Zero. 🖕🏻
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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Ah yes the Texas thank you 😝
Please and thank you
S'il vous plait et merci
And in ASL but that dont translate to text too well.
I just looked up please and thank you in ASL and now I know. Thank you.
- Merican. Gods language and the best language. You know I speak better Merican that anyone ever did. The best. Everyone says it. One time I was talking to Elon. I call him fuck boy the cum dumpster. No one treats me like he does. But, he was telling me you speak the best Merican. No one can talk as good as you do. Everyone says it. Maybe I should write a book about how good my English is. It would be the most huge book ever.
/s
That orange man has never said Please in his entire lifetime
You speak such good Merican that I'm going to trust you with our nuclear codes
i can say thank you in more languages than i can say please in.
perhaps that says something about me
Obligado
Dankeschön
Merci Beaucop
Thank you
Gracias
Domo Arigato (only in latin type, i have no chance of reading/spelling anything in Kanji)
You've nailed my languages:
Por favor (you'll see this later)
Bitte (had to check the spelling, but I knew how to say it)
S'il vous plait
Pleeeeeeeeeease
Por favor
I dunno about Japanese.
I can also say it in sign language.
For reference, I am a 37 year old dude from Jersey. I took French in middle and high school (we got to go to Quebec in the eighth grade because someone thought that was a good idea). We have large spanish and Portuguese speaking populations, and my mom's stepmother was also from Cuba, so we got some lessons early on. My high school girlfriend did the German thing so I picked up a little (ich haba einen bruder). Wife speaks pretty fluent sign language. Can also say Kurwa, but that's neither please nor thank you.
In the order I learned them:
-
🇷🇴 Romanian: Vă rog / Mulțumesc (native)
-
🇨🇵 French: S'il-vous-plaît / Merci
-
🇬🇧 English: Please / Thank you
-
🇪🇦 Spanish: Por favor / Gracias
-
🇯🇵 Japanese: Onegai / Arigato
-
🇨🇳 Mandarin: Qing / Xiè xie
-
🇮🇹 Italian: Per favore / Grazie
-
🇩🇪 German: Bitte / Danke
-
🇷🇺 Russian: Pozhalusta / Spasiba
Thanks I knew spasiba but Pozhalusta I just learned.
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!
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I know some, I guess, hope I do not butcher them:
German(native): Bitte/ Danke (sehr) or Vielen Dank,
English: please/ thank you (very much),
Japanese: どうぞ or おねがいします or ください/ (どうも)ありがとう(ございます) (Which is douzo (when you offer someone something, I think, onegaishimasu/kudasai (if you want something or someone to do something, which is following the request.)/ (domo)arigatou(gozaimasu),
Norwegian: vær så snill / (tusen) takk,
(Which is like "Sei so gut/lieb"/ "Tausend Dank" in German.),
Romanian: vă rog or te rog (formal/informal)/ mulțumesc ((foarte) mult) or mersi (mult) (ă is a short a, I guess and ț is like the ts from "its", or a German z)
French: s'il vous plait (that one I had to look up on how to write)/ merci
Polish: proszę (bardzo)/ dzięki or dziękuję (bardzo) (Like proshe/ djenki/djenkuje)(ę is nasalized)
Portuguese: faz favor or por favor/ obrigado or obrigada (male/female) (o is spoken like an u) (I do not know much Portuguese (like French and Polish), in my book (European Portuguese faz favor and por favor are used, but I do not know the differences.)
English and Japanese (I don't speak much Japanese at all but I know these specific word!)
2 English and German
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
Thanks Romanian sounds quite challenging
Speaking romanian is the easiest part of the language. I have heard from people trying to learn the language that the grammar is hard
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.
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.
You know don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Just trying fucking it up is still heaps better then not even trying.
Swedish, German, English, Spanish,
Estonian: Palun / Aitäh
English: Please / Thank you
Define language… Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, English, French, German, BHS (Bosnian Croatian, Serbian), Esperanto, Czech, Russian, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish… i think that’s it.
But what about cobol and C++? /s
Pretty cool that you can say "please" in Danish since the word doesn't exist in the language.
Vær så venlig?
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 :)
That fascinating. I wonder if it’s a cultural thing or a grammar thing? Most Asian countries have a stereotype of being polite so I’d take a guess at the grammar of Asian languages making it harder to put a mood changing word in a question maybe,
Yeah I definitely don't know enough to say. You can definitely translate please in translators for those languages, but for whatever reason I just haven't been seeing it in language basics. Once I spend more time there I'll learn more.
For Thai specifically, you say "ka" (if you're a woman) or "kraub"/"kaub"/"kaup" (if you're a man) at the end of everything you say. Whenever you finish a sentence you say it. I saw a woman relating a phone number, and she would say "ka" after every number. It's all about politeness.
Off the top or my head: English, Spanish, German, Russian (assuming I remember from 35 years ago). On a good day I can remember Thai, but not today.
Spanish and German are well documented here.
So I dated a girl who took Russian in high school. I learned the alphabet. Sometimes I think I can still recite it, other times I stumble.
Phonetically (and likely butchered): speSEEba / paZHAlista
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