this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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Asklemmy

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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.

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[–] hanabatake@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I would like to know how a native german speaker would say it. But I would say like you

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Well, if I were to post it to a community on e.g. feddit.org, I would write it as:

Welche Fremdsprachen sprecht ihr so?

"Fremdsprachen" just means "foreign languages", since I know that responding folks speak German.

Then "sprecht ihr" rather than "sprechen Sie", because addressing a group of people with direct pronoun is unusual in German.
As someone else already said, using "Sie" is also far too formal for this context. People refer to each other as "Du" on most of the internet.
But "Welche Sprachen sprichst Du?" still gives me vibes of a marketing firm hoping to drive engagement by referring to people directly.

And then the "so", I have no idea what that is linguistically, but it basically makes the question more casual. It invites for people to tell a story or to have a chat.

[–] hanabatake@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Thanks for the detailed answer. Interestingly it is pretty similar to the idiomatic way to say it in French. Except for the "so"

[–] hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

"So" is indeed one of those small things that's just colloquial to casual conversation in in Germany. To me personally it signals that you weren't as exact with your question so you're leaving it kinda open ended to some degree. But when it comes to Grammar no clue what this is.

It feels a bit similar to "do you speak any other languages or ~" because this leaves it less as a direct question and more as an open ended conversation, suggesting you just wanna know more and you're not very particular in your question and in what you expect as an answer.