Re: The Japanese Language
Nihongaeri said:
(This, of course, isn't any kind of rebuke directed at you Pete, but more so the countless people that I have seen proudly assert that they know exactly XXXX kanji, many further claiming to have learned them in the course of X months. *sigh*... people...)
Ah, Nicholas! Whatever happened to the good old days, when we would rebuke each other for hours on end over such trivial nonsense as the most suitable qualifier for Kisame's Samehada? Could it be we've - heaven forbid - grown civilized?
But I enjoy this bitching about the presumption of others rather than on account of one's own.
On that note, allow me to bitch about the "how many languages do you speak" thread, where people with a passing knowledge of one Romance Language or another would claim to "know" the rest by virtue of said fact; and where so many people claimed to speak Japanese that I wondered where it was that they kept their translations so well hidden, that I'd never seen them.
I was tempted, upon contemplating this phenomenon, to claim I spoke not only Spanish, English, a bit of French and some Japanese, but also Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, Italian and heck, why not Basque - it may not be lingüistically related to Romance Languages, but the Basque know either French or Spanish or both!
And that's not all! Since Kanji are technically Chinese and may be used to write Korean, I guess I'll add this last language plus at least Mandarin and Cantonese to my repertoire!
Truly, I know so many languages I amaze myself!
But yes, expressing one's ability to speak a given language is difficult. For instance, I say my English is at native speaker level, but then every native speaker I encounter says my English is better than that of 90% of the native speakers they know. Of course, I would actually put the number closer to 95% (at least), but that's not the point.
I don't consider myself fluent in Japanese, but then again I'm not quite sure what
fluent means. I think what the nikyuu goukaku explanation says is about right: I can hold a conversation on general topics and read everyday articles well enough, but not well enough that I don't encounter any problems. Also, my knowledge of grammar and kanji far outstrips my ability to express myself naturally in the language. Is that fluent? Proficient? Sufficient? Excentric? Eclectic?
Me does not know. All me knows is me understand big plot in games and manga. That good, but want to understand more, better, quicker. And want to put moves on cute little Japanese girls using Japanese. That まだまだ.
Plus, I've gone off topic.
Er... what was the topic, again?
btw most chinese dialects writes using the same chinese words just pronounced differently. so technically, u can also include other chinese dialects like foochow, hokkien, hakka, teochew in your repertoire as well. 
