Cavesa wrote:Nope, the opportunity to self-correct doesn't matter at all in my case. Actually, not thinking too much while speaking helps a lot and is one of the main reasons of the disparity. My trained "instinct" simply works better than spending a lot of time on each sentence and paragraph. It is partially a psychological issue, just like speaking being the biggest problem for many others..
Serpent wrote:OMG yessss! That's definitely something I experience. My mind gets it right but then I start to second-guess myself. For me it's worst in German and in Slavic languages. In German due to the painful experiences of classroom learning, and in the Slavic ones because sometimes what I'm saying/writing feels too similar to Russian
And I agree that you definitely shouldn't assume everyone is self-correcting when writing.
Oh and I also think garyb is C1 at least in some skills
Ser wrote:I've definitely had the experience here in Canada of meeting people whose oral skills were far better than their written skills. This includes a Korean classmate in high school who spoke largely impeccably, including in terms of her accent, but when I had a look at what she wrote, she showed a strange influence from Korean that I just couldn't detect in her speech. I think she really doubted herself whenever she tried to put something on paper, and unfortunately would often make the poorer choice.
Thanks to all of you for mentioning this idea! Looks like again I was judging too much based on my own experiences with self-correcting and general speaking difficulty, but what you say about instinct and doubt makes sense. Part of my own difficulty with speaking is probably that I don't trust my instinct enough so I try too much to self-correct and find the "right" way to express things, which just lowers my fluency and doesn't even necessarily avoid mistakes...
I'm quite confident that my reading and listening in French and Italian are C1 and have been for years. Maybe writing as well, but I'll play the rusty French card too and say that these days I can still write quite correctly but not as naturally as I once could: my phrasing sometimes feels clunky, like that of a B-level student, and some Italian influence slips in there. But as I say, I judge based on my lowest skill.