How well do you speak those languages? For example, can you order pizza with pineapple and olives in any of those languages? What if the pizza you get is cold, there’s only one olive on it and the crust is soggy, could you get your complaints through in any language?

Or perhaps will the explanation be more like: “Pizza bad, no good. Want money back.”

[–] rakyat@artemis.camp 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I’m not from India but as another Asian, yes, we can have fluent conversations in several languages. (I grew up speaking English, Mandarin, Malay, Cantonese and a bit of Hakka)

[–] aerir@lemmy.aerir.xyz 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Found the Malaysian

[–] rakyat@artemis.camp 3 points 1 year ago

Hello! 👋 We’re mostly on monyet.cc on Lemmy.

[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That’s pretty cool. Took a quick look at the relationships those languages have, and it seems that Malay is the odd one out, all the others are in the sinitic family. I would expect that if you learn one, your mind isn’t going to explode if you try to learn the other two. However, Malay is completely different, so jumping into that world may require some extra effort.

To give a European example, if you already know Norwegian, learning Swedish it’s only one step away. Jumping into Danish or German at that point can be done, but it will require some extra effort. A similar situation exists between Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

[–] rakyat@artemis.camp 3 points 1 year ago

It’s more to do with my multicultural upbringing - Malay is the national language here in Malaysia, so it’s pretty much compulsory to learn & speak. My parents are Cantonese & Hakka Chinese, I learnt to speak Malay & Mandarin in school (where ethnic Chinese kids from different dialect groups as well as ppl from other ethnicities mingle), and spoke mostly English in college & work. We also have Indians and other minorities who speak even more dialects/languages than I do.

[–] jungekatz@lib.lgbt 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well most of us speak a mother tongue , and english ( since ex britt colony ) very fluently , but there are times when both parents speak a different language and the city /state you live in has a different language and hence they speak it very close to native fluency !

[–] jungekatz@lib.lgbt 6 points 1 year ago

My bf and his family for instance speaks 6 languages for the reasons listed above !