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Does Melania Trump REALLY speak 5 languages?

Rhea

Rhea

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I was wondering about this today while reading comments about her birthday picture and Sarah Sanders’ claim that she is amazing and comparing her polyglotness to, say Buttigeig’s. So I asked the interwebs, “how many languages does she REALLY speak”?


According to Vox, in addition to English and her native Slovene, Melania also speaks Serbo-Croatian, Italian, German and French.

But according to others looking at this, she likely really speaks only Her family’s native language Slovene, her country’s (at the time) official language Serbo-Croatian and broken, poor-grammar English.

He cites instances where she was doing some photo-op with Italian school children and couldn’t really get past hello, and how when talking with Putin, a fluent German speaker, she uses English with a translator.

Given that she also said she graduated college when she didn’t, and that she wrote her own speech, I’m guessing she speak 2.5 languages. Which is great, but not the answer given of 6 - that seems to be a lie.

I looked at an additional discussion of this and it sounds like it is indeed a lie, there being no evidence of her speaking fluently in anything but Slovene and English. There a video posted in there, which I can’t watch, but it claims to show the tapes of her failing to speak Italian to italian children and failing to speak french to french children; anything other than “Hi my name is Melania,” Which even _I_ can do in 6 languages, and I’m a lowly American.
 
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Rhea said:
I was wondering about this today while reading comments about her birthday picture and Sarah Sanders’ claim that she is amazing and comparing her polyglotness to, say Buttigeig’s. So I asked the interwebs, “how many languages does she REALLY speak”?


According to Vox, in addition to English and her native Slovene, Melania also speaks Serbo-Croatian, Italian, German and French.
Click to expand...
Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Herzegovinian, and Montenegrin you surely mean? :)

:)
 
Derec said:
Rhea said:
I was wondering about this today while reading comments about her birthday picture and Sarah Sanders’ claim that she is amazing and comparing her polyglotness to, say Buttigeig’s. So I asked the interwebs, “how many languages does she REALLY speak”?


According to Vox, in addition to English and her native Slovene, Melania also speaks Serbo-Croatian, Italian, German and French.
Click to expand...
Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Herzegovinian, and Montenegrin you surely mean? :)

:)
Click to expand...

LOL, exactly.

Just as you and I are both fluent in American, Canadian, British, Australian and Georgian. Not to mention a smattering of Boston and Texan, for me.
 
Rhea said:
I was wondering about this today while reading comments about her birthday picture and Sarah Sanders’ claim that she is amazing and comparing her polyglotness to, say Buttigeig’s. So I asked the interwebs, “how many languages does she REALLY speak”?


According to Vox, in addition to English and her native Slovene, Melania also speaks Serbo-Croatian, Italian, German and French.

But according to others looking at this, she likely really speaks only Her family’s native language Slovene, her country’s (at the time) official language Serbo-Croatian and broken, poor-grammar English.

He cites instances where she was doing some photo-op with Italian school children and couldn’t really get past hello, and how when talking with Putin, a fluent German speaker, she uses English with a translator.

Given that she also said she graduated college when she didn’t, and that she wrote her own speech, I’m guessing she speak 2.5 languages. Which is great, but not the answer given of 6 - that seems to be a lie.

I looked at an additional discussion of this and it sounds like it is indeed a lie, there being no evidence of her speaking fluently in anything but Slovene and English. There a video posted in there, which I can’t watch, but it claims to show the tapes of her failing to speak Italian to italian children and failing to speak french to french children; anything other than “Hi my name is Melania,” Which even _I_ can do in 6 languages, and I’m a lowly American.
Click to expand...
Speaks more than me. Yes, she is a C-Grade model / trophy wife. I can't care to care about it any more than that. I hope she gets all she deserves when the marriage is over one way or the other.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
Speaks more than me. Yes, she is a C-Grade model / trophy wife. I can't care to care about it any more than that. I hope she gets all she deserves when the marriage is over one way or the other.
Click to expand...

Speaks more than you (both of us), but also lies more than us, whih is not mitigated by the extra language.
I agree though, on your other comments. I don’t get into stories about her much because I lack caring about what she cares about.

This was brought on by comments about her birthday. Some of them really bad, actually, sad to say. But the internet couldn’t help but respond to Huckabee Sanders about Melania’s birthday without adding “suit” and images to the tweets. Kinda bullying, although none of them were photoshopped like Michelle Obama’s were; just actual soft porn pictures that are public.
 
Rhea said:
I was wondering about this today while reading comments about her birthday picture and Sarah Sanders’ claim that she is amazing and comparing her polyglotness to, say Buttigeig’s. So I asked the interwebs, “how many languages does she REALLY speak”?


According to Vox, in addition to English and her native Slovene, Melania also speaks Serbo-Croatian, Italian, German and French.

But according to others looking at this, she likely really speaks only Her family’s native language Slovene, her country’s (at the time) official language Serbo-Croatian and broken, poor-grammar English.

He cites instances where she was doing some photo-op with Italian school children and couldn’t really get past hello, and how when talking with Putin, a fluent German speaker, she uses English with a translator.

