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