Linguistic mess

I got a question from EcoGeoFemme regarding languages, how many I speak and what language I speak with the Goose. When commenting back I realised this could just as well be a post. So here it goes.

My native language is Norwegian. I speak and write Swedish pretty well after living there for ten years. I understand Danish relatively well since I spent many holidays there in my childhood, but I haven't really tried writing any Danish. The pronounciation is also pretty difficult to get right. The three Scandinavian languages are very similar so this is not particularly impressive. To be honest my Scandinavian is now a mix of Norwegian and Swedish and that would be what I speak to the Goose. Sometimes Norwegian, sometimes Swedish and sometimes a ridiculous mix that probably sounds terrible. When languages are as similar as these two I have a hard time separating them. I should also soon take up a bit of writing in Norwegian and Swedish again since that has been severely neglected during the last three years.

My cohort started learning English in 4th grade, when we were about 10 years). The last three years of compulsory school (13-15) I had a pretty good teacher that gave me good basic skills. My teacher during the first year at high school was not very good so I did not take more than the compulsory English courses I needed for graduation. Not till I started college and university, where most litterature was in English, did my reading skills improve any further. My spoken skills did not really become any good till I started my Masters programme. Then I got the chance to meet English speaking researchers and that was quite a boost. I did not really have to start writing in English till I had to write up my Masters thesis. Quite a few years, conferences, lectures, e-mails, friendships and publications have occurred since then so I'm much more comfortble communicating in English now then before. Sometimes during my PhD I started taking notes in English and some time a few years ago I caught myself thinking in English. So I'm comfortable with English in work-related situations, but I still have a limited vocabulary in certain situations (like dealing with relationship conflicts...).

I learned German for five years in school (14-18) but I never really used it till I moved to Switzerland in 2004. Even though Swiss German is pretty different than the high German I learned at school I stll had a good basis for understanding as soon as I learned a few of the peculiarities of pronounciation and the different vocabulary. I never got any god at speaking it unfortunately. If I had prospect of a longer stay I would have taken a course in Swiss German while being there.

French was my best non-native language after finishing high school but after a couple of years I did not use it much. After lmoving to France nearly two yers ago it has become better but not as good as I had hoped. Basically I've been too busy or too tired to really make an effort other than letting the osmosis occur. I have also probably spent half of those two years outside of France so the long stretches of time I need to get used to and use the language have seldom been there. Also my closest collaborator and closest friend here speaks English very well. And then my lazy self easily switch to English since that is a much more effective way of communicating.

I worked in a very Finnish dominated lab during my PhD years and for 10 months I shared a room with a girl who was extremely blond, cute and an incurable foulmouth. So I picked up a lot of Finnish swearing. I also understood quite a lot of their lab talk like nubers. Otherwise I'm pretty lost with Finnish other than common polite phrases for touristing. A few years ago I dated a Czech guy and would've liked to lear a bit more Czech than I did. But the motivation was sort of lost when I decided that he was totally unsuitable for the life I was interested in living. But a Slavic language would be fun to learn.

All in all, a bit of this and a bit of that but no language spoken perfectly. Just like the rest of my life, basically.