Alternatively, in the languages I speak:

Welche Sprachen sprechen Sie? (Deutsch/German)

¿Qué idiomas habla usted? (Español/Spanish)

Quelle langue parlez-vous? (Français/French)

EDIT: These sentences are now up to date.

  • hanabatake@lemmy.ml
    19·
    4 months ago

    French, English, German and a little spoken Japanese. I also studied latin

    Edit: in French we say: « Quelles langues parlez-vous ? »

        • Zagorath@aussie.zone
          61·
          4 months ago

          Oh damn. It didn’t even occur to me that we were talking plural here lol

          Obviously you’re right.

          • Mr_Blott@feddit.uk
            2·
            4 months ago

            That precisely how the Scots and the Irish would ask it, the yanks would say “y’all”. It’s just the English who are fucking weird :)

            • Zagorath@aussie.zone
              1·
              4 months ago

              Yeah, sort of. I also use “yous” frequently as part of my dialect regularly. But it’s certainly an informal usage that I would not normally use in written communication.

              I actually suspect, though I haven’t investigated it enough to be confident, that there may be something else going on. That there’s possibly a difference—in my dialect, at least—between 2nd person plural “multiple specific people” and “a general large audience”. And that “yous” might only be appropriate in the former.

          • hanabatake@lemmy.ml
            2·
            4 months ago

            Yeah, it is the hardest thing when learning a new language. When you learn a new concept that your language doesn’t use. For example, in Latin, German and Japanese, the grammatical case is very important but totally irrelevant in French and English. So I try when I speak French or English to think about the case. That way it comes more naturally to me when speaking German or Japanese.

            • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
              2·
              4 months ago

              Yeah, the catch here is that it’s a feature that my native language does at least sort of have, just applied in a way that makes it not clear. When it’s a feature I’m completely unfamiliar with, I’m more likely to be on guard for it, if I’ve learnt it. But here I didn’t even think about it, because it was an element I am familiar with, so I never second-guessed my intuition, even though that intuition was wrong.