Flammie A Pirinen on github pages
Whether joking or serious (and possibly naïve), being a linguist you get asked often how many languages you can speak or understand. Among linguists this is often taken as a joke, of course since linguistics has to do with the theory of the languages rather than practical use of it, it is entirely possible to be monolingual and decent linguist; this is parallel to e.g. computer science and programming, for theoretical computer scientist or even software engineer it is not necessary to use multiple programming languages daily. There is a point to this question however, since it is very much beneficial to study of languages’ structures and shape, to understand and be able to use as many as possible languages from differen families. To this extent I am sometimes overly wary of linguists who are monolinguals (e.g. from USA) or struggle with English as their only foreign language (e.g. German, French, Russian and Spanish etc. speakers who can barely write and communicate in English).
But anyways, to answer the question you do need to determine what it means to be able to speak or understand language. Commonly in language learning, the system of A1—C3 is used, where A1 is able to say hello my name is and C3 discuss on range of topics from politics to their field of expertise… or something like that I haven’t really bothered to look it up. Personally, when I answer this question, I use a variation that is relevant to my interests:
The question of which you count as being able to speak is the question, for if you limit it to level 5, I can maybe only Finnish and English, for 4 it would be half a dozen and level 2 a lot more:
Conceivably, level 2 is reachable after few weeks~months with duolingoing and writing a translation dictionary plus transfer grammars. In other words, most summer schools, winter schools or researcher visits would be enough to learn the usable basics, that’s really all that is required, for me at least, and I’d be tempted to say it’s mostly motivation plus effort, I do not consider myself particularly talented with language learning.
It must be said though, most of what follows about learning and using the language only applies to well-resourced majority languages, that is. mostly languages that are native to a country. For minority languages, you probably do not get a duolingo app, or a bar or hotel staff using it. For many minority languages just finding place to use it may require an extra effort.
I saw this video after writing this but it’s quite relevant too: Abroad in Japan learning Japanese in 6 months
I acknowledge well that being a language nerd and a linguist means that I may know few things more of all languages than an average person (c.f. this xkcd comic about average familiarity), however, I think most, maybe top few %, languages are in category where I can guess from a text what it is. Very basic computer programs can do it too, nowadays if you copy paste random strings to google translate it will recognise languages kind of. There’s nothing strange there, just looking at distribution of characters, word lenghts, affixes etc. There’s nothing much that I have learnt from them in this category, associating cyrillics to certain set of languages and Kanji to other is not a linguistic skill.
This is what I believe a good tourist should aim for visiting in foreign countries, it is just good manners to know and recognise everyday communication. And learning it is not a huge effort: duolingo will usually start with these phrases and words, lonely planets smallest size phrasebooks (or free ones from the internet if you cannot get one) are perfect supplement to that. Here’s the phrases you want:
- Hello
- Does this bus go to city center?
- Thanks
- Bye
- I have a reservation for 3 nights
- I pay by card¹ (contactless)
- Here you go
- One beer please
- Can I have one food please pointing
- I’m going to this hotel please
¹I don’t even know how to say this in English sounding like a normal person
-_-
IT’s always the same. Plus all the things that you see in potential atms and public transport machines, toilet doors and such. Definitely learnable in a week or two, plus if you just pay attention to what people around you do and say when in country.
This is the actual learner phase, when you actually start seriously learning and using language, most often after moving to a country for the first few years. It’s mostly about vocabulary gathering at this time. Though the actual first thing you start this phase with is learning basics of discussion that annoyingly are not taught in classes or learn books, that is, how to discuss like a good foreigner, here’s the phrases you need:
- What is this in this language (again) pointing and gesturing
- What was that word you said foreign word, is it something about stuffs
- Um, it’s like, you know
- Gotcha, yeah, oh I know
- innit, no way, for real
- …
There’s loads, the main point is that for learning by doing to go smoothly the first thing to learn is to how to keep discussion flowing, especially when you are missing a word. There’s another use of learning to explain things a bit; when you are asked questions and you don’t know all the words, it’s a kind of a confirmation that you understood, or if you didn’t you just changed the topic for whatever reason: “so, if I was to pick a favourite colour in a board game,…” “No Karen, we were discussing of spirit animals not colours!”, and that’s how it is.
I like to see this level as when you can actually follow a gameshow centred on wordplays, or a stand-up comedy, a news satire or similar. This is where you of course start to see limits of the native language understanding as well. Gameshows with words in focus for example are my favourite, like pointless will among UK politicians and reality show stars often ask rare elements, animals or just words from letters. Lingo was a whole gameshow based on wordle, way before wordle.