[Survey] HP users around the world

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

Country: Canada
English and a little German

[badaze]

Country: France
Fluent : French (of course), Italian.
Spoken : English, Friulan.
Basic understanding of (enough to watch videos and read articles and understand the majority of the content): Spanish, Portoguese.
Enough to order to drink and/or to eat : German, Czech, Dutch.

[TheKaneB]

Good stuff! I'll update the first post with the first aggregated results tomorrow!

There is a ton of diversity among us, that's beautiful!

[Thomas Okken]

(01-12-2018 08:13 PM)Massimo Gnerucci Wrote:  But private messaging disabled? Why?

I don't visit this forum regularly enough to make private messaging work. While I've been here almost daily recently, because of the interest in Free42 that the DM42 has caused, in quieter times I may not visit this site for weeks or months on end, and even when I do stop by, I usually don't log in. So, forcing people to send me email works better, because then I'll actually see their messages.

[vk6ti]

Country: Australia
Language spoken.: English but still learning after 55years
Otherwise: Italian ,
Get by on: Spanish, German

[Helix]

Country : France
Language spoken: French

I don't know in which category I should put English : I read technical articles and books with no difficulty, but I'm not confident when I'm writing in English, and I'm certainly unable to speak in English ! At school it was a disaster… I've improved in reading English only because there is much more interesting stuff on the web. When watching a video in English, it's only a basic understanding for me.
Perhaps another category should be added : language read !

Spanish : Basic understanding . In my engineer school, I choose Spanish as a foreign language, because I was much more fluent in Spanish than in English. Unfortunately, I've not used Spanish since then, so I have lost almost everything.

[salvomic]

(01-12-2018 11:28 PM)vk6ti Wrote:  Country: Australia
Language spoken.: English but still learning after 55years
Otherwise: Italian ,
Get by on: Spanish, German

...and another HAM here
73!
Salvo

[Gerson W. Barbosa]

Country: Brazil (Latitude: 25°25’25” S)
Native language: Portuguese (since late ‘61 or early ‘62)
2nd language: English (since ‘77)
3rd language: Italian (since 2004)
Non-native languages still in acquisition process.
Reasonable understanding of written French.
Very good understanding of both written and spoken Spanish (without ever taking a single lesson :-)

[TheKaneB]

I've updated the first post with the current data
It's too early to draw any conclusion, but I'm seeing an interesting pattern already

[TheKaneB]

(01-13-2018 01:02 PM)Gerson W. Barbosa Wrote:  Very good understanding of both written and spoken Spanish (without ever taking a single lesson :-)

Same for me! I think Spanish, Portuguese and Italian are so similar that we don't need to put that much effort to learn one if you are a native speaker of the others. I find French a bit difficult due to the pronunciation, but quite easy to read since the word roots are basically the same for all latin-derived languages.

[pier4r]

I think the distance between Spanish and Portuguese is smaller than Spanish -Italian or Portuguese - Italian.

Also it depends on which level one want to understand the other. I strongly believe every language has a "core" of 5-6 thousands words that are enough for most of the communications (due to the fact that in general we tend to simplify). Anyway when one reads literature, specialized technical literature or law stuff, then it is over.

Reading M.Proust in English is really difficult at times. It is even difficult in Italian because when the translator is good, the tenses and the words used are refined. In German is way out of my league.

Would be interesting to know how difficult is for a Frenchman to read Proust. I mean if the reading flows without much problems, or it requires focus (aside from the moments when Proust go lengths to overdescribe something, like this or that tower with bells because the bells remembers him bla bla bla bla ).

A person that I know that is a translator from French to German, says that she has to put some effort in French and absolutely a lot in German when reading such type of texts.


For the curious (Eng and French): https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/

[TheKaneB]

Yup pier4r, I agree on every point. Of course we are simplifying things here.
As an Italian I find it somewhat difficult to read classical pieces of literature, let's say from Dante, and even when speaking to an Italian literature professor I can feel the difference between our vocabularies. But here we are talking in a much more general way, there's no need to know 30k words to be able to order a pizza or to read a calculator manual

[smp]

Country = USA
Primary language = English
Language with basic understanding = French

smp

[pier4r]

(01-13-2018 02:48 PM)TheKaneB Wrote:  there's no need to know 30k words to be able to order a pizza or to read a calculator manual

Hmm, new possible todo in the heap of my todos. Make a RPL flashcard program (I still have mine on the 50g incomplete) that is also able to order a pizza, but only if one replies correctly to enough cards.

