like I said, me being utterly shy made it so that I not-that-accidentally missed the deadline.

Also, I'm starting to get old (well into my 50s) and my health not being that great I worry more and more it would be a waste of a seat that a much younger person could make better use of.

I don't see any differently at it than some people can juggle and others can't. Or some people play instruments and others don't. They are not better or worse for it

I speak 3 languages and it's just normal to me. If someone looks up to that then it's great but I don't feel more valuable or better for it.

Well, I'm objectively better than them at speaking multiple languages but that's about it. I don't see why I should feel better about myself as a whole because of that. There are other things I'm good at as well as ones I'm not.

Not really, since I never get to actually use those skills other than watching media from Japan (or I guess Spain/Mexico since I also know Spanish).

I know Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish (and used to play around in Esperanto). I always loved learning languages but it wasn’t until later in life living in Los Angeles and speaking/hearing Spanish daily and then traveling to Mexico with my wife (who’s from there) that I really started feeling the benefits.

Knowing another language really opens doors in so many ways even if sometimes it’s only in small “insignificant” ways.

The first time I felt California was home was walking into a convenience store and being greeted in Spanish and carrying on the conversation like it was nothing.

Traveling to Mexico and being able to converse and learn all about another culture while being completely immersed in it is a powerful experience.

I don’t feel superior or better than others but when I talk to my monolingual friends and family back home I do feel a bit sad that they can’t understand or take part in some of those experiences.

I like hearing languages I don't understand because I can pretend they're talking about something intelligent.

I speak mandarin and malay frequently, can converse in english (only fluent when the codeswitch went well), understand hokkien and cantonese (chinese dialect, but can't speak it well), and no i don't really feel better than people who's monolingual. To me, being multilingual only mean i can understand more group of people, but to actually able to comprehend and express well, i still feels very lacking on those. Also my lexicon is limited, my head can only store that much info.

It opens doors and makes one feel more comfortable in certain social situations, but I wouldn't say it makes me feel like I'm "better" than others. And I speak Spanish, English and French. 👍