OK, prepare for a long answer.
I have not done any regular proficiency test in any language since I left the university in January 1981, so I normally just say that I have done monolingual trips in 11½ language - the half one is obviously Esperanto since I only have used it during conferences within the venues, but spoken something else outside them. The other 11 languages are Danish (of course), Swedish, English, German, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Castillian, Catalan, Italian and Romanian. By 'monolingual trip' I mean that I refuse to speak anything than the local language to any local person, and that I try only to think and read and write in it during my stay. It can't be a 100 % immersion because sometimes I do speak to other tourists or tourist guides or whatever, and I may also update this thread in English from hotel computers - but the plan is to avoid any other language than the local one.
I would say that the weakest ones among those I mentioned are Dutch and Romanian, but even there I have been discussing anything from the animals in the local zoo over the weather to nuclear physics and sights I ought to visit - which should be enough to justify a B2 even in the weaklings among the 11½. However if you catch me during a gathering where people are speaking German or Italian behind my back it may take several minuts to get my brain spinning in Dutch or Romanian. My Swedish tone isn't quite nativelike, but I know all the words I need. And my spoken Esperanto has been up and down since I only have refreshed it during gatherings and conferences, but now I have paid for paper versions of the magazine of UEA (the international Esperanto organisation), which means that I regularly get a boost, and right now I also feel that this language is right at the tip of my tongue.
It might be worth mentioning that I have done lectures in 7 languages, and if the *** jerks at the upcoming gathering hadn't refused my proposal I could have added Portuguese to the list. If you can do a lecture in a language without looking into your notes then I think you are entitled to claim you speak the language. But now my involvement with any kind of conferences or gatherings has come to a screeching halt so there won't be any further additions to the list. I'm not going to participate in any more of these events.
And then there is the rest. Hmm ... that's a complicated question.
Let me first say that I have been studying Greek for several years, and during my last two visits I went almost monolingual the last day both times. If I could take a plane down there for a week or so tomorrow I think I could add Greek to the list, but only at something like a A2 level - I have too many holes in my vocabulary. The same applies to Russian, but there I have heard far less speech during the last couple of years so I might have a problem understanding the responses if I were dumb enough to engage in a conversation. But it would just take some hard aural training to get ready for my first conversation in Russian. As for Bulgarian and Serbian (+Croatian, Bosnian) I can more or less read them, and I could probably survive as a tourist - but not as a monolingual tourist. And my Polish and Slovak are also too weak for that, but I'm close to being able to read them. The same applies to Bahasa Indonesia - the limitation is that I have close to zero listening experience.
I would probably try speaking Afrikaans if I got the chance, but each time I have visited South Africa everybody has spoken to me in English - and I'm slightly worried about the political implikations in answering back in Afrikaans. When I have visited Northern Germany I have hardly ever heard any native speaker utter anything in Low German, so I have almost given up keeping it on my agenda - except as a written language. And the same could be true of Scots, but here at least some persons up North speak English with a Scots accent, and during the last gathering I actually got the chance to have a conversation in broad Scottish - and I think I passed the test. As for Latin I have been hovering just below the level where I would be confident enough to have a conversation, but I have done a 5 minute talk in Latin about tardigrades and their similarity to my Latin skills so with a bit of preparation and the right situation I would have a go - albeit at a modest level. My Irish and Albanian are definitely not close to be added to the list, but I'm studying both sporadically and in bursts.
And finally: how come I didn't mention Norwegian, in spite of Norway being a close neighhbour to Denmark? Well, I understand practically anything I hear from NRK television (even when people representing several dialects have heated conversations), but the dominating writing system (bokmål) up there irritates me because it looks like Danish with a lot of spelling errors, and that has prevented me from doing a real effort to add Norwegian to the list.
Right now my main plan is to learn to read the remaining languages in Europe (i.e. Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Basque plus a number of languages and dialects close to some of those I already know). And for the moment I prioritize that higher than learning to speak those from Eastern Europe which I already study as written languages now.
Carmody wrote:For me to retain the necessary vocabulary words in so many languages is beyond my reach. However it sounds as if you are able to do it with lists. Does that mean you are constantly refreshing every other week in a language?
Without my wordlists and my selective way of studying grammar it would have been TOTALLY impossible for me to keep afloat in a dozen active languages and at least the same number of passive ones. If I'm not buried in other things like my music collection I would typically study something like three or four languages in a day, not counting the major ones like English or German or French. I don't know how Mezzofanti or Krebs did it, except that Mezzofanti actually did use flash cards on paper. But for me those wordlists are the key to getting and maintaining my vocabularies in the languages I study.
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