Unfortunately, this definitely applies to this troper. Considered to be eloquent in English, when I have to speak French to a native speaker, I end up sounding like a particularly retarded child. Made all the more frustrating by the fact I'm perfectly fluent in French on paper, can understand everything people say to me and can read French text like it's English. Somehow all of this gets lost when I try and speak it. The proof I'm actually pretty damn good comes when I'm drunk and can hold lengthy debates without any mistakes at all, my confidence just vanishes in day to day life.

Replace the French with Spanish and you've got this troper. Although, she hasn't tried out her language skills while drunk.

Chalk a third Troper up to the "Eloquent in English but not in Spanish" version. And when I say eloquent in English, I mean to the point that I am so well-spoken and enunciated people mistake me for British (I'm American born and raised), but it's actually just due to being in theater for four years (where you NEED to enunciate so the audience can understand you) and having an uncannily large vocabulary.

Change that to German with this troper, also made worse as she has a horrible accent while trying to speak it.

It's the same for me, but with Japanese. (And German and Spanish... but I live in Japan, so that one bothers me more.)

One of my guildmates in ''Main/WorldOfWarcraft'' is like this. She is intelligent, speaks three languages and has a reasonably good grasp of English vocabulary, but horrendous spelling mistakes in her non-native English (even in the simplest words, like "sow" instead of "saw") make her sound not much better than the 15-year-old retards of Goldshire.

My ''character'' in WorldOfWarcraft is like this, except on purpose. Her backstory is that she's relatively new to Azeroth, and despite being completely articulate in her native tongue, when she speaks Common she ends up sounding like Manuel from ''TheMoonIsAHarshMistress''.

Let me guess...draenei. This is my baby paladin trying to thank a priest for a stamina buff: "I would that the anchorite who did pray to grant me fortitude would speak, that I may give thanks?"

In this troper's experience, many roleplayers in WoW, particularly trolls and draenei, have this sort of trope in a semi-subversion - they speak eloquently and fluently in their own racial tongue, but when using their factional one (Common for Alliance and Orcish for Horde), they tend to lose that fluidity of speech rather quickly.

Dubious example (mainly so since I've never had to ''use'' either of my non-native tongues to hold conversations): This troper is well-spoken and prone to SesquipedalianLoquaciousness in English, but her knowledge of French and Japanese is very shallow. (The former is because I absolutely ''hated'' most of the mandatory French classes I had from fifth through eighth grade and didn't care enough to try learning it from other sources, and the latter is because I just started learning and am too lazy to really immerse myself in it.)

Change the references to the troper's gender, plus the times the French was learned, and you have this troper.

This troper can attest to the fact that there is indeed nothing more annoying than transitioning from grandiloquence in one's native tongue to the weak and bland [insert-language-here] of a particularly slow child. There's nothing for it but practice, mais, finalement, on pourra parler comme un habitant, ou, au moins, une personne inculte, au lieu d'une personne retard�e. Yes, I know, that's probably wrong. In a depressing sort of way, that's kinda the point.

This troper is a native English speaker with an excellent vocabulary, who not only speaks with SesquipedalianLoquaciousness, but thinks in it as well. This caused her no end of frustration when trying to do Spanish writing exercises in middle school and high school, often relying more on her Spanish dictionary than her textbook...which usually resulted in a gross mistranslation of what she was trying to say.

Probably subverted by me. I speak German, English and Dutch (my native language). I am able to write English and German, read those languages, understand them when I hear them and speak them. But I am only good at speaking them when I am speaking to a non-native. When I speak them to a native, I get nervous and end up just not saying anything. It is getting better with my German, but English... Still the same. Other languages that I have learned too (French, Latin (and thanks to Latin I'm able to at least understand Spanish, Italian and the like... on paper)), tend to follow this trope perfectly.

I put a random twist on it; I don't speak anything other than English, but while I have a great vocabulary and get my point across very easily on paper, I stumble over my words and sound like I'm mentally deficient when speaking. Apparently my native tongue is writing.

You too? With me, it's not so much that I lose my vocabulary as it is that I'll change how I wanted to phrase something in mid-sentence (sometimes in mid-''word'') and it'll come out sounding stupid. That, and I massively avert RealisticDictionIsUnrealistic, which annoys me even though I don't think I can do anything about it.

