Another metric you might've considered -- reading knowledge. A lot of us who are academics or academically trained in various disciplines can read languages that we can neither speak nor understand well when they're spoken. It's an odd inverse to being functionally illiterate, but able to speak and understand. I can read Portuguese fairly well, for instance, but because I learned to read it in order to read research reports, I have never spent time with it as a spoken language.
And of course there are also languages, for some of us, where we're basically competent as listeners but have never spoken or written; a lot of Jews in my age group and older are able to understand a great deal of spoken Yiddish but do not speak it themselves, or read or write it.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2005-10-18 02:56 pm (UTC)And of course there are also languages, for some of us, where we're basically competent as listeners but have never spoken or written; a lot of Jews in my age group and older are able to understand a great deal of spoken Yiddish but do not speak it themselves, or read or write it.