The Multi-Linguistic Talents of yACF

[Maladict]

Observation: Still don't know what people mean when they use the word 'fluent'. Usually they don't either. It appears to mean something more than 'halting' or 'beginner level' but often not much more.

I was fluent in French when I found I was dreaming in French.  The only language apart from English that I've ever had fluency in (able to join in any conversation on any given subject, use puns, dream and think in). 

It's amazing how quickly you lose it if you don't use it. 

I've never dreamt in French; I'd like to try it, maybe it would be about singes in arbres, Eddie Izzard, and Pavlov's cat.

[unipaul]

Enough French and German to get by (politeness, directions, food & beer), and a smattering of Makaton...

Similar here - except I've got stage 2 BSL rather than Makaton (which I can usually understand...)

[hellymedic]

My personal definition of fluent is 'able to answer telephone to caller who only speaks <language>

[Slim]

English
Greek Cypriot

Bits of Turkish, French and Japanese

[road-runner]

No one has mentioned Slovak so far, so I can add that to our list.

My personal definition of fluent is 'able to answer telephone to caller who only speaks <language>

I found that to be one of the hardest things to do as the caller cannot see me and just prattles on, especially those cold callers selling something. Face to face I notice people tend to sense when I have not understood something before I let them know.

[Jurek]

Very strong thread necromancy going on here.
 You've gone back to almost the beginning of time.
ETA - I can do Polski and Greek, in addition to my rudimentary knowledge of English.
My Swahili is limited to a couple of phrases. Literally.
(Yeah, I did take out a copy of 'Teach yourself Swahili' from the library (remember those?) when I was in my teens.)
Its stuff you do at that age.
Who on here hasn't woken up and said 'Fuck it, I'm going to learn Swahili today'?

[barakta]

I'll bite:

English: Native speaker.
British Sign Language (BSL): Intermediate in that I can understand 50-90% of a signer/conversation but it's very variable, reception is better than production by miles. I studied it for 4-5yrs in classes but I have a mishmash of community derived signing accents.

German: GCSE, rusty, can read better than hear/speak.
French: GCSE, forgotten almost all of it.

[Basil]

English - Still learning
Brummie - Still learning
French - Was good, if a little 1970s street.  Now rusty but enough to get on.
German - Dieing through lack of use.
Japenese - Was getting there.  But now probably faded away.
Bollox - I'm told that this is what I talk most of the time.

Welsh.  Disappointed that it's not coming on as quickly as I hoped it would,  but slowly improving.

[citoyen]

Crikey! Ancient thread alert!

Observation: Still don't know what people mean when they use the word 'fluent'. Usually they don't either. It appears to mean something more than 'halting' or 'beginner level' but often not much more.

I was fluent in French when I found I was dreaming in French.  The only language apart from English that I've ever had fluency in (able to join in any conversation on any given subject, use puns, dream and think in). 

It's amazing how quickly you lose it if you don't use it. 

I've never dreamt in French; I'd like to try it, maybe it would be about singes in arbres, Eddie Izzard, and Pavlov's cat.

I remember the first time I dreamt in French. I'd been living in Bordeaux for around three months - it was my year abroad as part of my degree course. Felt very strange.

My French is good enough that I can watch something in French on TV and usually follow it without looking at the subtitles, though I might miss some details. Speaking is good enough to get by in France. Reading is not nearly as good as it should be considering I supposedly have a degree in French (which, tbh, I barely passed).

I always had more of an affinity with German but I gave that up after A-level.

I studied Italian for a year as an extra course at uni. Was supposed to be A-level standard by the end of the course but I was nowhere near. I can just about get by in Italy as a tourist though.

Spanish I can just about get by on guesswork by cobbling together bits of French and Italian.

I'm completely at sea with Slavic languages, and as for anything beyond Europe...

[Wowbagger]

I did French as far as A level - "Whitmarsh*" French. I did a bit more at teachers' training college, but I don't think it was any more advanced. About 10 years ago Jan and I spent about 10 days touring Brittany on the tandem. On the last night we camped at St. Malo and went to a nearby pizza place for our meal. I was astonished at how easy I found it to converse with a bloke at an adjacent table, and the waitress when she came for our order, given that it was pretty well 40 years since I had last studied French.

*Whitmarsh French is a term which was commonplace when I was teaching, as W. F. Whitmarsh had written a whole sequence of French text books which seemed to be utterly ubiquitous. They were mostly quite old-fashioned and failed to reflect many post-war changes to the language. A quick look at Amazon reveals quite a few titles dated between 1950 and 1970-ish.

