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Define fluent, and define language. I can read novels in Dutch, English, German, French, Spanish, Swedish, and Italian, but only hold a meaningful conversation
by mdemare 16y ago
Define fluent, and define language.
I can read novels in Dutch, English, German, French, Spanish, Swedish, and Italian, but only hold a meaningful conversation in the first two, so I chose 2 languages in the poll.
I can read without much problems: Flemish, Afrikaans, Frisian, Norwegian (nynorsk and bokmål), Danish, Catalan, Portuguese, (and, I discovered by accident, Interlingua, an artificial language - truly a well designed language!), purely because these languages are so similar to the ones I already know.
If you speak Dutch, you also speak accented Flemish and broken Afrikaans. If you speak Danish, you can also understand Swedish and Norwegian.
But sadly, if you speak English, there are no languages that you get for free.
- johanbev 16y ago> If you speak Dutch, you also speak accented Flemish and broken Afrikaans. If you speak Danish, you can also understand Swedish and Norwegian. It is true that these languages are really close. But I woudn't say that danes in general understand spoken Norwegian or Swedish (though Norwegians usually do understand the others better). If you speak Danish as a foreign language, I'd be really impressed if you could have anything resembling a natural conversation with a norwegian or a swede.
- MarkSimpson 16y ago> But sadly, if you speak English, there are no languages that you get for free. Scots. http://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots http://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots And that's it. :)