Hi, I'm MGorrone. I also sometimes appear as 87.8.50.210 and 91.252.95.70 because my computer keeps logging me out and I often fail to notice that :). Well, those may be old numbers. The most recent (writing this on 14/12/20 a 12:49:30 approx.) unsigned comment I posted appeared as by 151.68.71.220. Anyway I would like to expand on the Babel Box at the side of these words.
As it states, I'm native in Italian.
I daresay I'm near-native in English because I've spent very much time in England. As such, my English is, in its accent, British, maybe with a tad of American taken up from movies. Well, the accent also got americanized in its inconsistent rhoticity and more open vowels actually. Right now, I guess watching American gamers' streams on Youtube made my English far more rhotic than it used to be -- besides teaching me the gamer senses of "cheese" and "spaghetti" and the expression "ass o'clock" :). In terms of vocabulary, I do not really distinguish British from American, so for example I used "movies", which unless I'm much mistaken is American. Some slang or dialectal terms may be unknown to me, but otherwise I have no problem at all with English. Conversationally, I have problems with strong American accents or non-native ones, especially if combined with exaggerated speed, as happens in movies, which I often watch with subs.
As for French, Italian is of help, as they are related and similar, but of course my level 3 is not only for that. I have studied it as one of the first foreign languages besides English, one of the first and many, because I like languages.
Then we have Spanish. In that case, Italian is really of help, because the similarity is even greater than that with French. I studied it very little, but I can understand it well enough.
Then we can get to Latin. I studied it in school and can understand many author texts without using a dictionary.
Ancient Greek, which I studied on my own, requires rather more dictionary usage, but in the end I guess it's good enough.
Then we have German and Chinese. My German is a bit rusty and was never that good even when in full practice. My vocab is not too wide, my knowledge of declensions is scarce, but for the rest my grammar is fine and, given a dictionary, I should be able to crack mostly anything. As with, but rather more than, the other languages I have mentioned, I have problems with speed in conversation.
That goes for Chinese too. Now Chinese I have studied both on my own and with lessons, I have managed once a short conversation in Chinese, but natives with problems distinguishing l from n and s from sh and similar can be troublesome for my comprehension. Also, speedy Chinese sounds like Greek (or, as we say in Italian, Arabic) to me.
Then we have a list of languages I understand, to a varying extent, by word-by-word sequencing and Wiktionary searches. That's what I indicate with level 0. In order of decreasing in-reading understanding, Japanese, Romanian, Indonesian, Zulu, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish. A bunch more should be added, but I don't feel like doing so. Have a look at my blog Artistic Translations of Poetry and Songs to get an idea :).
Finally, a list of dialects which I understand by comparison with Italian: Neapolitan and "Milanese", which is, though I don't distinguish it from "Brianzolo", the dialect of the place where I live, so I picked up a bit of it in school and a bit of it is in widespread use in the spoken language around my home.
Then there is the Romagnolo dialect, which I picked up from my grandparents in Russi, near Ravenna.
Now we move to computer languages. LaTeX I have learnt to a rather good level, though some pieces of code I sometimes see are really like Greek. Java, I learnt in Uni, with two courses: one on "imperative" programming and one on OOP. I improved my knowledge of MATLAB as it was linked with an exam I took in September 2014, but then MATLAB fell into disuse so I might have forgotten a lot of what I used to know. In the meantime, I learnt the basics of MAGMA, the CAS (not the linear algebra library), and will improve that knowledge for the exam coming up on September 15th, 2015. Which went well, and then I forgot most of what I knew about MAGMA :).
Unfortunately, my knowledge of Wikicode is extremely poor, and I very often have problems which I fix either by lucky guessing or by trying to find the same thing in another page and copying the way it's done there. I hope to improve, but I'm rather busy and getting near graduation, so I have little time to read the editing guide.
Well, that's about it. I see quite a few templates I would need are not present. Could someone create them for me? Thanks. I hope I can contribute to this wonderful site which has been of great help with many languages.
