Quote:
Originally Posted by kowalski
I speak Spanish with fluidity. Any native would call me fluent. I speak it better than any Brits here I've met. Nevertheless I make tonnes of errors and there's whole groups of tenses I just don't use and my vocabulary has gaps. So if someone tells me "I should have had a spanner" I wouldn't know what the fuck they were saying because I don't know the Spanish for spanner and then because phrases like "I should have had..." are rather more complicated and nuanced than we realise when only speaking our native tongue. Like, for sure, no one reading this can give an off the cuff explanation as to why the construction "I should have had..." comes to be understood the way it is.
So, despite being what is called fluent, I don't have mastery over the language. In normal discourse this is hardly problematic. However, things like reading legal documents is a real chore involving dictionaries and multiple rereadings and after a few paragraphs you get mentally burnt out. In this way it narrows your scope because certain tasks slow you down considerably and time is not an infinite resource, nor is mental effort and so on.
Or in a more basic example, it's not like I could just go work in a random call centre for a month or two if I got into financial difficulty.
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I empathise with you in French, I can do what I do because it's technical and being surrounded by English speaking provinces/countries the majority of technical people will refer to parts in English i.e. a bearing becomes un bearing rather than the French "un roulement". I'd hate to be in a position forced to apply for jobs in call centres/shops/bars....
Quote:
Originally Posted by kowalski
...even if I was half asleep, in my PJs, insulted the interviewer and was visibly drunk.
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