Quote:
(Steve Crook @ Jan 15 2006, 02:28 PM) Quoted post</div><div class='quotemain'>
I have reasonable conversational German. I had a German pen-friend when I was at school and we're still in regular contact 30+ years later. I had to use it recently when a German couple came visiting when I was staying with friends. She could speak English but he only had German with a few words of English. But I managed a few interesting chats with him even though I haven't spoken German for quite a few years.
I also found it to be a curious linguistic experience was when I went to a film festival in Spain with a French lady. She speaks French and English, I speak English & German. Neither of us spoke Spanish. And as it was in the little town of San Sebastian which isn't a tourist town, most of the people in the local shops and restaurants didn't speak much English. But we got by very well with a bit of smiling and pointing [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif[/img]
But the interesting discovery was that we could both read the local newspaper. As Spanish is a Latin based language, as is French and a lot of English, we could guess the majority of what we read and then fill in the gaps with a few checks in the Spanish-English dictionaries we had.
Steve
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Sounds like a perfect friendship, Steve! My dear brother once joked that his ideal woman would say nothing at which I gave him quite a few words in his ear and a tap on the arm. Too bad he tapped back [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tongue.gif[/img]
You're fortunate in having conversational German. I grew up hearing my mother speak low and high German to her brothers and sisters and although I 'understood' it, I never learned to formally speak, read, or write it. My parents preferred I become proficient in English although I could have mastered both languages had they realized that.
Best
Barbara