I am SO bad about changing my phrasing mid-sentence. I'm so glad I'm not the only one.

I (JBridge) have the ''same exact thing''. I also have something called a "non-verbal learning disorder," so yeah. Blarg.

I feel so happy that I'm not the only terrible speaker/good writer around. The difference is so bad that when my English teacher said that for a class debate he'd pick people who don't argue well, he immediately added that I didn't count since I argued well in writing.

This troper is exactly the same way. He's a silver tongued rogue with a keyboard, but he stammers, stutters, and generally sounds like an idiot verbally.

I've come to the conclusion that this is a common problem for people who "learned" english in school. Doing so is a recipe for being unable to talk straight. If you'd ask psychologists how to make sure a kid's going to stutter and will forever be unable to express itself vocally, all you need to do is correct its every sentence and remind it that the quality of its language is going to be graded. Native speakers learn a language mostly by listening, not by learning grammar and vocabulary. If you want to actually improve your english skills, I suggest you simply practice it, talking to yourself, alone. And cease caring if it's syntactically correct, the purpose of language isn't to be correct, but to get a point accross.

Sound like you all suffer from the side effects of Asperger's Syndrome (except the one immediately above me). Look it up, it's fascinating. And explains a lot of things. To put it in a nut shell, Asperger's Syndrome is just about the exact opposite of AttentionDeficitOohShiny--but the visible symptoms are similar enough that it's often misdiagnosed by doctors. Note that this troper has it, and falls in this section of this category. Three years of Spanish and two of anime, and he's still only fluent in English.

While this may be quite similar to Asperger's Syndrome symptoms, I think it's a bit much to say "sounds like you all suffer" when referring to the difference in written and spoken fluency. While it may be a slight tell, it doesn't automatically diagnose a person with Asperger's. For all anyone knows, the other tropers who have posted with this quirk (myself included) may simply be lacking in confidence/social skills/other cause. I would prefer you refrain from diagnosing others from slight information, despite having a thorough knowledge of the condition (which you presumably do have).

This troper is supposedly an eloquent typist (though I can't tell), but when forced to hand-write my thoughts, or to speak in class, I resort to either huge, pauseless deluges of information that others find either dull or confusing and impossible to follow, weird similes, or BuffySpeak. I swear, I'm eloquent when I'm allowed a keyboard... sometimes.

this troper has the exact opposite. I speak eloquently, and can write well, as long as it isn't for an essay. My essays are atrocious.

This Troper types and writes well but it is not uncommon for him to repeat his own words or attempt to rephrase something only to repeat the entire phrase. Even worse: his native language is English.

This troper finds writing extremely easy and can be very eloquent when she puts her mind to it. However, her spoken languague is terrible, mainly because she often starts to speak before she's finished forming what she wants to say in her mind.

This (English Speaking)troper can write a multi chaptered story on pen and paper in an hour (Including making herself cry and cheer from TearJerkers and Crowning Moments of Awesome/Heartwarming she just made) But make her do it on a computer and she can't write a damn thing. Thing is due to all notions of privacy being whittled down to everybody shares everything but their bed's I rarely write on paper anymore and just use the computer. Which is the only private place I can do so. I do not like showing other people my stories until I'm happy with them but they just keep poking in.

My friend Ashok speaks English much the way that Homsar does. He's also apparently one of the best up-and-coming young Hindi-language writers in America.

Inverse example, in that this troper is quite eloquent when speaking/writing in English, and not too bad with Swedish either, yet I'm absolutely horrid at Finnish, my native tongue. Especially when trying to write in Finnish.

This Finnish Troper has the grammar and pronunciation under wraps (spelling is another matter). The problem is the accent; Finnish and English have slightly different phonemes, mostly TT forgets when you're supposed to use a Schwa (instead of pronouncing the vowel as is) and the slight Rotic /R/. Russian English sounds gritty Swedish English sounds exotic and slightly sexy. Finnish English sounds like you've got something in your mouth.

Inverted with this troper, who is Chinese-American. She can speak Cantonese (though it's far from eloquent) and her Mandarin is ''atrocious''. English, despite being her third language, is rather advanced.

