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A dead honest language CV... | ||
Tags: Curriculum Vitae (CV) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4666 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes  Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 49 of 104 03 November 2013 at 5:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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I can't even rate my Brazilian Portuguese and my Argentine Spanish since they are not CEFR-ificated anyway.
I wouldn't sit a Continental Portuguese test since I've never been to Portugal and have no connection with its culture/people etc... 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6901 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 50 of 104 03 November 2013 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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@montmorency, thank you for your feedback and your nice words! If you find language mistakes in my posts, please let me know, if you don't mind. Maybe I will feel a bit more secure about my English writing when I am more aware of the specific problems (and able to deal with them, one thing at a time). There was no googling or dictionary use involved in writing that post, by the way :)
I guess my general problem is that I am generally a perfectionist when it comes to writing (this includes my native Polish - working as an editor fed my perfectionism to an even larger extent). I might never be happy with the way I write... Unfortunately, the BBC Polish Section was closed in 2005, along with nine other foreign-language services. This is a bit ironic, considering how many Polish people emmigrated to the UK around this time. I have to think of other job/research possibilities, though. Going back to the certification off-topic, I do not see how using CEFR levels for describing our skills in non-certified languages is an abuse of the CEFR framework. Even Iwwersetzerin did use a CEFR description for a non-certified language ;). Certificates are nothing more than the confirmation of the skills you've already had. Sometimes they may not even reflect your language skills anymore (this is the case of my Spanish). And sometimes they may confirm the skills which are not even there (despite the fact how thorough many of these certifying procedures are, test-taking skills are not of no relevance). Furthermore, the lack of an official certificate does not mean that the language level description is based solely on the self-evaluation. As tarvos has already pointed out, many language courses at school/university are coupled to the CEFR (with a clear distinction whether it is about the level required to start the course or the level expected after the course and tested in the end), and so are many European textbooks and other language learning materials such as graded readers, all being part of the all-European standardization process. If you keep seeing the A1-C2 labels all around you (which was not the case e.g. 10 years ago, if I recall correctly), it is really hard not to use this as a description of your level, the way I used to refer to my English language skills using the "lower-intermediate", "intermediate", "upper-intermediate" etc. terms. Plus, you have good CEFR-related self-evaluation checklists at your disposal. And let me point out that for people from Central and Eastern Europe, not to mention other world regions, many of those cetificates are difficult if not impossible to afford. Believe me, I do know how daunting these tests are: my DELE Intermedio involved not only hours and hours of tests but also getting up at 2.30 a.m. to catch the train to the nearest testing center. Plus arguing in Spanish about the oral exam hours when I found out that some candidates were expected to take the oral part of the exam on the following days (no information about it was given in advance; bad, bad organization). (Sorry for continuing this off-topic in a fun thread.) Edited by Julie on 04 November 2013 at 1:25am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 51 of 104 03 November 2013 at 6:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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As for my own CV, a proper one would be as long as Cristina's or Iversen's but not so impressive. But my current answer to "what languages do you speak?" is that I've had conversations in Finnish, English, Polish and Italian orally and in Portuguese, Spanish and German only in writing. I would definitely be able to have a fairly good oral conversation in Portuguese but I'm not sure about the other two.
I can also understand almost anything I care about in the languages listed above, minus German but plus Romanian, Ukrainian and Belarusian. A weird borderline case is Croatian. I can't list it neither above nor below this line. Next come the languages I'm less serious about, but still understand more than just what the related languages would enable me to. It's Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Catalan. Finally the former friends. I don't have such a big list as most people, as when I've started I rarely drop a language completely. But I studied Esperanto mostly because Prof Argüelles said there's a noticeable improvement when you have 4 languages under your belt, and I still want to read "Fajron mi sentas interne" one day (I also still remember all the endings and most suffixes) - but for now what is available in other languages is more exciting. One more reason to start Esperanto was that in the original rules of the 6WC it had to be a new language. Earlier I had started Yiddish for the same reason, and also to get more motivated for German. I've realized that getting motivated for German is "an inside job", and it will make much more sense to try again when my German is much better (and when I've read most of what I want to read in the Romance and Scandinavian languages). I also understand some written French, but I don't like it. But I've done some GLOSS lessons and it would kinda be fun to read a book in it one day. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Iwwersetzerin Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Luxembourg Joined 5667 days ago 259 posts - 513 votes Speaks: French*, Luxembourgish*, GermanC2, EnglishC2, SpanishC2, DutchC1, ItalianC1 Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 52 of 104 03 November 2013 at 6:52pm | IP Logged | ||
Oh, that's too kind of you, thanks Solfrid! I'd love to move to Norway ;-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Einarr Tetraglot Senior Member United Kingdom einarrslanguagelog.w Joined 4611 days ago 118 posts - 269 votes Speaks: English, Bulgarian*, French, Russian Studies: Swedish | Message 53 of 104 03 November 2013 at 7:06pm | IP Logged | ||
