Tick les boites por favor, danke

[chickenfeet]

I'm curious about my flist's language skills. Please answer the following poll which asks you to indicate languages in three categories. The first I've defined as "fluent", meaning that you could do essentially anything in that language that you could do in your mother tongue. Second up is "reasonably competent" implying the ability to carry a conversation or read a text. Finally, "smattering"; can order a meal or read a tombstone kind of thing.

[Poll #592981]

Comments

[rillaith.livejournal.com]

Italian/Dutch are picked up from a combination of tourism and knowing a related language (ie spanish/german). I have a teach myself Dutch book, that I haven't yet read most of, and my Mum taught me Spanish until I was 10 (when Is tarted learning French at school) so I used to know a LOT more, have a very good spoken accent, and can remember an ecletic subset of vocab. It's halfway between the last 2 categories really. I sued to be very competent at French/German but they're 14 years out of date, now.

[rillaith.livejournal.com]

(Err, as in 12 years ago, Latin, French, Germna and Spanish would have all been bumped up one level. Although "fluent" would be "3 years german to GCSE with an aptitude for it and 6 years french with a huge vocab but needing to think harder than for german", rather than second-language fluent.)

[misia.livejournal.com]

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.

[lnr]

Hmm, I could probably order a meal in italian, but that's about all, I just have the hang of it from menus. I can say hello and goodbye in spanish/greek/portuguese and count to 10 in arabic and russian - this is all well below smattering level.

I have a year of german, which isn't much use except for getting to the station, and I'd still call a smattering rather than reasonably competant.

My french is inbetween competant and fluent. Much more fluent reader than anything else.

[thidwick.livejournal.com]

Sadly, my language skills have deteriorated. There was a time when I would have considered myself nearly fluent in Spanish, but a lack of use has caused my knowledge to erode into the "reasonably competent" category. Same with Japanese -- I used to know more than a smattering, having taken it for two years in college, but I've regressed to only a very basic vocabulary and I remember very few of the characters I'd once memorized.

My knowledge of French and Italian is derived entirely from all those years of studying Spanish. I cannot wrap my mouth around French to save my life, but I can read it reasonably well and can understand speakers if they use basic sentences (this knowledge was gleaned when I spent a week in Paris by myself ;-)). Ditto Italian, though I find pronunciation much easier.

[owlfish]

My Italian is head and shoulders about my French and Latin - but I wouldn't call it fluent. I've studied Arabic and Japanese, but that doesn't mean I remember enough of the characters any more to be able to read a tombstone - although I still retain a smattering of vocabulary.

[frumiousb.livejournal.com]

I listed myself as fluent in Dutch as I generally am, but written Dutch has its own rather complicated rules that I cannot follow. I write Dutch as I speak it, which ends up making me sound like a retarded South African as I write. So, not clear if that really counts as fluent. :)

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

That's interesting as I have noticed that Dutch and Germans write English as they speak it, which is to say very well but quite unlike a native English speaker. We used to refer to Kearney Standard European English when I worked there.

[sorcha.livejournal.com]

I leanred Irish, French and German in school. My French is definately at the smattering level (but I stopped learning at 15), my German and Irish hovering somewhere slightly below the reasonably fluent. I've hardly spoken any language other than English in nigh on a decade (unless you count Engineering), but knowing some other languages does help me feel more comfortable when travelling on the Continent.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

(unless you count Engineering)

Grunting doesn't count

[lemur-man.livejournal.com]

There's a second 'u' in 'Portuguese' and a second 'a' in 'Tagalog'. No random vowel elision please!

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

I had to go for the cheesy on the French and Latin. I'm so rusty I need a dictionary for most things, but I can read academic articles reasonably well in French, because I haven't lost all that vocabulary yet. And if I were dropped off in France with none of my more fluent friends, I could get myself a room and a meal, etc.

But it's really embarrassing. Even my German, in which I could once give seminar papers, has deteriorated ...