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Cristina Carmona Aliaga's avatar

What a fascinating topic languages are! And everything here resonates with me, in particular recognising fellow Spanish but also Italian people without them even speaking and getting it right all the time who is who. And on the accent point I often wished Spanish were a more complex language phonetically as it would have made it easier to sound more native-like in English, which has a bigger vowel range (12 vs 5 in Spanish). But then again I’ve met people with perfect Spanish accents and yet something was off in the communication because they were second generation perhaps and had never lived in Spain so many of the figurative language -or cultural references- was simply lost on them. But this is the topic for another language-related question: when can one truly say they’re fluent in a language? When they speak it perfectly or when they can use it in the same contexts a native speaker would, including to make jokes and understand subtext and references to the culture and history of a given place?

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Remy Bazerque's avatar

privet by the way, ya ponemuyu po russki tchut tchut. Maya jena rosskaya

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