Ok, Lemmy, let’s another play a game!
And I honestly think this one’s more important.
Post how many languages in which you can say Please and Thank You, including your native language. If you can, please provide which languages and how to phonetically say them so the rest of us can learn!
I spent a fair amount of bopping around Europe in the early Aughts and as a native English speaker, I found everyone appreciating my bad mangled attempts at politeness.
I can only speak three but I really used to try to learn some others but suck at it. I praise people who can learn grammatically challenging languages
I’ve found that most people really appreciate even just the attempt at their own language. The fact that you’re trying goes a long way with most people.
Excepting Americans and sometimes the French. /s
I fully agree! Paraphrasing the Nelson Mandela quote that got me into college and grad school “if you speak to a man in a language he understands it goes to his head, but if you speak to a man in his language it goes to his heart.”
Idk I feel my partners English is received well by Americans but yes French and Parisians are something else
I actually really like most Parisians the only people in France I found to be rude were those who worked in the tourist areas like the Riviera. But honestly I can’t blame them tourists can be so annoying
Only English. The words are entirely different in the other languages I know.
In the order I learned them:
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🇷🇴 Romanian: Vă rog / Mulțumesc (native)
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🇨🇵 French: S’il-vous-plaît / Merci
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🇬🇧 English: Please / Thank you
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🇪🇦 Spanish: Por favor / Gracias
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🇯🇵 Japanese: Onegai / Arigato
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🇨🇳 Mandarin: Qing / Xiè xie
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🇮🇹 Italian: Per favore / Grazie
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🇩🇪 German: Bitte / Danke
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🇷🇺 Russian: Pozhalusta / Spasiba
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Define language… Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, English, French, German, BHS (Bosnian Croatian, Serbian), Esperanto, Czech, Russian, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish… i think that’s it.
Please and thank you
Te rog si multumesc
Bitte und danke
I dont know how to explain how to say a word to someone if they dont speak romanian
Mostly thanks because that’s the only word I learned when I’m visiting.
obrigado, obrigada - Portuguese Bitte/Danke - Deutsch dack - Dutch Gratzi - Italian Por favor/Gracias - Spanish Takk - norge Merci - French 不好意思。/ 謝謝 - Chinese ありがとう - Japanese Oi cunt / thank ye cunt
dack - Dutch
Dutch is alsjeblieft (informal), alstublieft (formal), thanks (informal), dankjewel (informal), or dankuwel (formal). The former probably means “as you desired” in old Dutch, the latter “thank you well”, and the formal/informal variants simply insert the right word for “you” (je or u). And then there’s thanks being commonly used. Or also bedankt, sounds kinda formal to me as well, not sure when you’d use that instead of dankuwel
Just “dank” (maybe you wrote that and autocorrupt kicked in?) is not really a thing we say, it just means “thank” which you’d also not say by itself in English (unless you’re Rocky)
Edit: writing “dank” in an English sentence feels like everyone will think our thank-yous are like dank memes. The pronunciation of the “a” there is as in Clark; the English pronunciation of dank would map to denk in Dutch and means think!
Zero. 🖕🏻
Swedish, German, English, Spanish,
Estonian: Palun / Aitäh
English: Please / Thank you
Languages I’m fluent:
- Spanish (Por favor, Gracias)
- Portuguese (Por favor, Obrigado/a)
- English (Please, Thank you)
Languages I can mostly understand but I’m a disaster speaking:
- Italian (Per favore, Grazie)
- Catalan (Si us plau, Merci (Technically Gracies, but most people use Merci))
Languages I can speak small child like phrases and express some simple things (although I’m very rusty in both of them):
- Russian (пожалуйста (Pajalsta), спасибо (Spaciba))
- German (Bitte, Danke)
Languages I can say “I’m sorry, I don’t speak X, do you speak English?” (Which I think is more important than just please and thank you)
- French (Si vous plat, Merci)
- Dutch ( [don’t know this one], dank je)
- Finnish ( * , Kiitos)
Languages I can say Please and thank you (because I’ve seen enough TV in this language):
- Japanese (Onegai, Arigato)
* There’s no word for please in Finnish, which you’d think makes the language sound harsh, but I think it’s the other way around, it makes everyone be polite by default, when going into a coffee shop and saying “one coffee” is the equivalent to “hello, can I please have one coffee, thanks” it’s hard to be rude.
Can you expand on the Finnish? Is it engrained in the language somehow?
I don’t really speak Finnish, so probably someone can expand better, but AFAIK they don’t have a word for Please. When I was in Finland I went to a coffee place with a friend, and noticed he said “yksi kahvi” which literally means one coffee, when he got his coffee he said “Kiitos” (thanks), I noticed no one used any recurring word that could mean Please, so I asked my friend and he said something like “They’re all being polite, we just don’t have a word for please, one could say something like: I would like a coffee, Thanks. But that’s just overcomplicated”
Native here. I think this is pretty accurate. Politeness is usually tied to other phrasings or modes of speaking, and as an ESL speaker I just think “please” is just a word that gets sprinkled in. In everyday conversations like buying something, it’s kinda more polite to get the thing over with as fast as possible. If you just want a coffee, you don’t need more than “hey” and “thanks” to be nice, right?
