Ask Lemmy

4: English, Spanish, French, and Japanese Bonus: Yes

Eight: English, German, French, Spanish, Latin, Russian, Japanese, ASL.

Bonus question: do you ever do your counting in a non-native language, just to make it more interesting?

Russian occasionally. ASL when I'm counting how many seconds the cat has to stay quiet before I give her a treat.

German, English, French and Upper Sorabian

Bonus: nope, but I sometimes try counting in Binary with my fingers.

But damn there are some smart people here!

English, Cantonese, Mandarin, German, Japanese

I'm native at the first two, fluent in Mandarin, currently learning German, and Japanese I learned by watching Puyo Puyo gameplay.

English, French, Spanish, Japanese.

French is lapsed, Spanish broken, and Japanese I know only that required for karate class.

My French was conversational, my Spanish was touristy (what time does the bank open? Where's the bathroom? Etc), and my Japanese was never getting better. But I miss the fluidity of thought and I'm sad to have lost ground on my language goals since COVID.

English (school/friends): one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten

German (school): eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs (hehe sex), sieben, acht, neun, zehn

Marathi (native): Ek, don, teen, char, pach, saha, saat, aath, naoo, daha

Hindi (friends/school): Ek, do, teen, char, panch, cchah, saat, aath, naww, thus

Eins, Zwei, Drei, Vier, Fünf, Sechs, Sieben, Acht, Neun, Zehn (German, Native)

One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten (English, know this pretty well)

Un, Deux, Trois, Quatre, Cinq, Six, Sept, Huit, Neuf, Dix (French, least sure about this one)

いち、に、さん、よん、ご、ろく、なな、はち、きゅう、じゅう (日本語, I love it but it's still hard)

一、二、三、四、後、六、七、八、九、十 (also 日本語 but with kanji)

Three. Spanish, Korean, and English.

6 languages to 10 for me.

Counting to 20 or 100 would be a better measure of knowing the numbers of that language, since some languages become weird at 10 or 70 onwards, for example, french.

Some like Mandarin or malay, we just need to mainly just learn to 10, and it is very consistent and logical after that.

I can count to ten in English (native), Japanese (did Karate for about a decade) and Spanish (took classes in middle and high school).

I can ... read and listen to Spanish and maybe understand at about a 2nd or 3rd grade level... very much out of practice.

I would not say I can speak Japanese or understand it ... basically at all, unless the conversation entirely consists of either counting, or using nouns describing Karate forms, lol.

The first time I dated ... a combination weeabo and owns her own horses, horse girl, who was actually taking Japanese in college to major in it...

She asked me a very grammatically basic question in Japanese, a yes no question...

And I responded 'Osu!'... and then quickly learned that that is not a standard Japanese word for 'yes', that would be 'Hai', and that Osu ... basically only contextually makes sense in the context of a dojo or some other sports/military type setting.

Apparently in proper/normal? Japanese it is a casual greeting amongst martial arts practitioners... but I was literally drilled to say it as an enthusiastic, affirmative response to any command.

EDIT: Also, this will sound insane, but I swear to god this actually happened: Many years after the aforementioned clarification from my at the time gf... I later encountered a man who told me he was ... a yakuza, specifically a yakushi... we chatted for hours, he showed me how one of his fingers had been severely busted at the knuckle.

He explained to me that... there had been a fuckup on his part, but his... direct superior decided to basically accept some of the blame for the fuckup of this guy I met, and struck him with the blunt side of the blade instead of the sharp side... and then exiled him.

Which was why he was in America, and could no longer safely return to Japan.

Anyway, he explained to me that the reason why... most Japanese say 'yon' instead of 'shi' to mean '4' ... is because 'shi' is also the character/sound that... basically means 'death'.

Which then circled around to why he referred to himself as a 'yakushi'.

As he explained it to me, it meant that he had both dealt, and been sparred from death.

... I have no idea if what this guy was saying is actually true, if he actually was a yakuza... but he did tell me these things and seemed very serious about them.

Four. Sign language, Mandarin + Mandarin hand signs, Spanish, English - and yes, I do use the other languages to entertain myself.

English, German, French, Dutch, Finnish.

With a bit of effort I might get pretty close in Spanish or Latin, but I'd probably make some mistakes, so that doesn't count.

English, Croatian, Polish and German.

Portuguese, Spanish, French, English, Swedish and Finnish.

English, German, Spanish, ASL... 4

I learned how to count to 10 and a few other random bits of Korean in Tae Kwon Do class.

4: Persian, English, Chinese, French

I used to be able to do so in Esperanto and Arabic as well but not anymore.

I can do it in English, Greek, German, Czech, Italian, Dutch, and Spanish (but I only speak the first 3)

English, German, Austrian and Eastern Swiss

Portuguese, English, Japanese, German and in a good day, Spanish.

Portuguese is native; English and Japanese I learned from consuming content in those languages; German comes from my family (though I recently started studying it too). And Spanish because it's very similar to Portuguese so I just need to remember the differences.

I have four and so does my wife! English, French, German, Spanish/Russian (learnt before it was uncool).

Edit: I remembered I can do Dutch as well. So 5 for me, 4 for her. I could only remember 4 and 5 in Latin, had to look the rest up.

chinese (epiphany) german (language class) english (epiphany) french (hamilton) japanese (karate) spanish (language class) in no particular order (provenance)

Hmmm... English, French, German, Spanish. Japanese numbers, yes, but only half that if we're counting things (iykyk 🫤). I should learn Mandarin 1-10...

My pronunciation ofc is abysmal.

One two three four five six seven eight nine ten (English)

Aon dó trí ceathar cúig sé seacht ocht naoi deich (Irish)

один два три четыре пять шесть семь восемь девять десять (Russian)

un deux troix quatre cinq six sept huit neuf dix (French)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (cheating)

English, French, Spanish, Korean, Mandarin, probably a few others I'm forgetting, I'm not good with translating numbers into sounds, I'd probably have more on the list if you ask me what languages i can say "it's okay" in, oh yeah i got the itchy knee I can do Japanese too. I think I learned Thai at some point before I gave up on their alphabet.

also counting in different romance languages is lame, show me how many language FAMILIES you can count in. oh shit you got the Bantu! oh yeah I can also do turkish

I speak three languages and I can count in ten.

Not a hard guess, to be honest, lots of people pick up numbers from popular culture (Spanish songs are big on counting, but weirdly, German ones as well). And if you study an Eastern martial art, chances are you'll learn to count to ten in the corresponding language from your instructor.

Or I don't know, maybe my brain is weird and I'm collecting numbers, that's a non-zero possibility.

Spoken: 3 at best. Counting to 10: 6.

Not just counting, but sometimes I might say a word or a phrase in another language because I find it sounds humorous in the moment. Poor Italian gets ridiculed the most 🤌🤌.

English, Spanish, French, Latin, Russian, German, Japanese, Cantonese, ...

So 8. 10 is not very high. I'd have Arabic too, but I can only get to 5 :)

Edit: I can speak 3 of them, 2 passably, English natively. I took 5 of them in school. I had a Rammstein phase. 17 years Karate. And I dated a Hong Kong girl for 6 years and her family liked to play mah-jong but didn't speak English.

English, Swedish, French, Hebrew, Latin