I cannot stress how true this is. I can speak for Bulgaria, where the average salary is somewhere around $400 (way worse outside the capital) Аt the same time a CPE would cost $230, a DALF: $170, TRKI (Тест по русскому языку как иностранному) more than $200 and if I want to get my Norwegian certified it will set me back by more than $300. And add to that the exorbitant costs to go and stay for a couple of days in Norway. Now, here in Scotland, Norway is a short fly away but it's a couple of flights and at least a day of travel from Bulgaria. Now back to the topic. In my official CV, which I use in front of employers, the languages I mention first of all English, since I got an A in the state exam (a result which is inscribed in my high-school diploma and I consider legitimate enough), French,got my certificate from the French Institute after 5 years of intensive study at high school (my degree there was governed by them). Usually I also list (just for their information)Russian and Norwegian as languages I currently study, and further explain that I have not achieved high levels of proficiency, and underline that they can rely on me if they need something I can help with and is in my competence. For instance, where I last worked we had a Norwegian translation for a major client and I saw that tiny, yet obvious mistake in the translated text. It would have been highly awkward to send it off like that, so we had it returned and corrected by another certified translator who proofread it and confirmed that there, indeed was a mistake. So I guess, even uncertified languages can be of proper use too. :) Edited by Einarr on 03 November 2013 at 11:55pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 54 of 104 03 November 2013 at 7:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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Of course they can be! When I worked for Kaspersky Lab I saw spam in ALL languages. (we were required to use google translate if there's something in an unfamiliar language) Well, not in toki pona, but I've seen spam in Esperanto, Belarusian and Icelandic.
4 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 55 of 104 03 November 2013 at 11:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm actually quite happy with the way the thread has worked out. There is no need to get uptight about
certification. If one does not have a need for it, why spend money, time and energy? That said, there are many situations where people are tested for their language skills. With our federal government language tests are mandatory for many job positions. Of less concern for us are all kinds of language tests that foreigners must pass to enter certain professions. What I find very gratifying in the present discussion is the universal acceptance of the CEFR model even though the implementation may be limited among recreational language learners who do not need certification. For example, few people talk about the section on oral interaction skills. I find it particularly gratifying that people are actually looking at the self-assessment checklists and various guidelines. I think the people now think twice about appropriating willy-nilly the CEFR descriptors. And, above all, we can see that very few people "speak" many languages equally well. The idea that somebody speaks many languages has morphed into the idea of certain strong languages, even then with nuances, and the weaker languages along a graduated scale. This is not really new but at least it is out in the open and can be easily described and even measured. Mission accomplie. Edited by s_allard on 04 November 2013 at 2:18am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5764 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 56 of 104 04 November 2013 at 1:19am | IP Logged | ||
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s_allard, it would be very kind if, in the future, you could refrain from making blanket statements about "how other people act".
Cristina, maybe now I'll manage to be more objective. German. Supposedly native. A certain degree of wonkiness in my listening comprehension due to erratic attention; some days capable of making meaningful remarks in a conversation when focusing primarily on another task or able to get the gist of two or three conversations; some days I experience severe lag and garbled interpretation even when I'm trying to concentrate on my conversation partner. Do understand a number of dialects when I can focus. Interference in spoken production, especially when tired. Tend to talk in spurts and hesitate a lot while talking. Get nervous easily. Little experience in formal written communication. English. Six years of school, private use, another three years of school. Same limitations as in German apply. Generally good listening comprehension of many accents including non-native accents. Five days in an English-speaking country; conversations mainly with other non-native speakers. Accent non-native, but not obviously German. Can and do use scientific literature and other media in the language. No experience using the language in a formal setting. Spanish. Ten months as au pair in Spain. Sé castigar a niños pequeños. Good to acceptable comprehension of most accents. Conversations nowadays are strained, mainly due to my conversation partners feeling compelled to say "tranquila, tranquila" a lot. Could deal with daily life tasks and engage in interesting conversations about unknown topics when I was in Spain; mainly thanks to the immense patience of everyone around me. Generally understand written media, but read comparably little, and have almost no practice writing the language. Japanese. Around six years of erratic self-study, one of it accompanied by a beginner's class, language exchanges since February. Can read modern novels, internet conversation and easy newspaper articles with a little help of a dictionary, can follow most TV shows and everyday conversations. Get very nervous when addressed directly and often can't speak. Usually can get my point across in writing, but make many mistakes. French. Three years of school. Can read mosts texts, sometimes with the help of a dictionary. Listening comprehension very dependent on my interest in a topic, zone out when the topic is uninteresting - even more so than in other languages. Little writing practice outside of class; tend to replace talking by blushing, looking helpless and finally gesticulating. Mandarin. Half a year of classes. Know grammar and vocabulary at A1 level, experience even stronger inhibition when trying to talk or write than in my other languages. Edited by Bao on 06 November 2013 at 4:30pm 7 persons have voted this message useful |
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