Iversen wrote:
My own strongest skill is definitely reading, and I can probably read twice as many languages as I can speak. Writing and listening come somewhere in between. And between my travels I mainly communicate through writing. But that doesn't change the fact that writing is an invention which we learn to use fairly late in life, whereas speech seems to be built into our brains from the beginning (though not necessarily in the form of universals). And that could imply that speaking always would get the upper hand if the environments we live in just supported all our potential target languages.
But they don't.
This is exactly the point I am making. Although we make talk about "knowing" or "speaking" multiple languages at an "advanced level", the reality is that we rarely have the same level of proficiency in all the skills. Here for example, iversen speaks of reading twice as many languages as being able to speak. I think that writing is the hardest skill to master because it requires much formal education in the language.
Statistics: Posted by s_allard — Tue Aug 09, 2016 10:51 am