Originally posted by robgski the general idea of a passage of text.
going by that definition, I'd count Italian for myself. At a party lately, a friend of a friend showed around a small quiz app she had made to test her students, who were teached for a considerable amount of time, for basic understanding and grammatical knowledge. In that test I did quite good, even though I'd never had any lessons in Italian. But I did learn Latin for some years at school, and a little French, so with the close relationship between the Romance languages French, Spanish, Italian, I can get the gist of some that is "said" in those, but I would finely distinguish between native speakers conversing normally and written language. Put some dialect on top and I'm completely lost, even in German, my mother tongue, when some Bavarians or Swiss claim to speak the same language as me.
I wouldn't even really consider myself fluent in English. Sure, I could hold a conversation, depending on the topics, and I could probably follow close to all that is being said, but I often find myself looking for the correct word for something (okay, that is something that routinely happens to me in German as well, but in writing I often find myself just quickly looking something up in the dictionary, which I wouldn't be able to do in speaking... I'd probably resort to paraphrasing it in simpler terms). And even in writing, oftentimes I'll resort to using strange words or grammatical constructs that native speakers must find weird.
And while I do watch most of the movies at home with the original English audio, I can better follow the action when I turn on subtitles, because whenever the spoken word begins to drown in surrounding sounds, the rate of how much I understand drops rapidly and trying to concentrate more on what is being said removes more of my enjoyment than simultaneously reading the subtitles (one reason I like Netflix more than Amazon Video, they provide audio tracks and subtitles in movies' / series' original language much more often)
And in music I'd say English is even closer to some languages that I don't understand at all than to German. In German I immediately understand all the lyrics, without even having to actively try it. But I enjoy many English songs without ever really trying to understand what is being said, I just listen to the rhythm and instruments and the sound of the voice rather than what is transmitted with it. I can much better zone out and relax to that. With a song that is regularly played on the radio I'll absorb the chorus after a short while, but most of the verses will be lost on me until I look up the lyrics.
Most of the reading I do is online and most of that is rather colloquial. A few years ago I tried to read paperback novels in English, for example Lolita because everybody was raving about Nabokovs use of the English language, and he really has a poetic way in his choice of words and structuring of sentences. I really enjoyed Catch-22 for its humour. But all in all I find it a bit more strenuous and exhausting to read English novels. That may play a big part in why I'm not reading much analog anymore, along with the never stopping digitization of our lives.
I don't think I'd ever be able to follow anything in a movie when it's in anything else than German or English, with or without subtitles, to take even a little entertainment out of it. A "¿Donde esta la bibliotheca?" (accents missing because I wouldn't be sure where exactly to put what kind) or "Je cherche la bibliothèque, ou est-
ceelle?" would be no big deal, but completely understanding what was answered or giving a follow-up question for some details... yeah, that'd take a while
Last edited by ehrwien; 02-15-2020 at 10:35 AM.