I stumbled upon this one sentence in an EFL book.
Could you speak English before you came here ?
The whole chapter is dedicated to can and could.
There are no other sentences around the above one so there is no context I can guess from.
First of all, does this sentence sound natural ?
Second, does it mean
Were you able to speak English before you came here ?
Or is it some weird way of saying,
Could you do something(in this case, speak English) before you come here ?
Best Answer
1) The sentence sounds perfectly fine to me.
2) You are correct, it means "were you able to". (Past tense of can)