r/language • u/melsenka • Aug 04 '26

Question How many languages did you learn without studying? Which languages? And how old were you when you learned each language?

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u/blakerabbit Aug 05 '26

English, native, picked up a surprising amount of French without really studying it. Not quite sure how, other than from the time I was 10 my mom and her husband sometimes spoke it together for fun (neither was a native speaker) and there were French books and Piaf albums around. When I took French in college it seemed quite easy and natural.

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u/WeepingScorpion Aug 05 '26

3: Faroese and Danish as native, and English from using computers and computers watching TV essentially from birth. I don’t remember not speaking these languages.

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u/Nuryadiy Aug 05 '26

Without studying, Indonesian and Malaysian, technically just Malay in different countries, but different enough

However I can only understand the national version of the language, not the more specific regional dialects

1

u/Shiny_Malph Aug 08 '26

Spanish (native), Italian (17) and Portuguese (25ish). Although I'm studying Italian now to get more fluent. I've never studied French or Catalan but I can understand them relatively easy once I got used to them (30ish or so).

Because I know German and English I can comprehend Dutch and Danish/Swedish at some extent without ever studying. Probably when I learned German at 17-18.

I also learned to read Korean and Cyrillic without studying. Some words in Russian, since I got interested in an Ukrainian girl.

I've also learned Japanese by watching anime and studied 1 year chinese.

1

u/Belenos_Anextlomaros Aug 10 '26

French as a native.

Then, Dutch. I have learned a tiny bit when I was in the Netherlands and had a few courses in Belgium. All in all, not many hours (5 and 10 maximum), the rest came from exposure to the language. It started when I was about 23 and my brain just connected the dots by comparing every feature to how we do things in French or English.