The subject should pretty much let you know any languages I am familiar with, although French is only recently been a hobby of mine (a semester's worth of class and a summer worth's of reading), but I am not just fond of natural languages. I love artificial/constructed languages so much so that I studied Quenya in the past during like middle school but have always loved reading about fictional languages in general, not just speaking, but from a linguistic point of view as well as an appreciation for them.

Hope you guys don't mind another language fanatic, but I do have one quick question to break the ice I guess. I personally find that I am much better at reading new languages rather than listening and speaking. Would you guys think that is generally the way it is, or is it an individual thing, being different from person to person?

Nice to finally be a part of this online community. I hope to learn many things here.

Your new friend,
Layke

Comme j'ai deja dit, je suis tres heureux que il y a des autres qui parle francais ici.
Bienvenue!

Sorry, my keyboard does not have accents on it.

To answer your question, I think it depends how you learned the language, for instance, I learned French by ear, so I learned how to understand others and speak well, but for the longest time it was difficult for me to read it, and I still have difficulty writing it.

But if you learned the language by text, like I am doing with Russian, then reading and writing come more naturally, while it is difficult to speak.

It also depends on the language. In a language like Spanish or German, if you learn how to read then you can learn how to speak, as they are very phonetic.

Well you are very welcome, even though I can't speak very good French, but I'm very good at understanding the writing, which works for this particular medium of communication lol. I would love to learn to be fluent though.

I think you may have a point with which way you learned by the way. French was definitely mostly reading, so taking classes to learn how to pronounce it was difficult, especially since it's not very phonetic (certainly less than other languages although I find it to not be so bad, it's largerly rules to remember that often make more sense than English, my native language).

With Spanish though, I do find that speaking and writing are both very easy because there is that one to one correspondence. I can see that there are very intelligent people here lol.

Why thank you. I have to say it but I forgot to contract "que il y a" to "qu'il y a" little grammar mistakes like that really bug me, lol

Lol, I understood it. =P No one's perfect after all.

I would call that "spelling", not "grammar". After all, in speech it often comes out [kja] anyway.