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That is a most unusual skill, normally people can speak another language but not read it. What languages can you read?
Salaam
MW
Latin, Spanish, French, Italian pretty well -- I had the first three in grammar school because I went to a good school I guess. I kept studying Latin and Spanish for quite a while. A friend of mine claimed we shared a past life in France and after speaking with her for a while I found myself getting more fluent at an inexplicable rate so maybe she was right.
Portuguese with some difficulty, though it sounds like the other romance languages, the spellings seem a bit more difficult.
When I was in Ethiopia I was trying to pick up some Amharic -- learned the alphabet which is very complicated (over 200 characters) and could read a bit but it's been about 5 years and I've forgotten most of it. The locals frequently spoke some English and seemed thrilled that I was interested in learning their language. Once it became clear that I was a willing student they would sometimes gang up to teach me.
OK, I guess there are some that I can understand spoken but not written, which I forgot about until I thought about it just now:
On my visit to Germany I found I can understand spoken German, and had a lengthy conversation with one woman where I was speaking English and she German and we understood each other. At times I found myself forgetting she was speaking German. With German, many words sound just like English words but are written very differently. Dutch too is like that my neighbor was Dutch and when she got old (and either very senile or doped up on medications or both) would talk to me in Dutch "so that I will understand"
People in my family spoke Ukrainian and Greek so I picked up a little of that when I was a kid but can't read any.
I've watched hundreds if not thousands of hours of anime in Japanese and can understand a bit. I would think more by but I never got exposed to Japanese until after I was an adult so maybe it makes it harder to retain what I've learned.
