I have a lot of language userboxes. It's not just puffery. Hardly anybody will ever look at this page, anyway.
The first list is languages I can actually form sentences in, to varying degrees of ability. Put me on a street corner somewhere that any of those languages is spoken and I can manage myself just fine. Except for English, though, I feel like a moron whenever I use any of those languages because I am always comparing them against my mother tongue, and they always come up short. I'm pretty good at the art of circumlocution - at least if you define it as finding an alternate way of saying what you want to say, rather than as talking all around the topic without ever actually getting to the point.
The lower list is languages I feel reasonably competent in reading - with the aid of dictionaries or on-line translators - but I wouldn't be able to fool a native speaker for a second. Most of the languages on this list are Romance languages - they are all closely related since they all derive from Latin. After a while, you get a feel for how they work, and cognates begin to seem obvious. Maybe I could add all of the Germanic languages, too, for the same reason.
I don't know if all this makes me a hyperpolyglot, and I really don't care if it does or doesn't. All this labeling and categorizing is arbitrary anyway. The level numbers don't really work for me. The userboxes, however, serve a useful purpose: they flag people who can help out in a specific language. Since I can read those languages, I can help out.
