The "Language Skills" table (B55) is the real problem with the GURPS language skill. Using the stock rules, a bright character (IQ 13 character) has "educated" command of his native language. Appropriately, he has no default skills with anything but closely cognate languages--but the rules make that at -4... which for him is at a 9, making him equal to an average speaker (with an accent). With no effort or study at all. That's crazy. As bad, or worse, is that by investing 0.5 points in an unfamiliar average language, our example character would have skill 11, and fluency akin to an educated native speaker.

Another problem is that no one has skill 4 with any language, unless they're a near cartoon neanderthal struggling with a very hard language (IQ 8 at IQ-4, for a half point investment in a Very Hard language). And almost no one will ever have skill 5 or 6. Characters won't struggle with a language that they're learning. It's absurd. In the real world, no one spends a few days working on learning a language and goes out speaking it competently.

A rather modest change to the rules corrects these problems.

The trick is to decouple a character's SKILL from his FLUENCY. Skill remains as described by the rules. In the event that you have to make a success roll, you make it at the character's current skill level. However, his fluency limits his ability to communicate and understand. Fluency uses the existing "Language Skill table"--but defines it as NOT being related to the character's skill. Instead, fluency is derived directly from the experience which has been SPENT --unmodified by Eidetic memory, Linguistics skill, or Language talent (those modify skill levels).

Doing this means that any character who has spent 0.5 XP on a language has a grasp of important words, and probably simple phrases. 0.5 points gets you only "level A" fluency. More intelligent characters, and those with advantages and skills that improve language acquisition will have better skill--a higher chance of catching those important words and phrases. But conversation will still flow right over your head. One XP grants a fluency of grasping simple sentences--"level B". The next level is 2 XP, and each level thereafter is an additional 2 XP (the normal mental skill succession)

With 6 points, you're at the E level--educated grasp of the language, but still a trace of accent, etc. This works pretty nicely, and parallels my experience of languages (first and second hand) that it's possible to be pretty fluent, comfortable, and... suddenly lost when the natives take a turn into idiom, or you don't understand a critical phrase.

The defaults are changed as follows:

• Native language(s): IQ-2;
• all native languages, regardless of their difficulty level, are learned as ME.
  This means that any average speaker (IQ 10) will be an "uneducated" speaker of his native tongue. But with 1 XP, he's at 10--an average grasp of the language. This allows the creation of PCs and NPCs who are uneducated rustics, and simulates the effects of a little education.
• Dialects are -1 or -2 skill and -0, -1 or -2 fluency level.
• Close cognate languages are -2 from skill and -2 from fluency.
  (The distinction between dialect and very close cognate language is more political than linguistic. Indonesian and Malaysian are almost the very same language, but there's a political border; Sicilian and many of the Italian dialects are farther from Italian...)
• Cognate languages are -3 or -4 from skill and -3 or -4 from fluency.