Anyone learned a language to native level?

It's funny how if you happen to have been fluent in several languages since early childhood and even if you sound native to most people there is always one prevailing language "at a time."

Dad was a great international traveller and I lived in three different countries and I spoke 4 languages fluently by the time I was 9: Catalan, Spanish, French and English. My parents are also multilingual and my mother also speaks the same four languages fluently although my father is less fluent and has a heavier "Catalan" accent in all of them. My brother and sisters have my same linguistic history but I've had more professional linguistic training than the rest.

After that age I've learnt Occitan, Italian and Portuguese, although I read more those languages than I'm really fluent. My Occitan and Italian can sound really well and I was told by a lady in an Occitan village in the Languedoc: "vous parlez comme nous, vos parents doivent être d'ici.", which I thought was rather nice to hear although she said it in French trying to be more "cultivated".

If I read a passage in Romance languages, which aren't the ones I spoke as a child, I sound almost native since I'm really good at accents but my language skills in those languages only improve quickly when I spend a short period in those countries. I also have learnt basic German but I've never been too fond of my German experiences in Germany. It's probably my fault.

The fact is I live in Catalonia and most of my life is in Catalan. Even my very fluent cultivated university regional Catalan Castilian Spanish gets rusty depending on real exposure. Things can change in a few days.

It may happen, for instance, I don't have to speak a word of English in a fortnight and when I finally start again with the language my tongue feels heavier than usual for a few minutes o even longer. There must be muscles that are only used in each language :-)

When I go to Paris for a week or I go to London for another week (I do that several times a year) I end up dreaming in French or English after two or three days. Where does that leave the Catalan I always speak with my wife and two children? It falls asleep and retreats only to come back when I hear my family again.

It even happens in the same language. My accent gets more northern French in Paris and far more southern French in Marseilles. It is more Australian when I'm with Australians and slightly more briticised when I'm in London. It sounds more Castilian after a week in Madrid and more Andalusian after a week in Seville.

I've known British ex-pats who've been living in Spain for a few years and speak only basic Spanish to be "at a loss" for words in their native English and syntax always tells the trained linguist where you're living at that time.

Languages are all about speaking them and even those who claim being fluent in several languages have always got one that beats the rest. I should know. I also happen to be a trained university interpreter and translator and I've done lots of simultaneous and consecutive interpreting all over Europe in my younger days. I'm now an executive in the tourist industry. If I were to register my voice after a few days in London all my languages would sound slightly different and my English would have begun to take over me. I trust you will have understood what I mean.

This is the way things are for people who, like me, have had "four native languages" since early childhood. You're always an ex-pat in three of them although you love them dearly and the four of them help you to learn other languages and other accents.

You finally decide not to learn new languages and to constantly brush up the ones you already know. There are also other things to the world: music, the sunshine, the sea waves, your family...

Very impressive Jordi.
I guess you can't say that your native language was the first one you learned first, since you learned 4 at the same time :)

I know a few immigrants here in the USA who didn't allow their kids to learn English, but their native language. When the kids went to kindergarden of course they were forced to speak English, but the teachers thought that the kids were retard. Well this is another side of the story..but...
What's the kids' native language is this case?

It can be common for those kids (depending on their family's background, of course) to learn English in a few months and to end yp speaking better Standard English than the rest of the class. After all, their is no dialectal model at home. Some of them are even the first of the English class!
I would say the kindergarten kid who's the son of a diplomat who always speaks French at home is more likely to end up being a perfect bilingual i both French and English than somebody whose parents don't even have a good educational level in their native home language.

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in both

Wow, amazing story Jordi, thank you! I can only aspire to someday be as well spoken in so many languages as you.

Well... I'm not impressed

ha-ha !Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Occitan, Provencal etc. Are virtually just one language...So give me a break !

I 'm Italian and I also speak Spanish, Portuguese Sardinian some Romanian and English obviously.But I don't feel any challenge in learning Catalan as being so similar with the others. LOL !

I do speak 6 languages, but 4 of them are so similar they don't even count as separate languages to me...Ok

Jordi if we both spoke: German, Russian, Hungarian and Finish instead of Catalan,Occitan,Spanish and Portuguese...Could have been some bright multilingual people...

Jordi ..good luck with your German!

It wasn't my intention to impress anybody. I can assure you the nearer the languages are the more difficult it is to keep them apart in their standard fashions. You got the name of the thread all wrong. It's about "native level" and in my case, it's not due to anything but to having lived in those countries by the time I was 9 years old.

That's how my life went and we are speaking of "native level" not just of passive understanding or reasonably good knowledge. I've been humble enough to say my Italian and Portuguese are passive although others, knowing far less, would have said they spoke the language at native level. I know lots who speak Itagnolo (a mixture of Spanish and Italian). Regarding my German I'm in the tourism industry and I haven't gone further although I have studied a couple of years, enough for the job I can assure you.

What is really difficult is to speak several languages, no matter how close they are, at native level. This is why I said there is always one that prevails and, after all, I did learn those four languages before age 9 Do you realise the subtle differences there are in syntax beween Italian and Spanish, for example. I can assure you Catalan syntax also has tricks which are never easy for an Italian. I repeat, it's sounding native we are speaking about.

I can assure you I don't have too many problems with German but one must love a language to learn it (one must be highly motivated). I might even go for Dutch or some lesser spoken Celtic language but as I told you before, there are other things to life and I have studied music and guitar, for example. That can also be quite challenging, as challenging as learning perfect Italian something I haven't done although I can almost feel at home in Italy.

