Re: What languages do you speak? read? write?
mikech,
That's how I am with Japanese (though Japanese is not my first langauge). I can speak read the language fluently, and even write it using a word processor, but I cannot write the language by hand. I simply never learned how to write more then a handful of characters (well short of the 1,000+ needed to write sentences).
When I tell people this they are often puzzled. They ask, "If you can read it, why can't you write it?" It is the difference between active and passive fluency, or the ability to recognize the language versus the ability to produce it.
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