This troper sonsiders himself to be pretty much fluent in english, exept he sometimes can't find the words he's looking for. However his spelling and pronounciation tend to range from slightly off to atrocious.

Subverted when this troper took up French on top of her Spanish classes. It frustrated her to no end when on a test she would know exactly how to phrase something in Spanish, but alas, it was a French test.

Its also worth mentioning that this troper is better at reading Spanish out loud than English, subverting and inverting this trope.

You mean a trench fest.

This troper, while possessing a good vocabulary and having good pronounciation, is so much more used to writing in English than talking, and as a result has to dig for the correct word a couple times every sentence, making a complete ass of himself in the process.

This troper's english is often littered with horrible grammatical errors - "How you?" Arabic is the same way. Of couse his writing and reading of these languages don't show it. Maybe it's just the accent?

English is my native language, and I still sound like a moron half the time. Maybe I need to attend speech therapy?

Due to a very interesting *coughwhitefromMinnesotacough* ''Mandarin Chinese'' teacher, my grammar was atricious until this year, when I finally learned how to constructa sentence. The problem? I'm in Chinese 3. Outside of the basic noun-verb construction, I can only speak with emphasis (是...的) or '''passive voice''' (被).

I can converse in Filipino and English without any problem, but my Spanish teacher thinks that my accent needs work, and that my impressive grades might be okay on paper but won't do me any good if my speaking is barely coherent.

This Troper's cousin immigrated to the U.S. from India when he was little. He speaks English well (American Accent), and remembers enough of his native language (Telugu) to have a coherent conversation. But, he picked up his parents' thick country accent in Telugu (Think KansaiRegionalAccent, only Indian). This accent, when combined with the English inflection in his speech, results in him sounding very yokel-ish. Not that this Troper is any better: her Telugu is patchy (at best) and has an even heavier English inflection attached to it, making her sound like an American trying to speak Telugu (not pretty).

Inverted with this troper; I speak SesquipeladianLoquaciousness as my preferred language in English, but I still sound like a seven-year-old in Mandarin Chinese, my mothertongue. (This may have something to do with the fact that I moved to Australia when I was seven, hence limiting my vocabulary to words a fairly mature seven-year-old would know. (I ''still'' don't know the word for "sex". My parents won't tell me.)

This troper lives in Germany and still struggles with the German vocabulary and the genders/cases, therefore he usually tries to avoid long complex sentences (or fails badly). Because of this, people who hear him speak English or Russian (his native tongue) for the first time are often genuinely surprised at how well-formed his speech actually is. Of course, that only applies to spoken German: people are equally surprised to see how eloquently this troper writes in German, considering the difficulties he has with speaking.

This troper is a native English speaker. He's also pretty much equally fluent in Mandarin Chinese, which makes for interesting occasions whenever he rants and gradually his angry soapboxing turns from straight English into a mix-n-match of English and Chinese. Eloquency isn't an issue. Clarity on the other hand is.

This Troper speaks English (native language) EXTREMELY well. He also speaks two dialects of Chinese and Latin. Latin is somewhat tolerable but his Chinese is basically HulkSpeak.

This troper has a friend that can understand spoken Japanese, but apparently can't speak it.

This tropette had a coworker from Germany who claimed to be like that, except with Spanish. But later we began to realise that he's a compulsive liar. Even his job coach, who ''is'' EloquentInHisNativeTongue (Hebrew), didn't believe that one.

This troper is fluent in English (my native tongue), and I am getting fairly good at writing and speaking Japanese. My problem: Keeping up with someone speaking Japanese at a "normal" speed. (By "normal", I mean the speed the native speakers speak it at.) I may be in my fourth college quarter of the class, but yesterday when Sensei was introducing the guest who was gonna teach us about the tea ceremony... I only picked up about three sentences' worth of fragments. To really ice this cake of I-can't-think-very-fast-in-Japanese, the guest teacher doesn't speak English that well. At least she gave out study packets instead of having us try to take notes on a lecture. And I dunno when hilarity will ensue first: if I forget my "lines" during the ceremony (happened twice today but at least it was only a demonstration), or when the class clowns start messing around. Either way, lulz don't echo very well in the tatami room...

