What is your native/first/best/usual language?

[player1]

We often assume that many of you are native English speakers, but for many forum users, English is a foreign/second/additional/unusual language. I don't want to start any Us vs. Them kind of flamewars, but I was just wondering what language some of our forum users were brought up speaking, how long they've been utilizing English, and how they like our wonderful and consistent language. If you'd like to reply, fine; if not, that's fine, too. If you'd just like to say that English is not your native tongue without being more specific as to your nationality and location, that's fine also.

As for those of you for whom English is your native language, I'd just like to say that spellcheck can be your friend. Thread-starters, in particular, may want to at least make sure that the thread name/title/subject is correctly spelled. Otherwise, you may appear to be lazy/careless/thoughtless/foolish.

Cheers!

Me: American
Language: English (the American kind)
Other Languages: 2 yrs. of high school German, 1 yr. of high school French, and a quick non-credit course in Korean
P.S. High school for me was over a quarter-century ago, and I rarely have a chance to use German, French or Korean.

Maybe this is Off-Topic, and if so, please move it. It seemed to be along the lines of "How old are you?", "Where are you located?", etc.

[kevlarman]

the "how old are you?" topic was created before there was an offtopic section i think.

[Rocinante]

Why not

Me: American
Language: English
Other Languages: Three years Deutsch (also in high school, and 1.5 decades ago)

[TinMan]

Location: USA, Chicago
Native: British English
Fun/Heritage: tsalagi

[player1]

I just learned at least two things about TinMan. One: he was apparently born somewhere that British English is the native language; and, two: he apparently (like about half the people in the U.S.) has some Cherokee heritage. I also learned the native name for the Cherokee language. New grooves are fun to make in your brainpan.

@kev: thx 4 the move

[FoXx]

You probably weren't expecting this:

Me: Dutch
Language: Dutch
Other languages: Deutsch, English

[Atom Eve]

I'm American, and my native language is English. I can speak some basic French, German, and Spanish. I'm was also once fairly fluent in Japanese, though I never learned to read it.

[Knowitall66]

Nationality: Australian
Primary Language: English
Other Languages: 1yr Italian, 1yr Japanese, 1yr Indonesian (Though remember little to nothing of them)

[snb]

Nationality/location: Haitian Haiti(SNB district A2)
Primary Languages: Creole, sub English A, English (real language its basicly english but some of the words not needed have been taken out and there are 10,000 more curse words it was also created by the SNB weopons company)
Other Languages: kinda know a little spanish

[TinMan]

Oooh! I know some Japanese too! I learned my Hiragana and Kanji, then dropped the class because the other two writing systems required way too many crazy strokes and I sucked at comprehending things said to me.

@player1: I grew up in the boonies/sticks outside of Chicago. I learned how to spell colour as colour by reading a few books, many newsprints, and the internets! Oh yeah...and then there are PBS channels to blame for my pronunciation, which these forums have no knowledge of! I try to pronounce things in their native tounge. For example, I pronounce Linux as "lee-nuhks," as that's the Swedish pronunciation of the word opposed to the butchered "lin-nix" that I have to hear every other American say.
And yes, I am of Comanche blood...and Slav, but we dear not mention them...my family crest has a picture of a sabre beheading a Hun over it. xD

[Kaleo]

Australian
English
Very little Japanese

[whitebear]

Location: Finland
Native: Finish
Native secondary: Swedish (but I barely understand it.)
Learned: English

[Kaleo]

Do you like Finnish Death Metal?

[mooseberry]

American:

Native: English

Other: about 1 year of German, quite a few of Spanish, and a few words in Italian and French.

[whitebear]

Do you like Finnish Death Metal?

No.That stuff is yelling and very unmusical.

[PIE]

First language: English
I have moderately working Spanish. Remnants of high school Latin (ubi oh ubi est meum sub ubi?!) and i'm dabbling in Japanese though very soon I plan to start taking it seriously in an attempt to become fluent... also a very small bit of German.

[whitebear]

Whoa... Japanese is really starting to kick in. Kinda glad. ^^
I can't claim to know much Japanese but I get the general idea even if I watch an anime episode without subs.

