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Richard Jernigan -> RE: How many languages do you speak?? (Mar. 1 2016 18:37:19)
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The answer may fluctuate. Eight years ago we went to Spain. It had been many years since I spent much time in a Spanish speaking country. Driving from Jerez to Granada, Larisa had the radio on. Though I had been handling tourist stuff for a few days, I couldn't keep up with the radio announcer, who was speaking pretty much castellano.
I thought, "Well, that's it. Lack of practice for years, and age, Spanish is gone."
Suddenly, like throwing a switch, everything the announcer said was perfectly clear. When we got to Granada I conversed with the university student who was minding the small hotel while the owner ran errands. When we got to the room, Larisa remarked, "You really can speak Spanish."
A couple of years later I visited my college room mate, who has lived in Munich since 1964. We ate dinner, breakfast the next day, walked around the city center. I could read signs, understand a few words here and there. He said, "Let's hire a taxi and ride around a little more of the town."
The driver was friendly, apparently used to tourists, and gave a running commentary of the sights as we drove. At first I just caught a word here and there, not having used German to any extent for more than 40 years. But gradually I picked up more words, then the curtain was lifted. By the end of the hour and a half taxi ride I was conversing intelligibly and fairly fluently.
Assuming it would be no problem to me, a Javanese friend wrote to me in Bahasa Indonesia, the Malay dialect that is the official language of Indonesia, though he speaks English, Spanish, Russian and five Indonesian languages fluently. I had to work through his letters laboriously with a dictionary at hand. But back in Indonesia for a few days, I would not say I was fluent, but I could get along with daily stuff fairly effectively.
In grad school I shared an office with a lovely Brazilian girl. She spoke Portuguese and Romanian, neither of which I could make out very well. But she showed me that if she spoke Portuguese very slowly, and I did the same in Spanish, we could communicate clearly. In a few months she was effective in English, and fluent in Spanish, with a mere wisp of accent.
So when I went to Brazil I thought, "No problem. I'll just speak Spanish slowly, as Catarina showed me." Didn't work. As soon as Spanish words came out, people's eyes clouded over, their faces said, "Foreign language. Don't understand."
So on the next trip I altered my tactics. I learned a little Portuguese, enough to get a conversation started. Then I would very gradually transition to Spanish, slowly and carefully enunciated. Worked about 80% of the time.
Working in France a fair amount, I learned enough French to get through a fair amount of daily stuff. The problem there was people would assume I was fluent and launch into rapid fire monologues which were totally incomprehensible to me.
Some times I even have trouble with English. Spending several days in rural Norfolk four years ago, photographing some 15th century paintings on the altar rail of a church, I stayed at a small rural hotel. The staff were young people in their twenties, educated and well spoken. But one morning at breakfast I was offered "More taste?" It took three repetitions for me to figure out the subject was "toast," pronounced with the ongoing vowel shift. I read recently that the same vowel shift is taking place in the northern midwest of the USA.
RNJ
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