Sounds a nice program to use. Starve if you don't know.

[Didier Lachieze]

Country: France
Languages spoken: French, English
Basic understanding of : German (I was quite fluent 30 years ago but have not practiced since then)

[badaze]

Italian is the closest language to French due to obvious common origin. My wife, who is 100% French and doesn't speak Italian at all, is able to understand an Italian speaker when he speaks slowly.
I noticed that the more the language is elevated the more the words look alike and that also true between French and English.
Did you know that there are more than 3000 words that have the same spelling and the same meaning ? While they are few between Italian and French. So far I only noticed the short sentence "un virus fragile" that can be French and Italian.
But in fact there are thousands words in English that can be understood in French even if they have not the same spelling. For instance, "common" for "commun", "origin" for "origine", "language" for "langage","spell" for "épeler", etc... "Nurse" is the english pronounciation for "nourrice", "flirt" for "compter fleurette" that has the same meaning. Even "feasible" for "faisable".
Between French and Italian there are some rules that allow to understand words in the other language. For instance, an I followed by a vowel in Italian gives often an L in French (piazza => place, ghiaccio => glace, pianeta => planète, piombo => plomb). An ê or an â in French gives an S in Italian (forêt => foresta, prêt => presto o prestito, bête => bestia). The funniest word I found was "biasimare" that according to the rules gives "blâmer" ! Blâmer looks like "to blame" but is not exactly a true cognate.

[salvomic]

(01-13-2018 06:33 PM)badaze Wrote:  ...
Between French and Italian there are some rules that allow to understand words in the other language. For instance, an I followed by a vowel in Italian gives often an L in French (piazza => place, ghiaccio => glace, pianeta => planète, piombo => plomb). An ê or an â in French gives an S in Italian (forêt => foresta, prêt => presto o prestito, bête => bestia). The funniest word I found was "biasimare" that according to the rules gives "blâmer" ! Blâmer looks like "to blame" but is not exactly a true cognate.

oui, sì, yes: that's Romance philology... French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian come from Latin (but also Gallego, Catalan, Provençal, Sardo, Friulano and all Italian dialects and French patoises), with not so different linguistic form evolutions.
If a "Romance" speaker read enough about those similitudes can at least understand if not speak another Romance language easily.

Salvo

[Thomas Okken]

(01-13-2018 07:06 PM)salvomic Wrote:  If a "Romance" speaker read enough about those similitudes can at least understand if not speak another Romance language easily.

I find this mutual intelligibility of the Romance languages interesting, because it seems very different from the situation with the Germanic languages. Dutch kids really have to work to learn German, even though those two languages are each other's closest relatives. I found English quite a bit of work to master as well (though easier than French, although French is easier to pronounce), but I find the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian) absolute gibberish, especially when spoken. I guess the Germanic languages have been diverging from each other a lot longer.

[pier4r]

I suppose this is due to latin. Latin was imposed/embraced and then from there the different dialects diverged, but for long hundreds of years they were influenced by the same language.

Germanic languages had multiple tribes/kingdoms that never fully mastered the others for long time. Aside from English recently that become the new lingua franca (was was latin before with some sprinkles of french, spanish and German according to the case).

[badaze]

(01-13-2018 08:12 PM)Thomas Okken Wrote:  

(01-13-2018 07:06 PM)salvomic Wrote:  If a "Romance" speaker read enough about those similitudes can at least understand if not speak another Romance language easily.

I find this mutual intelligibility of the Romance languages interesting, because it seems very different from the situation with the Germanic languages. Dutch kids really have to work to learn German, even though those two languages are each other's closest relatives. I found English quite a bit of work to master as well (though easier than French, although French is easier to pronounce), but I find the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian) absolute gibberish, especially when spoken. I guess the Germanic languages have been diverging from each other a lot longer.

What you wrote reminds me that when I studied Dutch at college (a long long time ago) there were two german students and they didn’t have better ratings than us french students.