[==Troy==]

Main : English/Russian (I am still not sure which one is better, both are rubbish though)
Secondary languages : German, French, a bit of Polish, a tiny bit of Esperanto and Italian.
Tertirary languages : C++, C#, Perl.

[player1]

Whoa... Japanese is really starting to kick in. Kinda glad. ^^
I can't claim to know much Japanese but I get the general idea even if I watch an anime episode without subs.

My housemate watches a lot of Korean shows. I can get the gist just from the facial expressions and tone of voice, generally.
(Plus I've seen about twenty years worth of the nun-mur or "eye-water" shows, the plot is always the same.)
The only thing I can do fairly fluently in Korean is order food at a Korean restaurant, but if the waitress starts answering back in Korean I'm sunk. 
Also, the honorific system can leave a Westerner slightly confused: which of the three to seven ways to say "Thank You" should I use for this particular individual (for instance)? Komo, Komowayo, Kamsahamnida, etc.

@whitebear: Where in Finland are you?
@==Troy==: Where are you located, dude?

[Taiyo.uk]

mine natif langwij ist engrisch.

[==Troy==]

@==Troy==: Where are you located, dude?

This thread is about languages isnt it?   But I am teh from Britiz country ))

[gareth]

english english / leet.

[Amanieu]

Born in Belgium
Lived in China for 11 years
Native language: French
Secondary language: English
Third language: Chinese

You don't see many frenchies over here because they have their own trem forum 

[NiTRoX]

Born in Malta
I live in Malta.
First Language: Maltese/English (Maltese mainly used)
Second Language: English
Third: Italian
Fourth: French (I can understand what I read but not good at making conversations)

[E-Mxp]

Location: Holland
First language: Dutch
Second: English

[whitebear]

whitebear: Where in Finland are you?

Jyväskylä. (City in the middle of Finland) Name would translate as grain village.
I've read few Korean manga and enjoyed. Id is the best!

[player1]

In Korea they say man-hwa. When I lived in NYC, they had a Korean manhwa store. You can rent the comics and bring them back, or sit in the store and read them (and drink coffee, and, at that time, smoke cigarettes, too). You paid a nominal fee to join, and then a small fee to rent the comics. It was a good way for me to learn their alphabet, Hangul, which is a phonetic alphabet, but grouped into syllables. It takes a while to get used to comic book sound effects in a foreign language. In Korea, dogs don't go "woof-woof", they go "mung-mung". Also, some of their comics read right-to-left, top-to-bottom, starting from the "back" cover, which also is a trip when you first try it.

I liked Outlanders, by Johji Manabe, as long as we are talking about manga.

Most of the Korean stuff was about baseball, dating and ancient Chinese warriors. Not as many giant robots.

@==Troy==: I just wondered where you live when you said Russian was one of your main languages. I didn't know if we had anyone in Russia actually playing Tremulous.

[==Troy==]

@==Troy==: I just wondered where you live when you said Russian was one of your main languages. I didn't know if we had anyone in Russia actually playing Tremulous.

Corbina, Planeta Moscow and Star ATCS are Russian servers.

[PlasmaPL]

Nationality: Polish
Language: English, Polish
Other: Spanish, a little french.

Whoa... Japanese is really starting to kick in. Kinda glad. ^^

I don't see why anyone who isn't living or often travelling to Japan should learn Japanese. Of course it's a nice language, but not very useful ( unless someone watches loads of anime without subs xD ). I guess a better language to learn would be Chinese judging by the ammount of chinese coming to  Europe. In 10 years, the world will be flooded with the Chinese.

[khalsa]

Location: Texas!
Language: Punjabi / English
Other Languages:
Spanish - Enough to get by with spanish-only speakers ;
Russian - enough to bug kev with ;
German - enough to get out of germany ;
Hindi - close enough to Punjabi that I can claim to 'KNOW' it completely short of writing it ;
Kashmiri - ditto ;
Urdu - Enough to tell some dirty jokes/understand some dirty jokes.

English is the worst language ever.

Khalsa