This Troper speaks 9 languages to various extends, but although English is my second language which I have learned for the longest time, I still make basic mistakes. Also, I tend to "sound" terribly rude in writing even if I try to sound humble. People are usually aggressed by it and I have no idea why. On the other side my Chinese is very basic but I manage much better and am already able to give taxi drivers directions.

This troper has an extremely good vocabulary in English and a manner of speaking that his girlfriend compared to Edward Cullen, but when he speaks French, unless he's practiced the sentence he'll end up halting and sometimes having to describe what he's talking about when he's forgotten the word for it.

This troper was told that, when he tried to speak Japanese, that he sounded like a mongoloid John Wayne. In English, however, I am rather erudite and proper (some would say unnaturally so).

This troper inverts this trope when it comes to his native Russian and English. The reason for that is that when he speaks English he tries very hard to avoid common Russophone mistakes and carefully plans every sentence he is about to say. He is a lot more careless when speaking Russian, which often leads to digression, incoherence, bad grammar and getting stuck mid-sentence. He plays it straight with Kazakh and German though, despite having grown up in Kazakhstan and having studied German for almost nine years.

My native language is English, and I speak it pretty well. But I also study Spanish and German at college and though I've been studying them for a few years now, they're still atrocious.

This troper knows a Korean girl from school who hardly ever talks, and when she does often pronounces vowels oddly & leaves out conjunctions (e.g. going to church because she "believe Jesus", and was such a ShrinkingViolet I thought she was retarded and/or much younger, but when asked for just one word in her own language, she writes it in perfect hangul, puts it in a sentence, and explains politeness levels/honorifics if needed, often bringing Korean textbooks in Korean for reading practice & her favorite [=CDs=] or foods from Korea to help me understand the culture.

This is apparently this troper. In Japanese high school, my English writing teacher would often say that I would make stupid faces when I spoke Japanese, but when I switched to English, my native language, I suddenly seemed more mature and believable, I guess you could say.

Inverted by me. I learned English at the age of five, and since then I've been better at it than in Filipino, my native tongue. I talk to myself in English a lot.

This troper is reasonably competent at speaking English. However, his Spanish has caused people to joke about babies being dropped on their heads.

This troper used to speak French well... until he learned Portuguese. Now whenever he tries to speak French, he uses French words but pronounces them as if they were Portuguese. Evidently his brain cannot keep romance languages separate.

My French is so horrendous that I apparently sound like a mentally deficient 3-year old. I'm also one of the best at the English language in an English IB school.

When This Troper speaks Hebrew, her sentence formation and vocabulary is pretty bad. She's okay reading and writing it, but when it comes to hearing and speaking Hebrew...

This Troper's native tongue is Swedish, which I speak very well but writes better. I am also fairly eloquent in English. The problem is that I have almost no problem writing English or speaking English to myself when I'm alone (living by yourself will make do things like that, trust me), but as soon as I'm speaking English to someone else, even if I know that I'm better at it than the person I'm talking to, I get nervous and start sounding like an idiot. Another example is a lady I went to university with. Back in her home country she was actually a university professor, but for some reason she wasn't allowed to teach in Sweden. Anyway, she was very nice and it was obvious that she was very intelligent. The problem was that 75% of the time, I had absolutely no clue as to what she was talking about. It wasn't that she spoke Swedish with an accent; it was more like she spoke something that definitely didn't sound like Swedish at all.

This troper has a friend who speaks Russian as his native language but is also fluent in writing and reading English. However, when speaking it he comes off as a bit awkward and unintelligent but knowing him for the past two years, he's made astounding progress. Switched around with myself, I speak English as a native language and took classes in Mandarin and German. German is pronounced pretty nicely but heaven forbid I speak Mandarin properly, thanks to my accent.

I am a bookworm with a decent vocabulary in my native English and with the occasional help of a dictionary, this carries over well to Italian. On paper, I sound fairly intelligent but once I try and speak my confidence disappears, I can't roll my R's and it becomes the Italian equivalent of You No Take Candle.

