I consider myself a pretty decent speaker of my native language, English. I even consider myself a pretty decent speaker of one other language, as well. According to a recent Facebook post citing an article discussing at what point one might reasonably say that he "speaks" a language, I felt modestly proficient at both.
--uh, well, until I took this test:
I didn't notice until after the test started that this test is apparently intended for native speakers of Brittish English.
Well, that, or I'm not as sharp as I thought I was.
I got 4 out of 6 right on the "Egghead," although I'm sure there was a little bit of luck involved.
ReplyDeleteI read that article, too. I once read an article by someone who speaks like 30 languages and belongs to a sort of language-lovers club. He said that it's always better to claim to speak, "a little," of a language and surprise the speaker by what you know rather than claiming to speak it and then having negative surprises. I kind of agree with that outlook. I know Spanish fairly well and am just learning German, but I don't know that I would be comfortable claiming, "to speak," them yet.
I got 4 out of 6 on egghead as well, and plain ol' failed the other two--1 out of 6 and 2 out of 6. I don't know if it speaks much for a test if the "hardest" one renders the best scores. As far as languages are concerned, I certainly followed your friend's advice about what I claimed to speak. I didn't walk around boasting about how good I was, and certainly my ability to speak the language has decerased over the years. However, if ability to write is included in a "speaker's" ability, then I'm pretty comfortable.
ReplyDeleteI got 4 on easy and 3 on the middle one. I don't think there's any rhyme or reason to it.
ReplyDeleteI think the questions even change each time. Hmm....
ReplyDeleteI am not taking these again. My scores will just go down. I enjoyed the ones that you could figure out if you had some knowledge of other languages/roots, but some of them were just impossible.
ReplyDeleteOkay, I was apparently busy enough when I took the test to not notice that I actually didn't take the "middlin" one. I got 5/6 on that one. Phew.
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