How long did it take you to speak comfortably in your first language?

Sorry I meant to say the first language you learned after your native language

Many many years!!!

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I don’t know about years, but certainly quite a few dozen months…

Things are different for green chicken kicking in the Internet Age.

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@TroisR

You can chop off the head of a green chicken - and it’ll still go on kicking for several seconds…

(Creepy-Cryptic!)

Same with young and old fish.

Umm… what???

@Sanne

(Watch to the end - zombie chicken!)

This reminds me of a time back when I was living in London when a family unit that makes up a part of my extended family decided to keep some chickens in their back garden. One day they bought the chickens along with a load of equipement for keeping them in, and a load of fancy equipment for keeping the foxes out. Anyway, after installing the chickens in their garden, they went out for a hour or two. When they came back, all that was left of the chickens was feathers and blood all over their back garden!

I have to say, despite the unbelievable brutality of all this, when they told me about it the next day, I laughed my ass off for hours. Every time I think about it, I cannot stop laughing.

Lately I’ve been writing more in English than in Japanese, although I speak more in Japanese than in English. My ‘ultimate’ goal is to speak English in the way I write in it. How ‘bookish’ will my spoken English be? I am looking forward to seeing the result of this project.

(Edited)

How ‘bookish’ my spoken English will be? = How bookish will my spoken English be?

@Tuquiro
It depends of your impudence in the good sense of the word.
Some of my students feel comfortable knowing only 20 words and adding the other words with gesture (sign language). But some other students knowing 7000 words yet feel uncomfortable by speaking even with the simple sentences.
But of course, the study of each language has the beginning and doesn’t have the end.

@Colin:
"…This reminds me of a time back when I was living in London when a family unit that makes up a part of my extended family decided to keep some chickens in their back garden. One day they bought the chickens along with a load of equipement for keeping them in, and a load of fancy equipment for keeping the foxes out. Anyway, after installing the chickens in their garden, they went out for a hour or two. When they came back, all that was left of the chickens was feathers and blood all over their back garden!

I have to say, despite the unbelievable brutality of all this, when they told me about it the next day, I laughed my ass off for hours. Every time I think about it, I cannot stop laughing…"

Yeah, foxes are evil old things - and urban foxes are the worst! I’m not really in favour of hunting vermin with dogs (I’d rather shoot the blighters.) But I have little time for the foxes-are-soooo-cute brigade (of which my own sister is a leading member!)

BTW
I wonder how you’d say “urban fox” in German?

Could we say “ein städtischer Fuchs”? Or maybe “ein verstädteter Fuchs”…?! (Except that, according to my Mac’s auto-correct, the second word doesn’t actually exist! :-0)

Ein urbanisierter Fuchs?

It is Stadtfuchs.

Yeah, these both sound possible.

(But I’m pretty sure I once read something else in a German translation of a Michael Ridpath novel - however it was quite a long time ago and my brain is gradually going soft under the daily assault of alcohol :-D)

I found this: “Ein Fuchs, der nicht in Wäldern oder auf grünen Wiesen lebt,
sondern zwischen den Häusern des Menschen, ein Stadtfuchs also.”

Ein Stadtfuchs eh?

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Very dapper! I guess there’s many a little chicken who’s lost her head for that fox! :smiley:

There used to be a great little series called “Mongrels” where the hero was a Stadtfuchs, a middle class urban fox.