[toomuchcoffee]

I guess he had a couple of courses at school and called himself "fluent".

Umm, another possibility is that he learned Castilian, and the people in your office grew up speaking some Latin American version. Just the other day a native speaker from Spain told me of his being completely flummoxed by the border guards trying to casually chat him up on his entry to the U.S.

[crusso]

Nope. The people I worked with were almost all from Spain. They spoke Castilian. My main exposure before them was always from Latin American sources. I LOVE the way Castilian people speak since it's so clear.

We had Latin American folks in the office too. They never had a problem speaking with each other. Maybe a border guard speaking broken Spanish confused someone, but this woman was just trying to ask basic Spanish 101 type questions.

The follow-up to the story is that I came across the same candidate's resume 6 months later. He had changed the "fluent in Spanish" to something like "basic Spanish".

[gcp]

I had a very similar experience when I was much younger, fooling myself that by not specifying how fluent I was, I wasn't lying when claiming knowledge of language X. Then I had an interview much like the one you described and learned that "misleading statement" and "lying" are close relatives.

No job, but life lesson learned.

[illuminate]

"Umm, another possibility is that he learned Castilian, and the people in your office grew up speaking some Latin American version."

Someone fluent in conversational Spanish would still be able to speak the basics with a sympathetic, if skeptical interviewer.

[toomuchcoffee]

Yeah but quite often people are thrown off balance when encountering other native speakers of a shared, large language group (but speaking a different accent or dialect) for the first time. That's all I'm saying.