Given that she also said she graduated college when she didn’t, and that she wrote her own speech, I’m guessing she speak 2.5 languages. Which is great, but not the answer given of 6 - that seems to be a lie.

I looked at an additional discussion of this and it sounds like it is indeed a lie, there being no evidence of her speaking fluently in anything but Slovene and English. There a video posted in there, which I can’t watch, but it claims to show the tapes of her failing to speak Italian to italian children and failing to speak french to french children; anything other than “Hi my name is Melania,” Which even _I_ can do in 6 languages, and I’m a lowly American.
Click to expand...

Yes, by those standards, I am fluent in Arabic, Yiddish, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese and semi-fluent in German. Plus English.

I will note that many leaders use a translator even if they are fluent in the language being used. Putin does this routinely, I believe. I can see the advantages of doing that if you want extra time, or if you wish to be a little bit underestimated.

On her side, I genuinely believe that she's very introverted and that might add to her discomfort with public speaking. Also, if her husband routinely bragged about her prowess in languages, it would be difficult to back away from that claim if the husband were Trump.

None of this is to be taken as a defense of Melania Trump who is a birther and a despicable human being.

- - - Updated - - -

Rhea said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
Speaks more than me. Yes, she is a C-Grade model / trophy wife. I can't care to care about it any more than that. I hope she gets all she deserves when the marriage is over one way or the other.
Click to expand...

Speaks more than you (both of us), but also lies more than us, whih is not mitigated by the extra language.
I agree though, on your other comments. I don’t get into stories about her much because I lack caring about what she cares about.

This was brought on by comments about her birthday. Some of them really bad, actually, sad to say. But the internet couldn’t help but respond to Huckabee Sanders about Melania’s birthday without adding “suit” and images to the tweets. Kinda bullying, although none of them were photoshopped like Michelle Obama’s were; just actual soft porn pictures that are public.
Click to expand...

Love is the international language.

I saw that tweet, or another similar one that was supposed to make us feel sorry for poor Melania spending her birthday alone on a sofa in the White House, surrounded only by press. Boo fucking hoo.
 
To pull a Clinton on this: It depends on what "speaks" means.

"Speaks" attempts to reduce to a binary state something which in practice has a great range of values.

Personally, I would define "speaks" as in being able to express most non-technical matters in the language and understand such matters if spoken to. Broken grammar and other such matters that generally do not keep a person from being understood would not make me say they do not speak the language. (A big problem is cases where one's native language has one word to describe things which have different words in the language they are speaking. An example being in Chinese "on" and "open" are the same concept. It's much harder to learn to correctly do a one-to-many mapping than to simply come up with the word for the concept in the other language. Note that this is why Chinese speakers are notoriously bad at gender--the only words they have with gender built in are family words and the gender words themselves. Everything else is a one-to-many translation for them. Written Chinese has separate words for he/she/it but that doesn't help much for speaking.)
 
Given their past history, why would any rational person take anything Mrs. Sanders or Mrs Trump says at face value?
 
If you can speak Serbian, you can speak Croatian, which is practically identical except that Serbia uses Cyrillic letters, making it hard to read if you use Latin as Croatia does, plus you can easily get by in Macedonia (not in Greece) because it's mostly the accent that is different.....there's 'three' languages for a start, haha.
 
DBT said:
If you can speak Serbian, you can speak Croatian, which is practically identical except that Serbia uses Cyrillic letters, making it hard to read if you use Latin as Croatia does, plus you can easily get by in Macedonia (not in Greece) because it's mostly the accent that is different.....there's 'three' languages for a start, haha.
Click to expand...

So it's like me, having lived all over the US, saying I speak standard American English, Suth'n, New English, Sou'western, Downeastern and Cali? I can also get by in French and Spanish... Eight languages - Sheesh, didn't realize I was such a linguistic genius! :D
 
I don't think Donny married her because of speaking abilities, but something else she does with her mouth.
 
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Elixir said:
So it's like me, having lived all over the US, saying I speak standard American English, Suth'n, New English, Sou'western, Downeastern and Cali? I can also get by in French and Spanish... Eight languages - Sheesh, didn't realize I was such a linguistic genius! :D
Click to expand...
I think it's more like, does the State Department say she speaks 6 languages, or is it the number off of her resume?
 
Elixir said:
DBT said:
If you can speak Serbian, you can speak Croatian, which is practically identical except that Serbia uses Cyrillic letters, making it hard to read if you use Latin as Croatia does, plus you can easily get by in Macedonia (not in Greece) because it's mostly the accent that is different.....there's 'three' languages for a start, haha.
Click to expand...

So it's like me, having lived all over the US, saying I speak standard American English, Suth'n, New English, Sou'western, Downeastern and Cali? I can also get by in French and Spanish... Eight languages - Sheesh, didn't realize I was such a linguistic genius! :D
Click to expand...

Yep, just like Melanie, you are multilingual. Probably even qualifying for a job as an interpreter for the UN.
 
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