[Poindexter]

OK, say my native language is english and im talking with another native english speaker and my social limit is 4.
Now, lets say im talking in sperethiel and i have that language skill at 3. My social limit is 3, cause thats my skill in the language, right?

So, if i take sperethiel at 4, my social limit is the same in either language. Am i now, effectively "fluent" in sperethiel? Meaning, i can speak with native speakers and they wont immediately know im not a native speaker? I dont have to make rolls to understand what people are saying and whatnot anymore, right?

[Kincaid]

Language skills act as a cap on the number of skill dice you can add to a test, not your Social Limit.  So if your Negotiation is 6 but your Cantonese is 3, you're only rolling 3 dice (+Charisma, +whatever) while negotiating with the Triads.

I generally determine how well you speak a language outside of tests by looking at how many hits you buy.  My German is decent and got me though spending a year there while studying a specific field, so I figure that would be enough to buy two hits.  I couldn't have a conversation with someone about genetics in German, however. 

[Ryo]

I'm pretty sure complete fluency to the point no one can tell you aren't a native speaker would be the equivalent of having a rating 6 or higher in the language.

But yes, it's like Kincaid said. Your language skill doesn't affect your Social Limit, it affects your skill dice. You want to have your language skills at the same rating as your social skills.

[SunRunner]

Fluency in a language is less about your skill level and more about your total dice pool, its one of the weird parts of the rules vs reality things. If your a Logic 1 troll with german at a 6 you have a dice pool of 7 and can only buy 1 hit and average dice rolling is 2 hits which means even though your skill is at 6 which is pretty good your dice pool will in general only allow you to have basic conversations with the occasional complex subject.

From a purely technical stand point to be FLUENT in a language you need to be able to buy 4 hits which means you have 16 dice. 12 Dice means you can by 3 hits and are very good at the language. Its a little weird but its really just a fact of trying to translate a fuzzy and subjective activity that is speaking a language into game rules. And sounding like a native speaker of a language has only limited connection to how well you speak the language, I had college professors that spoke better english then I did but still had pretty atrocious accents, and keep in mind this was in high end physics classes discussing thermodynamics and other fun stuff so we were definitely talking about very technical and obscure stuff that does not come up in daily conversation and the average person who did not take similar classes will not understand half of what your saying.

for my part I have mostly gone with the house rule that for language skills you can buy hits equal to 1/2 your language skill so by the time you have raised a language skill to an 8 your fluent and dont have to roll dice to understand what is being said to you or to say things to other people. Its a quicker and cleaner way to handle languages in my opinion, and I just have players buy lingos or use dice beyond 8 to get rid of or to speak with accents.

[Kincaid]

Keep in mind that accents and fluency are separate things.  Just about anyone can order a cup of coffee in a language with minimal instruction (say 1 hit required), but your accent will betray you as a non-native speaker without significantly more training.  Even if you're having simple conversations from a vocabulary standpoint, if you're trying to mask your accent, I'm probably going to ask for a roll.

Plus, rolling languages allows for fun things like the first critical glitch I've seen in 5th edition.  Last weekend our decker rolled his Japanese to try to listen in on a conversation my character was having with a Merrow--hilarity ensued.

[Poindexter]

Keep in mind that accents and fluency are separate things.  Just about anyone can order a cup of coffee in a language with minimal instruction (say 1 hit required), but your accent will betray you as a non-native speaker without significantly more training.  Even if you're having simple conversations from a vocabulary standpoint, if you're trying to mask your accent, I'm probably going to ask for a roll.

i had thought of this as well. Some people are skilled with picking up and replicating local accents. Is there a skill, quality, or specialization that would cover that sorta thing?
performance, maybe?

[Novocrane]

Why not Impersonation?

[Lucean]

Sunrunner, language skills are governed by INTuition, not LOGic.

[SunRunner]

yes I know that fact and sorry that I mis typed my example but it changes nothing about what I said. I know lots of people with very high language skills that still speak with accents even though they have a language skill of 6+ in shadow run terms. I was demonstrating the vagaries of trying to represent real life with a game system and how at some point it breaks down. The point was that even if you have a language skill at a level where your theoretically professionally qualified to teach the language (skill 6+) if you combine it with a weak stat you get a crappy dice pool that on average results in you not being able to function much above basic conversation. You can also get the opposite effect where is some one is rocking a 6 Intuition and a language skill of 1 they end up with the same dice pool as the guy with intuition 1 and language 6 and effectively in game terms have the same level of practical understanding of what ever they are hearing. But by game rules the guy with skill 1 is an amateur and they guy with skill 6 is a qualified collegiate level language professor. It all comes down to they made a game system and it fails to translate certain things. Its why I suggest my house rule that makes it closer to the way alot of other games handle language witch is normally a binary yes/no equation as you either speak it or you dont. Some of them will go into more detail like adding a reading/writing level to it, but most games just use a yes/no equation and move on.

[Kincaid]

Why not Impersonation?

This is actually what I do.  Impersonation plus a Voice Modulator make it very easy for my Face to speak with a variety of accents.  Mnemonic Enhancers 2 and an Intuition of 5 gives him eight dice (two bought hits) on any language he has at rating 1, so it's very easy for him to speak a ton of languages passably well.

[Emperors Grace]

Bilingual positive quality also gets you a second "native" language.

[rednblack]

I totally buy a high INT low skilled speaker outpacing or keeping par with a low INT high skilled individual. A lot of communication is nonverbal, inflection, etc. a high INT person could get the gist and response in kind based on his intuition, while someone with "book learning" may be able to properly conjugate verbs, etc, but lacks the ability to understand regionalisms, sarcasm, or nonstandard sentence structure. Hell, he or she might just be able to "read" the language much better than understood it at the speed of a native speaker.

[SmilinIrish]

Mnemonic enhancer 3, plus Intuition of 5, plus Adept power of linguistics:  9 dice for languages with no karma expenditure.  I'm waiting for 5th edition to bring over the linguist quality (which adds 2 to your rank).  This would arguably add to the limit on dice you get with social rolls.  A face with 7 charisma could be multi lingual and rolling 10 dice on his social skills in other languages at rank of 1. 

[Kincaid]

Mnemonic enhancer 3, plus Intuition of 5, plus Adept power of linguistics:  9 dice for languages with no karma expenditure.  I'm waiting for 5th edition to bring over the linguist quality (which adds 2 to your rank).  This would arguably add to the limit on dice you get with social rolls.  A face with 7 charisma could be multi lingual and rolling 10 dice on his social skills in other languages at rank of 1.

Linguistics (in a different, but still handy) form is in the Street Grimoire.

[Lucean]

Yes, they increased the time of exposure by 2 hours and cut the halved learning time for further improvement, but otherwise it seems identical.