That said, it’s definitely not impossible to be explicitly polite: “Ole hyvä”/“Olkaa hyvä” (“[You] (2p. sg./pl.) be kind”) is basically “please” as in “could you do…” or “here you go, have this” or “go ahead and do that” depending on context. “Ole kiltti” (“[You] (2p.sg.) be nice”) is “please” as in “would you be especially kind to do…” But as you can see, these are basically direct orders, it’s “be kind”, not “please be kind”.
So like impolite would be “give me a coffee”, polite is “would you give me a coffee?” instead of “coffee please”. Makes sense, thanks!
Gracies -> Mallorca
Mercés -> Cataluña
Mercí -> ¿cerca de la frontera con Francia?
The place I hear Merci daily is Barcelona
For me: English, Irish, french, German, Indonesian, Malaysian (same as Indonesian), japanese I’ve thank you in Turkish, Thai,
For Irish Please is: le do thoil (é). Translates as; by your will (it). Pronounce : le duh hull ay.
For thank you: Go raibh (míle) maith agat. Translates as may (a thousand) good things be/fall upon you. Pronounce : guh rev mee-la moh a-gut
For pronunciation, I’m using Munster dialect. It can be quite different for other dialects.
Other languages seem to be covered by others, so I thought I’d add the Irish in more detail.
English: Please : Thank you
French: Aujourd’hui : Merci
Spanish: Por Favor : Gracias
German: Regenbogen : Danke
Swedish: tillhör alla : tack
Aujourd’hui means today. You’re looking for: s’il vous/te plait.
In German, bitte is please (and part of you’re welcome) but regenbogen means 🌈, so youre still spreading happiness.
I remember I once told a German person ‘ich besuche dich diese wochenende.’ I’ll visit you this weekend. I meant to wish them a nice weekend. They were quite surprised as we met in a professional work setting, not social, lol.
So, this is an odd one because I travel a lot and try to learn basic words in local languages, usually hello, please, thank you, sorry/excuse me, and numbers are my basic go to. For some reason, in a number of languages “please” isn’t something you get by default. I’ve found this particularly in southeast Asia.
I can say please and thank you (and generally converse and read) in French and Spanish. In Spanish I find myself using “por favor” a lot. “You’re welcome” takes different forms in Spanish depending where your are, and what’s polite in one place can be confusing or even rude in another.
I can say hello, please, and thank you in German, Italian, and Greek. I mostly said hello and thank you in Greece and Italy, rarely please. I’ve never actually used German in situ, I just know it from pop culture I think.
I can say hello and thank you (and various other things) in Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin), Malay, Thai, Lao, Khmer, and Vietnamese. I might need to think hard for a minute or get a quick refresher so that I don’t mix some of them up sometimes, especially when I’m moving from one country to the next… I don’t think I ever learned please specifically in any of these, though I think it’s kind of built into the other things you say in a lot of them (especially Thai).
So, please and thank you, 6 for sure. But if the goal is to talk about language basics for getting around as a visitor, I would say 13 :)
Please (English)
- kiitos (Finnish)
- chōdai / kudasai (Japanese)
- s’il vous plaît (French)
- por favor (Spanish)
- bitte (German)
Thank you (English)
- kiitos (Finnish)
- arigatō (gozaimas) / dōmo (Japanese)
- gracias (Spanish)
- merci (French)
- grazie (Italian)
- kamsahamnida (Korean)
- xiexie (Chinese)
- tänan (Estonian)
- danke (German)
- spasiba (Russian)
- tack (Svedish)
I love the fact that Finnish doesn’t have a way of saying please, so you just thank the person instead. The first time I was in Finland I learned to say “excuse me, I don’t speak Finnish, do you speak English?”, and because that was the only thing I learned I wanted to learn to pronounce it correctly, so I took the time and effort to learn how to pronounce it. The problem when I do this, is that most people don’t learn basic niceties, and even the ones that do tent to mangle pronunciation, so native people think I’m kidding because it sounds like some native saying they don’t speak the language. Also because the majority of interactions with people are simple “hello”, “thanks”, “bye” I like to pick up on those by listening to people, but not by studying it or anything.
All of that setup for this stupid story: One day I go to a supermarket and the lady tells me “Moi” (hi) and with the same cheerful tone of voice I’ve seen people use I replied with “Moi Moi” (bye bye). I had seen people use both Moi and Moi Moi, but hadn’t noticed that one was hi and the other was bye, so I was accidentally cheerfully rude, and I still feel bad about it. If you’re out there, I’m so sorry supermarket lady in Helsinki, I’m just a dumb tourist trying to be nice.
In order of fluency (for languages spoken, although German was only studied and any fluency has rusted out):
Portuguese: Por Favor/Obrigado
English: Please/Thank you
Spanish: Por Favor/Gracias
Farsi: Lotfan/Merci (plus many more elaborate ways of thanking)
German: Bitte/Danke
For languages I don’t speak at all, but only know because of friends who are native speakers:
French: s’il vous plait/merci
Romanian: Va rog/multumesc
Italian: Per favore/Grazie
Oh I like the Romanian please. That sound fun to say.
Yeah, Romanian is so weird to me as a native Portuguese speaker - there are so many cognates. I am good friends with a Romanian family and when they talk all sorts of words are completely understandable coming from Portuguese…
