• southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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    15 hours ago

    Fluently, only English.

    To enough range to ask for a hospital, Spanish and ASL.

    For enough to curse a little, add in french.

    I know a handful of martial arts related words in Japanese, though I never use them nowadays.

    Past that, we’re talking either jargon or a handful of words picked up at random.

    Now, I’m beastly with medical terminology, which has roots in Latin and Greek, so it sometimes seems like I speak a little of those, but it falls apart fast.

    If you want to consider math a language (and I do in the colloquial sense), I’m not quite fluent, but I can get by.

    I genuinely suck at learning languages. Vocabulary, I do fine with. It’s crossing the barrier into expressing ideas with a language as a whole that’s failboat.

    What’s kinda funny to me is that I can, in Spanish, use multiple accents. I naturally fall into the Castilian patterns I learned in high school, tinged by my own southern accent. But, I can switch to that Castilian without my accent with a little effort. I curse in a Mexico City accent because I learned that from a girlfriend that grew up there.

    But I’ve tried to pick up Gaelic, since I have some family that speak it, and couldn’t get past a handful of words before I could tell it was going to end up the same as Spanish for me.

    Tried going deeper into Japanese, but didn’t have the time to even get as far as I did with Spanish.

    I did pick up extra Latin, to the point I can read it okay, but I can’t speak it for shit.

    ASL, I was super disappointed how bad I was at it. I took a class on a lark for medical ASL, and just loved how it works. Then I took two semesters of it and discovered that my dawning arthritis made practicing hard, and quit so I could focus on other classes that I could develop skill in. But I still love Sign. The people that are fluent in it, and compose poetry with it are just next level awesome. I just can’t follow them lol.