"I can assure you the nearer the languages are the more difficult it is to keep them apart in their standard fashions"

Not to me! I always felt that I could speak half the "nearer" language before even learning it !!!! I have learnt spanish FLUENTLY in only 14 months! with no effort at all...Perhaps the same as you learnt Italian.
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Inter-Romance speakers to me are not multilingual. No matter in how many languages they are native...

You have an original point of view and I respect you fully for it although I would never be able to be "native" in a neigbouring Romance language in only 14 months. This is why I only say I can speak Catalan, Spanish and French at native level (apart from English). I'm quite fluent in Occitana and Italian and can get by in Portuguese but I assure you I'm not "native" in those languages although I have studied them thoroughly.

I I congratulate you for sounding like somebody born and bred in Madrid after only 15 months. I know a few Italians who speak beautiful Spanish with a magnificent Italian sing-song accent and few oddities here and there.

Even I, who have spoken Spanish since my earliest age, I have to make sure some Catalanisms don't slip into my Standard Spanish and I always have a Catalan accent when I speak Spanish. A Catalan accent is considered Spanish because Catalonia is in Spain but it's as foreign to real Castilian Spaniards as Italian is.

You must be a very gifted man, I'm the one impressed, since no one in Spain would ever guess you're Italian after only 14 months of Spanish studies and having learnt the language as an adult. I'll take you word.

According to my native Italian University professor back in my university days, a very nice nature lady from Rome married to a Spaniard and who spoke perfect Spanish with an Italian accent, Spanish students of the Italian language had the worse European scores at advanced level according to some very serious research. It is true they start better than other countries but when they reach intermediate level their Spanish just can't stop getting in the way. It's like Rafaella Carra, the Italian who had shows on Spanish TV. She spoke very good Spanish but the accent was there and she didn't really have a "native" level. It's easier to speak properly a far away language since you learn it from scratch and never mix things nor use "faux amis" (false friends, words which have totally different meaning in both related languages.)

I'm sure there's a lot published about that and the explanation would need some kind of thesis.

"You must be a very gifted man,"

Jordi ! No I am not ! I never said I'm "native" in Spanish !I don't think I'll ever be. I don't even think is possible! I'm just fluent in Spanish after 14 months of living in Madrid but I do have an Italian accent very sing-songish :(.But I have some Romanian friends sounding like somebody born and bred in Madrid only after 3 years!!!

I guess we Italians have a strong typical sing-song accent in any language we speak :(

à bientôt !

Enzo: >>Inter-Romance speakers to me are not multilingual. No matter in how many languages they are native...<<

That may be true with regard to Italian-Spanish-Portuguese-Catalan-Occitan, but I doubt it would be so with regard to Romanian-French, for example. The last two have quite different grammatical structures, and while Romanian even has some remnants of Latin inflections, French has turned completely analytical and has lost practically all inflections typical to Latin. Off course, it is definitely still easier for a Romanian person to learn French than any non-Romance language.

By the way, I am perhaps the most native-like in English, of all foreign languages. However, the curious thing for me is that I am more fluent in English than Serbian/Croatian, although I grew up speaking the latter as a second language. What I mean is not just linguistic fluency, but the way one imitates the non-linguistic peculiarities of a native speaker (intonation, pitch, "verbal gestures" in general). I have always been more able to imitate the "verbal gesturing" of English speakers than those of Serbians, perhaps because I perceived the "gestures" of the latter as a little brash.

Easterner:
Would you say that somebody who speaks really fluently Dutch and German is not fluent in two languages?
The fact is there is a strong attitude factor which nobody is considering. Although Catalan is a widespread language in Catalonia and has most of the factors related to "prestige", many Castilian Spanish speakers don't speak it after many years. Others do but with moderate or even low fluency. I would agree with Catalan and Occitan or even with Castilian and Portuguese, which at least in their standard spoken form seem to form qite a diasystem (system of dialects which have given place to two different standard languages). Much the same could be said about most Slavic or Escandinavian languages.
The fact is there are major morphosyntactic and lexical differences between Catalan and Spanish, for example.
It is obviously easier to "get a knowledge" amongst related languages but speakers of languages which are quite close usually tend to mix up structures, more so than new learners of the language.
I agree regarding French and regarding Italian but the fact is that for a monolingual Catalan speaker French would be as difficult as Spanish. The fact is most Catalans are bilingualised in Spanish but quite a few are bilingualised in French. That is actually what happens with Catalan speakers on the French side (Perpignan) who find Spanish as difficult to learn as we find French.
As a matter of fact, English would be as easy (or difficult) to learn for most Romance speakers than another Romance language. There are differences in syntax but they are mostly as easy to learn as differences between Romance languages.
The fact is many Italians and many Spaniards will brag abouth their knowledge of the other language. I know quite a few Italians and unless they do some thorough study they never get a full hold of Spanish. Even more so with central Castilian Spaniards who are not bilingual in two Romance languages.

Jordi: >>Would you say that somebody who speaks really fluently Dutch and German is not fluent in two languages?<<

Of course I didn't imply this, just that it it is *comparatively* easier for an Italian to learn Spanish or Catalan or Occitan than for a Romanian to learn French (and we are still with Romance languages). I was trying to put Enzo's argument straight, so to speak, but it may have caused some misunderstanding. At least from what I realised, the languages of the Iberian Peninsula are very close to each other structurally, and even if I don't doubt for a moment that a speaker of Catalan, for example, will perceive Castilian or Portuguese as a foreign language, they will master them more easily than non-Romance speakers, or even speakers who speak a Romance language different from these three (except perhaps for speakers of Occitan). As for myself, I can master Italian more easily once I have learnt French, although it is slightly less true for mastering Castilian Spanish.