Well, just in case no one guessed, I do happen to speak English fluently
(translators are pretty decent nowadays, I could've been feigning the language the whole time I've been on here), and I also speak Italian proficiently (probably 2/3's the fluency I speak English). Despite my username, I'm actually 75% Italian (half Siciliano and a quarter Napolitano), and I grew up in a predominantly Italian neighborhood in New York, so growing up you'd pick up certain phrases or commands around the famiglia and such. My grandmother was the unpaid babysitter back in the day, and my granparents are immigrants, so they use both languages when I hang out at their place, and growing up it was easy to understand mostly commands, like
Mangia (eat! I still hear that one a lot
) or
Venica! (come here!), and also eventually a bunch of er, less appropriate words from cousins
that you could probably learn anyway from watching the Sopranos. But it wasn't until I actually started taking Italian as a class in middle school that I could put the pieces together – I already had the words and the phrases, I just needed to learn the grammatical glue in between. Unfortunately I don't use it outside of school much though (at least full-on sentences), if I'm talking to my grandparents or other Italian people I know around (mostly family members who immigrated to the states), I usually just listen in Italian and talk in English, unless they're English is so broken the conversation just doesn't work bilingually
.
And I also speak a teeny-tiny bit of Spanish and French from elementary school, but I doubt I can even remember anything from ten years ago. And I know Japanese greetings, or anything in Japanese that involves Pokémon boxart, but that's about it… It's easier to understand Western languages speaking English and Italian (even though they're not all romance languages) because the structure is relatively similar, unlike Japanese for example, which uses different placing of action and description in sentences, and ways of speaking entirely depending on your status/age and that of whom you're talking to (in Italian at least formality is expressed through mostly just verb endings and conjugations). I've been trying to pick up some Arabic lately for a short story I'm writing (just playing around on the translator, nothing crazy
), but I find it to be even more cryptic than Japanese, it's like calligraphic art that's different for every possible combination of English characters, so it would seem on the surface at least incredibly mind-spinning.
