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How fluent are You in Your native language?

Posted: September 8th, 2014, 3:48 pm
by Nemomon
Stupid spam topic, but why not.

My talking Polish is kinda weird. People understand me, of course, but often I use words that are gramatically incorrect, or gender incorrect, or just obsolete ones. Due to my age, Russian words aren't rare as well. I often also use English words as well, though usually single words that otherwise I would have to use multiple Polish words to describe the same thing.

My written Polish is similar to spoken, except that I love to use weird words, and combinations, and use the well forgotten tense most often in an incorrect way.

But how are You?

Re: How fluent are You in Your native language?

Posted: September 8th, 2014, 4:07 pm
by Iwamoto Yuri
I'm pretty fluent at speech, though my dutch grammar isn't the best.

Re: How fluent are You in Your native language?

Posted: September 8th, 2014, 5:08 pm
by Nemomon
Aquahorse wrote:Of course I speak and write Russian fluently, also very good English) That's all.

Very good topic, thank you!!
By "fluent" I don't mean to talk very well. Every of us is fluent in our native languages - after all we're talking in it since we were born. I rather meant if each of You have a habit of using different words, or talk kind of differently than others. Or if one uses all the grammar rules, or perhaps skips some &c.

Re: How fluent are You in Your native language?

Posted: September 8th, 2014, 7:39 pm
by Shiromi
What do you mean by "fluency"?

Are you talking about a standard dialect of your native language that you're required to learn in school?

Are you talking about being Bilingual and one of your languages being more easy to communicate in than your other languages?

Are you talking about being able to do complex language-use tasks, like compose poetry or tell jokes? Even native-speakers of languages may not be able to do more difficult tasks in their language. How would you measure fluency in a language?

The matter of "fluency" is a very tricky topic to linguists.

How fluent are You in Your native language?

Posted: September 8th, 2014, 8:08 pm
by Jecka
Portuguese, and uhhhh, well, it depends...On a scale of one to ten (ten being the most, obviously):
Understanding: 8
Reading: 6/7 (as I don't do it much)
Speaking: 5/6 (Tch >_>)
Writing/spelling: anywhere from 1-3
Results: it really depends, but I'm going with not very :V
Tbh, I'm more fluent in Spanish (which would be my 3rd language) than I am in Portuguese.

Re: How fluent are You in Your native language?

Posted: September 9th, 2014, 6:50 am
by mangaluva
I usually have to slow down a LOT when talking to Americans because apparently Scots talk fast. I also have a really weird mix of Scottish and American in my accent and it usually gets people asking if I'm Canadian.

Re: How fluent are You in Your native language?

Posted: September 9th, 2014, 6:58 am
by Hime-Chan
I'm not exactly sure how to rate the fluency of your own native language, especially since usually, fluent is used as a sort of a level under the native speaker level?

But, I'd say my english is more polite than my French, I do use quite a few swear words, and my usual French is slightly working class, I can switch to formal and use big words, I just don't want to use my energy to do that most of the time.
However, even taking into account my working class roots, with the swear words, you can notice pretty easily that I have more vocabulary, and uh, I make a lot less grammar mistakes than the average population when writing. I do pale in comparison of Academics, it's easy to notice that I don't come from money (as in, the only other person who went to university, in my family, for now, is my mother's cousin), if you've been to uni, or are generally rich.

I have a slightly southern accent that tends to come out stronger the longer I've been speaking in English, or if I talk to people from the north of France :)

Re: How fluent are You in Your native language?

Posted: September 9th, 2014, 12:15 pm
by MoonRaven
Hmm... I'm fluent in Finnish. I can talk, read, write and understand very well. Even though I got only C... But that was a matter of the topics I had to write about. I didn't go deep enough in my essays. But grammatically I fare just fine. :)

Re: How fluent are You in Your native language?

Posted: September 9th, 2014, 12:33 pm
by MoonRaven
Aquahorse wrote:Moony, and Englisk pretty good, your forgot)))
yes, but the point og this thread is native languages. Mine is Finnish. Otherwise I could start writing all sorts of stuff about English, Swedish, French...

Re: How fluent are You in Your native language?

Posted: September 10th, 2014, 5:46 pm
by Stopwatch
I guess I'm decent at it. As in, my grammar and spelling tend to be better than a lot of people my age, but I'm far from happy with some of my grammar especially. Also, I'm terrible at explaining things and tend to get misinterpreted a bit as a result. Still, I focus in on those points probably too much so I would judge my English to be, idk, 7/10?

Re: How fluent are You in Your native language?

Posted: September 12th, 2014, 8:55 am
by Giogio
Heh, interesting question.
As for talking - I'd say my pronounciation is just bad, no matter which language I speak. People tend to ask me to repeat stuff a lot :-[
For grammar and stuff, I've always had a rather good feeling - never bothered to remember the comma rules, but I usually guess right, for example ^^
And in writing, I guess it really depends on the topic. There are just some areas, mostly academic, about which I've only heard/read in English, so trying to write about them in German feels really awkward. (And in others, like topics I learned in school but don't usually encounter, I always hit the missing-vocabulary-wall in English.)
I do the language-mixing almost only in my head - it's just more effective - but yeah, it has happened that I really couldn't figure out a good way to say something precicely in German and used the English word :x

Re: How fluent are You in Your native language?

Posted: September 13th, 2014, 10:35 am
by Kaito Lady
Um....I'm fluent in speaking Afrikanns, though I tend to mix a lot of spanish and english into it and I am slow to pick up new word in it. I think that might be because I mainly only speak it with my parents and occasionally with another familiar. I also barely can write it and I don't really read it either....
All in all, I'm just much more better at Spanish or English at all levels :P Even my German reading and writing skills are better and that's already saying something :x