I've occasionally had a googledabble into Whitmarsh, but never come up with anything about him. Astonishingly, no-one has ever seen fit to give him the honour of a Wikipedia entry. I think I read, a long time ago before the internet was a thing, that he was a pupil at my old place, King Edward VI School, Chelmsford, but I'm unable to prove this. I would think that he's been dead quite a long time.

[Ivo]

No one has mentioned Slovak so far, so I can add that to our list.

My personal definition of fluent is 'able to answer telephone to caller who only speaks <language>

I found that to be one of the hardest things to do as the caller cannot see me and just prattles on, especially those cold callers selling something. Face to face I notice people tend to sense when I have not understood something before I let them know.

That tells me more about the cold caller.
Over the years I've given customer service in 4 different languages (Dutch, German, English, French). I could do it in 2 other ones as well if needed.

[FifeingEejit]

SSE reasonably good when I feel like it
Scots - basic Fife and Doric as is in general usage while mixed with the above
Mein Deutsch ist slecht.
Mijn Nederlandse is niet goede

Chan eil mi nan Gàidhlig agat
Je non parla pa francais

And I seem to have my norse Hej spot on, which is how I found myself speaking in Angus Scots in a 7eleven in aarhus.
Knowing a bit of English, Scots and german/Dutch along with some regional variations is pretty handy for getting the jist of written modern norse, like kenning that quine is Scots for woman, comes fro. The same route as Queen soon makes you realize what a kvinna is.




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[Mr Larrington]

My late friend Hairy McSteve, Furryboottoon born and bred, was alleged to sound like a drunk Dane when he lapsed into full-on Doric

[FifeingEejit]

My late friend Hairy McSteve, Furryboottoon born and bred, was alleged to sound like a drunk Dane when he lapsed into full-on Doric

Yonscosyecannaetellwhitthursayingataw.


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[T42]

English: fluent with senior pauses
French: used to be extremely fluent, but now decaying after our lockdowns and generally avoiding social contact.
German: as French, but also decaying since I retired and no longer needed it for business.  I used to be able to make Stuttgarters think I came from Schwabenland.

These days I need closed captions in films, and find English-language films with CCs in French almost impossible to follow.  Come to that, French CCs on French films are often there and gone before I can read them.

@Wow: I suffered from Whitmarsh when I was at school.  Came to France with a vocabulary straight out of Simenon.

[Legs]

Reading is not nearly as good as it should be...

You don't need to tell me - I was born there.

I can do English reasonably well, a bit of German (less than my A-grade A-Level would suggest), and enough French to make myself understood most of the time.  I can do 'holiday Spanish' and 'holiday Italian', too.

Mrs L grew up in Kenya so our family patois is littered with Swahili phrases (polepole ~ slow, bisibisi ~ screwdriver, shilingi mingi ~ expensive...)

[Ham]

My definition of being able to speak a language is when you can say something without translating from your native tongue, which is a watershed as far as I am concerned.

Fluency is a graded thing, all too often you can hear something and radically misunderstand. Some of that is language (simple vocabulary), some is usage where the meaning differs from the words, some is accent. Either way, it can make for interesting situation.

My own list of languages I can switch into is much shorter than it used to be: French, Spanish, German, Hebrew. The list of those I had some familiarity with but have fallen into disrepair through lack of use is more esoteric: Italian, Mandarin, Georgian, Portuguese, Dutch and I can just about read cyrillic

Watching Netflix stuff in the original language is helping compensate for lack of travel. One interesting (?) observation is that - at least for me - keeping fluency in one alternate language helps them all.

[citoyen]

My definition of being able to speak a language is when you can say something without translating from your native tongue, which is a watershed as far as I am concerned.

Also when you know the native word for something but can't translate it back into English without thinking hard about it - often down to subtle nuances of meaning and slightly different usage.

[ian]

I obviously don't like to learn foreign as it merely encourages them. Having grown up fluent in Erewashian, it's not a dialect that readily adapts to foreign pronunciation, or for that matter, English. That's why DH Lawrence adaptations are always done by people speaking that mangy idiot-tongue Yorkshire.

We did reduce our French teacher to frequently reviewing her life and career choices, I'm sure she was on the morning-break absinthe in the staffroom. I believe a select few at my comprehensive did do German O Level, but I think the teacher eventually tied himself to a supermarket canal and threw himself in the canal. I feel sure Latin wasn't an option but it was the sort of school that didn't have a full set of keys on the music class xylophone. The delights of a mid-80s mining town.

