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I think most people outside of the US will pick: "I speak more than one foreign language". Among my friends in western Europe speaking three conversational (us

I think most people outside of the US will pick: "I speak more than one foreign language". 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).

mbustamanter 5y ago
As native Spanish speaker, I confirm the closeness to Italian and Portuguese. Particularly in scientific literature, I can read words in Italian/Portuguese and the sound I hear in my head is in Spanish. Other than that I speak French and English, although it doesn't feel that much of an accomplishment given that all the aforementioned stem from Latin. 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.
- gumby 5y ago
  > 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?)
  - mbustamanter 5y ago
    Yes, that's why I can only do so with technical articles rather than conversational/general literature (papers rather than newspapers), the vocabulary is more standardized :)
- tmottabr 5y ago
  yeah... 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.
gumby 5y ago
> I think most people outside of the US will pick: "I speak more than one foreign language". 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.
- ushakov 5y ago
  can confirm it, in Germany, at least in my area people would get shocked if you speak to them in english they might have learned english in school, but in practice would get lost the second they have to apply the knowledge
  - hbogert 5y ago
    Yep, as a dutchman I'm amazed at the amount of German people not being able to speak English. They usually take for granted that dutch people will just speak German to them, which I can't, even after 4years of high school German.

mbustamanter 5y ago

As native Spanish speaker, I confirm the closeness to Italian and Portuguese. Particularly in scientific literature, I can read words in Italian/Portuguese and the sound I hear in my head is in Spanish. Other than that I speak French and English, although it doesn't feel that much of an accomplishment given that all the aforementioned stem from Latin. 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.

gumby 5y ago
> 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?)
- mbustamanter 5y ago
  Yes, that's why I can only do so with technical articles rather than conversational/general literature (papers rather than newspapers), the vocabulary is more standardized :)
tmottabr 5y ago
yeah... 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.

gumby 5y ago

> I think most people outside of the US will pick: "I speak more than one foreign language". 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.

ushakov 5y ago
can confirm it, in Germany, at least in my area people would get shocked if you speak to them in english they might have learned english in school, but in practice would get lost the second they have to apply the knowledge
- hbogert 5y ago
  Yep, as a dutchman I'm amazed at the amount of German people not being able to speak English. They usually take for granted that dutch people will just speak German to them, which I can't, even after 4years of high school German.