Hello All,
Language was always a "disposable" skill to most people. Many would take the basic level to get by in the world and not give it a second thought. Marrethiel is correct that professions with the Language bonus do tend to get ripped off a bit so we reworked the use of languages.
First, we split the skills into Language Spoken and Language Read/Written since there is a chart in RMC showing a difference between the two skill sets. This makes the PC want to invest in Language and to make it worthwhile. RMC lists the equivalents for the ranks and what the corresponding level of knowledge each rank equates to, from basic words, to grade school level, to university level, and innate knowledge of all idioms and idiosyncrasies of the language.
A good example is that I can speak Chinese, coming from a Chinese family and growing up in a Chinese restaurant. However, I can only recognize a few (very few, sadly) characters of the written form of Chinese. I can look at the character and know that it means “horse” but have no idea how to say it or I can look at a character and have absolutely no idea how to say it, let alone know what it means. What sound does "Square with a cross and a diagonal dash on the left with 2 parallel lines on the right" make? Forget writing it properly!!! I can duplicate the characters on paper, but when any Chinese person witnesses me writing Chinese, they laugh because I am writing the lines in entirely the wrong order. And to confuse things even further, the dialects are very different. Chinese movies are subtitled in Chinese so more Chinese people understand the movie. Cantonese, Mandarin, Choi-san, Fushun will each speak the same character a different way and MAYBE it will be recognized by a different dialect of Chinese. I can speak Cantonese and Choi-san because they sound somewhat similar, but I cannot speak Mandarin at all even though it is still Chinese.
I can read the French words on the paper easily enough, but if the grammar gets too in depth and idioms are used, I will probably have no idea what I am saying even though I am saying it correctly.
We then did something similar to Arakish by allowing the Level bonus to be added to the number of ranks when trying to figure out something unique other than just seeing if the target speech/text falls within the PC’s Skill Rank Category. i.e.: a PC with 2 Ranks in Elvish trying to read a Doctorate level dissertation on the Effects of PEM on Mithril over Extended Periods of Time. Sure the PC can understand some Elvish language, but the dissertation would require having 8-9 ranks in Elvish Read/Written to read it and to understand it.
5 ranks in a given language is more than sufficient to get by in a particular language. But if an adventurer stumbles across a Trader and glimpses an Elven item in the back of the cart with some old Elven script on it, I would allow the PC to make a roll.
5*(Ranks in Elven Read/Written) + Language Level bonus +10 <---- +2 Level Bonus, Level 5 PC
25 + 10 + Dice Roll
Depending on the roll, the PC would have an idea of what it was or what it says. If the Quality/Difficulty of the crafter's skill fell within the "8-9 skill ranks" or "10+ skill ranks" of languages category, then the PC would know that the level is at least too difficult to comprehend, but MAYBE, he recognized the stylized character for "fire" hidden in the text, but have no idea at all of the context or if that symbol, when paired with another symbol, means something entirely different.
Finally, I apologize for being longwinded; we set restrictions on which languages could be learned, the cost for those restricted languages due to the difficulty in finding a tutor, or a reasonable situation in which the PC would even be exposed to the language. Learning Dragon speech is nigh impossible. What dragon would tolerate a human long enough to teach him how to speak Drake? The most a PC could have was 1-2 ranks in that language and none in Read/Written. A PC can very rarely reach 10+ ranks in a non-racial language. Humans can never hope to attain 10+ ranks in High Elvish or Ancient Dwarf.
PS: Horse is pronounced "Mah" in Chinese and the character actually looks like a little horse. :-)