I did sign up to learn basic Japanese and then the covid-era intervened, I should resume at some point, I don't much fancy doing it online, I want some Mind Your Language comedy. I do struggle with foreign, I have a weird speech thing where I can't say some words but I don't know which words until I'm about to say them. In English, I'm adept at stepping around these linguistic landmines and choosing another place to put my mouth, but that's a benefit of having a wide vocabulary. More challenging in foreignese where you don't have that extensive thesaurus to command.

[Mr Larrington]

You have canals in your supermarkets up there   Not even Venice is that sophisticated!

[ian]

The slow migration of supermarket trolleys to the local canal was a wonder to behold, they were the metallic wildebeest of the East Midlands savannah. I say this as the once-upon-a-time Trolley Recovery Operative for the local Co-op. I could make a single recovery op take all Saturday afternoon, which was better than cleaning the fruit and veg section.

Plus if I found any trolleys that belonged to other supermarkets, they'd pay me an off-the-book recovery bounty.

[Kim]

Much like barakta, I'm a native English speaker with conversational BSL that's atrophied from lack of use.  Since most of my exposure these days is through video, my reception's okay (accent permitting) but my brain goes faster than my hands and I end up in a muddle.

My definition of being able to speak a language is when you can say something without translating from your native tongue, which is a watershed as far as I am concerned.

But very much this.  The nature of sign languages is that they're just more natural for visual/spacial descriptions than one-dimensional speech, so I'll often find myself using BSL proforms for emphasis, even with non-signers.


I've got a shit GCSE in German, which to date has mostly been used for translating B&M instruction manuals and booking campsites.  I once found myself in a xkcd://466 situation and learned to use ipchains with nothing but the SUSE German manpages to work from.

The reason I have a shit GCSE in German rather than the default French is because at primary school, our French teacher was more interested in talking about food than teaching us much of the language.  So by the time I got to secondary - where I had a native French speaker for a form tutor as well as French lessons - I was two years behind everyone else and thoroughly lost.  German, on the other hand, was taught from scratch.

That said, last time I found myself in a Dutch supermarket reading the trilinugal ingredients list on something, I found the French version most useful, so some of the food vocabulary must have stuck.


But ultimately, I'm one of those people who can only learn languages by actually using them.  Which is fairly rubbish when you're BRITISH and have to actively seek out other languages.

[Wowbagger]

https://frenchteachernet.blogspot.com/2010/06/whitmarsh.html

I found that blog entry on a French teacher's page. I found it interesting, but if Whitmarsh published his first book in 1935, it's not surprising he's old hat!

But I shouldn't knock it. Somehow, the study of Whitmarsh instilled somewhere in my brain the ability, after a 40 year gap, to be able to hold a perfectly acceptable conversation in French after just a week or so's visiting shops, bars and campsites. But then I think I've got a very weird brain.

When I started teaching in the mid-1970s, I even used a (much more colourful) Whitmarsh text-book then.

[Rod Marton]

I used to speak German fairly fluently, well enough to pass as German in Austria, Bavaria and Switzerland (where admittedly they don't speak proper German, anyway), though in Germany itself people generally reckoned I was Dutch. This may be because I once had an Ostfriesische girlfriend, and the accent may have rubbed off.

My Russian is more recent, and whilst I've never reached the same level of fluency I can certainly get by in it. Though as it's become more and more difficult to travel to Russia, my main use for the language nowadays is in understanding conversational Polish (I reckon I can follow about half).

In the same way I can generally read and understand Dutch, once I worked out the weird spelling and pronunciation, but attempts at conversational Dutch have been limited by the fact that most of the Dutch speak better English than the English.

I once tried to learn Czech, but gave up as it was too difficult.

[orienteer]

English, as in London, but not quite within the sound of Bow bells to qualify as a cockney.

French at school; amazing how much I can muster when in rural France with no option to use English.

Japanese, through marriage, lack of recent visits hasn't helped but can get by on my own in Japan. Can't read beyond major place names and common terms (eg ladies and gents!), so feel very illiterate, but every restaurant has a show window of highly detailed plastic models so no danger of starving. We sent both kids to Saturday Japanese school, which has been of enormous benefit to them.

I also studied Latin at school, which helped my English mostly, as I can recognise unfamiliar words derived from Latin, and grammatical constructs.