When this troper moved to the US for the beginning of seventh grade, she had the exact issue. In Spanish, she was perfectly eloquent, and many people said they adored the way my voice sounded. Shove me in a New Jersey middle school, and I'm stuck having to resort to staying silent. Until about halfway through the year, I was so insecure about my English I refused to speak in public, because kids are jerks, and this was seventh grade, so many of them had quite the riot whenever I tried to speak. With a bit of help from the few friends I'd made, and by reading the entire HarryPotter series in English, I finally fixed my slight dilemma. The only downside is that I refuse to use American spelling for certain words. Colour, Flavour, Favourite, Favour, Centre... It took a while for me to convince my eight grade teacher that I was not misspelling the words, and I even had to pull out a dictionary once, to prove that Learnt was the equivalent of Learned. I still speak with an American accent though...

I'm pretty eloquent in English (well, I hope so, anyway. It IS my native language, after all). In French, however, I'm an illiterate mute. I can get the gist of French writing and conversations (provided the speakers aren't going a mile a minute), but my brain just freezes right up when I try to speak it.

My friend is Russian, forced to attend an English language school (despite not really being that good in English, all things considered). During one of the most Tear Jerker moments I've ever seen, she despaired and said "In Russian, I am funny. In Russian, I am smart." Damn near broke my heart. In addition, I'm quite clever in English (mom's an English professor, it's in the genes) but tend to either get laughed at or shot funny looks every time I try to speak Swedish.

This troper got a very, very, very high score on the Writing Skills/Vocabulary sections on the SAT, but when speaking in other languages sounds like an idiot. I'm prone to switching back and forth between ridiculous loquaciousness/ vaguely verbose speech and loud, childish, ditzy statements a la "Ahahahaha, that's ''funny'', cha! Can we ''go-o'' back to the ''dorms'' now?" when speaking in English. However, my other languages are not so lucky. I've never lived in one country long enough to truly pick up a language, so I speak pidgin French, Finnish, German, Japanese, and Latin. And I sound like an absolute idiot when I try to say something. It irritates the heck out of me; I was reduced to tears once by a 'German tutor' who was a downright jerkwad.

In addition, my great aunt is this way. All we have to communicate is my basic German and her basic English, but I can still tell she's one of the smartest people I've ever met.

Before I learned english, I was this. These days, however, the only wrong thing with me is the pronounciation, but some people with said idiom as a mother language complains that I have better vocabulary than them. Possibly a little subversion of TvTropesWillRuinYourLife, as I became fluent thanks to it. And, if you excuse me, it's time for my EvilLaugh. Mua. Ja. Ja.

Whatever, when the only word in english that I knew was ''Thank you'', this blockheads were trying to break in a classroom using some little metal wire they found in the floor. Problem? The classroom had two doors, and the ''other'' one was open. I tried to tell them, but none of them knew a word of spanish and they ended up being caught by the teacher, who did unknowingly my suggestion and appeared in the door they were trying to force. They got punished, I got an bad opinion about them.

This Troper's second job was as a delivery driver for a Chinese restaurant in Texas. The owner, from Taiwan, epitomized this trope, having long conversations about seemingly interesting topics in Chinese with fellow native speakers, yet made a point to hire native English speakers as drivers and waitstaff. Anyone who worked there long enough mastered a sort of pidgin English to communicate with him and eventually each other. The fact that the whole cook staff didn't speak much English meant the linguistics flying around the place were this trope UpToEleven.

While IGotBetter eventually, My French was not up to scratch. I ended up learning this the hard way when I attempted to translate a fanfic chapter. What few reviews I got prompted me to talk to a beta translator--Apparently, not even three years worth of grammar and conjugation knowlege was enough to keep the piece from spiraling headlong into TrollFic territory by mistake.

This troper might be a... double subversion. Or zigzagging, or whatever. He isn't particularly eloquent in Polish, which is his native language. In written English, he tends to be, writing full sentences and quickly running out of characters in any place where they're limited to only a few hundred. In spoken English, though, he isn't, due to his lack of prowess in pronunciation of pretty much every word (not being a native speaker is horrible), so even if he uses sophisticated words and the like, they just end up sounding awkward. And then there comes German, in which he is utterly hopeless precisely due to not having a wide selection of words to use, so he ends up not speaking at all, or badly when he absolutely has to.