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Fluent - for the first 30 words... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| I'm With Stupid Senior Member Vietnam Joined 4171 days ago 165 posts - 349 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Vietnamese | Message 9 of 15 17 October 2013 at 2:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yeah, it's quite common. A lot of tourists think that Vietnamese people have pretty good English, but the reality is that as soon as you talk to them about anything not directly related to doing their jobs, they're often pretty weak. It's also quite common for someone to know all of the specialist terminology and colloquialisms for a subject they're really interested, and it can fool you into thinking their general English is much better than it is.
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| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4686 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 10 of 15 17 October 2013 at 4:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
Which may be a large part of why you can put seven languages under your profile as spoken, while I'm still barely clinging to my three, with the rest stuck in "studies," I bet! I see Germans all the time where I live, but I basically look at it as "why bother someone just because you're one the hundreds of millions of people in the world who speak German?" I wouldn't talk to them if they were speaking English, so why is this any different? Yeah, I don't get a lot of practice that way. That's what I get for being a cold and closed northerner. ;-) As for this "depth" of proficiency, I've seen it in my German, for one. The first time I speak to anyone, they always ask the same questions: how did I learn German, where did I live, etc. And at most conversation meetups (the most common way that I get into a conversation), most of the time I'm just meeting new people and having the same small talk conversation as with everyone else. So I got to be very fast and smooth with this conversation, since I'd basically memorized the whole thing as a routine that I put on over and over. But my REAL conversational abilities, while by no means bad, are not quite the same as that. A couple years back when I was just starting to revive my childhood German, the difference was even greater, because this was basically ALL I could do with any confidence or accuracy. When I was in Rome, I also got the distinct impression that the merchants there all have the same thing going on with English. No one sounded super confident with English, and yet everyone could easily handle certain low-level business English relating directly to their business (e.g., food, souvenirs, train tickets). 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Duke100782 Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Philippines https://talktagalog.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4486 days ago 172 posts - 240 votes Speaks: English*, Tagalog* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 11 of 15 17 October 2013 at 6:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think after more than a year of living in China my Mandarin is more or less fluent for the first 30 or so
words, taxi-Mandarin as they put it. I'm learning quite fast now though. I think a lots of work with my dad teaching me Mandarin focusing on pronuniation, Berlitz and Pimsleur's gave me a big head start in fluency and pronunciation, which often misleads the person I'm speaking with that my Mandarin is more fluent than it really is. I'm learning, learning, learning, and soon I'll reach fluency! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Belardur Octoglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5609 days ago 148 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2, Spanish, Dutch, Latin, Ancient Greek, French, Lowland Scots Studies: Biblical Hebrew, Italian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Korean | Message 12 of 15 17 October 2013 at 7:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
For what it's worth, I took it completely differently. The people in Egypt were literally warm, and thus smiling (i.e. not having a warm personality); the combination of cold and indifferent people (who are also physically, not emotionally cold) would make the experience so terrible. Connotation-wise, I understood that she has (shares with the Egyptian?) a dislike of cold weather. Not that I'm saying you're wrong either, mind you, just that it varies extremely due to subjective conditions. Edit: wine not conducive to subject-verb agreement in number... Edited by Belardur on 17 October 2013 at 7:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Zireael Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 4649 days ago 518 posts - 636 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, Spanish Studies: German, Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Arabic (Yemeni), Old English | Message 13 of 15 21 October 2013 at 9:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This reminds me of my mum's stories of a student trip to Libya and Syria.
Basically, the locals in the bazaars (suk) could speak the phrases they needed to in their line of work in quite a lot of languages, including German. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 15 22 October 2013 at 10:45am | IP Logged | |||||
My own sister is of the Solfrid Cristin type, i.e. the bold speakers (although with a shorter language list), but I'm of the geoffw type - I need a reason to speak to people, and knowing their language at some intermediate level is not a valid reason. And therefore I rate speaking as a necessary step you have to take in order to claim a language, but chronologically I will always have been able to read it long before - and probably also write it at a decent level. And because I know that things are like that it would also be silly of me to make small talkl my primary goal - reading stuff is more important, and knowing the language and its structures is too. Being able to smalltalk is only important while I'm on holiday in a relevant country, and even with my rather extensive travel activities that doesn't amount to many days in each language in a given year. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5428 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 15 of 15 22 October 2013 at 2:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In my opinion, one of the lessons of Solfrid's and other people's observations is that you don't need a large
vocabulary to speak a language fluently. I have argued quite heatedly in other threads here that 300 to 500 words can take you very far in French, Spanish or English, the languages I'm most familiar with. I know that some people think that a small vocabulary means that you can only make idle small talk while waiting for the bus. This is not true. A snall vocabulary means that you can not discuss certain topics in a technical manner. You can approach the subjects with a limited vocabulary and expand your vocabulary as you go. This is not unlike what happens to us in our native languages when we meet people with specialized vocabularies. I'm sure that some of us have experienced going to a hospital or having to deal with medical specialists. All of a sudden we are exposed to a new vocabulary that we absorb naturally because of that core knowledge of grammar and basic words. Just to set the record straight, I'm not saying that you should limit your vocabulary to 500 words 1 person has voted this message useful |
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