NOTE: LANGUAGES

excellent, fluent, good, perfect ~ He speaks fluent Japanese.

bad, broken, poor~ I got by with broken Chinese and sign language.

colloquial, idiomatic, non-standard, pidgin, standard ~ The inhabitants speak a kind of pidgin Spanish.

spoken, written ~ My spoken Polish is better than my written Polish.

business ~ She is doing a course in business English.

original ~ The fable is translated from the original French.

know, read, speak, understand, use ~ I am more comfortable using Spanish, if you don't mind.

be fluent in ~ She was fluent in German, Urdu and Swahili.

do, learn ~ I did German at school but I've forgotten most of it. I've been learning Arabic for four years.

improve, practise ~ I spent a month in Rome to improve my Italian.

master ~ I never really mastered Latin.

translate sth into ~ He has translated her latest book into Korean.

~ class, course, lesson I'm late for my Russian class.

~ interpreter, speaker, a speaker of ~ the need for Gujarati interpreters

a command/knowledge of ~ He has a poor command of English.

in ~ What is ‘apple’ in French?He addressed me in his best Portuguese.

> See also the note at SUBJECT