smallwhite wrote:I've always wondered - why does a conversation have to be in ONE language? There's abundant listening opportunity everywhere and every day so it's really just speaking opportunity that we really want, so if Tarvos spoke to me in Chinese and I to her in Dutch, that's great practice, too, no?
I actually had a chat in the English-free zone with girlyrobot. I was speaking Swedish, and she was Swedifying her Danish and we got on pretty well. Then someone else came along and we discovered that the only thing we all had any pretensions to was German, so she spoke to us in German for a while and I astounded myself by being able to respond.
A lot of the time English ended up being the group language, but that didn't mean that I hadn't been part of groups where the language changed over the course of the conversation. Russian, Spanish and Mandarin happened around me very often. In fact, I've stayed in touch with some of the gathering participants who speak the latter two and they still speak in Spanish and Mandarin here - although not so often.
EDIT: As for what languages I spoke - English came top, then Swedish*. I spoke enough French to impress Rick and zenmonkey, although not enough to impress myself. And I stumbled through some German on a few occasions.
*Although I hid from tarvos and Jeff when they spoke to me in Swedish on the first day! I got stage fright!