I think that a general level of spoken and written understanding that allow someone to communicate in a meaningful way (i.e., "I am hung over today because I drank too much. Don't ask why I drank too much" as opposed to "where is toilet? I need throw up" ).


I think it just has to be enough that it would not be misleading for the purposes of the job being done. In my case (transactional law), the fact that I speak French and German slowly doesn't hurt my ability to quickly read legal documents or correspondence so I added both those languages to my work bio.


Enough to say "u r stupid" or "OMG! My cat had kittens - let me inflict the photos on everyone!" Well, the second part of that last statement is usually implied anyway.


Fluent: English, Russian
Just Out of Practice but Come Back When I Travel: Chinese, Spanish
Read without Dictionary but Speak Slowly: French, German
Read without Dictionary and Speak Slowly with Hideous Mistakes because the language is too similar to other ones I know: Italian, Ukrainian
Read mostly without Dictionary but don't speak because the language is dead: Latin, Classical Greek, Coptic, Middle Egyptian, Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic (Syriac really, but Imperial Aramaic is so similar it doesn't need separate study)
Read only with dictionary and don't speak: Sumerian, Nahuatl
Bought lots of books with intention of learning but never got around or never got beyond basic phrases: Finnish, Indonesian, Tibetan, Turkish, Kazakh, Georgian, Sanskrit