How many languages can you read (and, of course, understand) without the help of an online translator?

@GustavinoBevilacqua would be interesting to see the results of a secobd poll with the same question, but tooted and boosted at a different time of the day (so it might reach people in other parts of the world).

@GustavinoBevilacqua Dutch English German and French

@GustavinoBevilacqua are we counting human languages only? Because the answer would be higher if I also count programming languages

@GustavinoBevilacqua How does one vote for one and a bit? :-)

@GustavinoBevilacqua
If you know a Latin language, then similar ones are easy, e.g. Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Portuguese, Galician...

@GustavinoBevilacqua Perfectly understand it's 2, but understand simple texts, or generally understand more complex ones it would be 4-5 (I entered 2-3 in the poll)

I took "understand" to mean "understand what I'm reading" not "understand when spoken" (which would immediately bring my score down by about 75%)

@GustavinoBevilacqua I'd have been better to choose 1, 2, 3, 4, more because the difference between 2 and 3 is the most important thing I'm interested here.

@GustavinoBevilacqua I'm a US-American and not proud of it. Only fluent in English, so I selected "1" in the poll. Though I do know some Spanish (studied on and off for decades), a tiny bit of German (studied for a year in college 30 years ago), and have been doing French lessons on DuoLingo for about six months.

@GustavinoBevilacqua I I answered 2 language, but in fact I regularly use a dictionary for both

@GustavinoBevilacqua counting "it's slow and takes a lot of effort"

@GustavinoBevilacqua pretty hard to answer. I sometimes even look up English stuff, on the other hand, I do online translating into English because it usually gets better results. Also sometime look up stuff in my native language. So, while being able to read at least 4, the answer could have been 0. (And I also have to factor in that some languages are similar enough to read, like if you know Danish, Norwegian text looks like text with a lot of typos)

@GustavinoBevilacqua i voted 5+ because while i can only speak turkish english and italian, i can also comprehend written spanish french portuguese well enough

(of course how one defines a language matters a lot, e.g. many arabic varieties are considered dialects of a singular language, albeit being just as variable as romance languages.. tho i'm quelling the linguist pedant side of me and going with the varieties politically considered to be languages :blobcatgiggle:)

@GustavinoBevilacqua Fluent in 3 but I can also kinda read russian and mostly understand it without a dictionary so just barely falling in the 4-5 category

@GustavinoBevilacqua ho messo 4 o 5 ma non è vero, dipende dal livello di complessità del testo e poi sono molto pigro, quindi ogni tanto uso il traduttore, però mi è capitato di leggere interi libri in inglese francese e spagnolo, però non capendo proprio tutto.
il problema comunque è il vocabolario che è un problema solo quantitativo, ci sono tanti aspiranti cosmopoliti che parlano fluentemente un inglese molto povero e per frasi fatte o luoghi comuni.
non so se mi spiego

@GustavinoBevilacqua human languages? 1 and several bits. I feel confident enough in basic French that I answered 2 in the poll.

@GustavinoBevilacqua
This will not be a random sample. It is self-selecting and so cannot represent the true level of language ability.
@ajsadauskas

@GustavinoBevilacqua it kinda depends on the level of "reading" - understand a news short text? Read a proper background newspaper article? Read and appreciate a literary text? That would each be different numbers for me.

@GustavinoBevilacqua 4-5: i speak dutch (mother language), french, german, english and i'm learning swedish 😋

@GustavinoBevilacqua Computer languages more than 5. Human languages (excluding all the en variants), about 3ish (I can get the gist of some of most of the latin script Indo-European ones such as French and German and some Japanese if it is in Romaji)

@GustavinoBevilacqua
I assume programming languages excluded?

@GustavinoBevilacqua comment on sample selection: you cannot expect many anwers of "one" from an international audience, because the poll is written in English. So, most answers will be at least 2-3. In other words, people knowing only their mother tongue, not bein this English, are not sampled.

@GustavinoBevilacqua Only 1, i studied French at school but i've forgotten most of it now. But thinking of Japanese though.

@GustavinoBevilacqua
Would be interesting to see where I'm the world these answers come from, although that would automatically skew the answers. Non-English speaking countries would hardly have the answer 1.

@GustavinoBevilacqua 4. It kinda feels like cheating since Swedish and Danish is very similar to my native Norwegian.

@GustavinoBevilacqua Does translator usage include "Look up single words"? Me: German (native), English, French, Italian,

@GustavinoBevilacqua growing up in Belgium and then moving to Norway feels a bit like cheating here.

Belgium has 3 official languages (Dutch, French, German) + we all learn English.

Norwegian and Danish look almost the same written, and Swedish is similar enough to understand (especially since there are a lot of Swedes in Norway and they exclusively speak and write Swedish so it’s easy to pick up on).

@GustavinoBevilacqua Perfectly understand, 4. Plus 2 more depending on the difficulty of the text. I selected 4-5 though.

@GustavinoBevilacqua understanding as in, getting the gist of it, or detailed enough to make a literal translation to your native language?

@GustavinoBevilacqua @markrendle

English, Swedish, German, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish, Spanish. Roughly in that order of confidence.

Helps that Swedish, Norwegian & Danish are practically dialects of the same language while being classified as distinct languages.

@GustavinoBevilacqua
2-3, più 2 che 3 sperando diventi un 3 entro il prossimo anno, il mio singalese fa ancora schifo per considerarlo. ^^'

Comunque tutte le volte che c'è un sondaggio di questo genere c'è qualcuno che chiede seriamente se bisogna contare i linguaggi di programmazione (perché?)

Allora se si devono considerare le comunicazioni uomo-macchina perché non contare anche il gattese? il canese?
L'importanza del linguaggio del corpo?

@GustavinoBevilacqua One... aside from my own.

@GustavinoBevilacqua My native language obviously. English, Norwegian and mostly Swedish.

@GustavinoBevilacqua reading is one thing, speaking another :p

@GustavinoBevilacqua
Should I count in my native language if I consult a dictionary more than the average? :thonking:

@GustavinoBevilacqua I'm being charitable even saying "1" here. Somedays I speak very bad England.

@GustavinoBevilacqua what's the level of the text? Also am I allowed a dictionary? Because I can get through a German wiki page with a dictionary to look up some words.

@GustavinoBevilacqua @martinvermeer I feel like this is a ‘out yourself as English’ type of poll. 😞

@GustavinoBevilacqua What about non-writable languages like any of the many sign-languages? They are fully featured languages after all.

@GustavinoBevilacqua due secco non c'era? Quale sarebbe la terza? l'avanzo di quello che si capisce dallo spagnolo più l'avanzo di un po' di francese? Effettivamente 2/3 :D
in realtà è male 1 ma questa opzione sarebbe stata troppo di nicchia o forse no :D

@GustavinoBevilacqua beeing swiss helps alot as well. I mean, technically there are quite many forms of swiss german to understand, if one wants to travel from village to village. On the other hand i guess that not even counts as a 'one'.

@GustavinoBevilacqua Feeling horrible anglophone for answering 1, but the truth is that I need translation for 20--50% of words for the other 3 I'm not completely lost in.

@GustavinoBevilacqua @breadandcircuses if you take language learning seriously, you will never waive good translating tools. The better your knowledge, the more sophisticated your tools.

@GustavinoBevilacqua on which level?

@GustavinoBevilacqua Do I count Afrikaans and Low-Saxon?

@GustavinoBevilacqua I am embarrassed to say 1. I expect that English speakers from the UK and US are probably amongst the worst.