Being fluent.....how to know
How would a person know if they're fluent in a language or not? Is a thorough understanding of culture (this may include body language) essential to become 'fluent'. Or do you ultimately become fluent when you start dreaming in that particular language?
Update: I ask this question because there are questions addressing the length of time it takes to become fluent...but that got me wondering, what is the benchmark for becoming fluent?
8 Answers
My personal idea of what fluent is includes being able to understand and maintain conversations at all levels, from formal to casual, including teenager speech and idiomatic expressions. One should be able to easily understand slang and TV (without subtitles), jokes, puns, and a reasonable amount of cultural references. Natives speakers should have the impression that they don't have to slow down or simplify the language to talk to you, and be able to understand you easily and without having to focus more than they would with any other native. Maybe I forgot some details, but that's more or less the idea.
This question is asked pretty often, and this is the best description I've seen of the different levels of fluency. On this scale I'm a low-level Conversationalist.
Just another addition to Professor Lazurus's contribution. If you can freely express yourself, without the need to resort to your mother tongue, then you may consider yourself "fluent".
This is a great question and something I think about all the time! As my language skills become better I'm beginning to think it means that even if you don't know exactly what someone says at first you can talk around it and figure it out. I dream in Spanish probably more than I dream in English, but I think that's because I study all the time and it's always on my mind. I consider myself a long way from fluent. My brother in-law, who is a translator from Perú, still asks me questions about English all the time. The other night I was talking to his friend who I would say is way beyond fluent, and he told me that he was in a drive through at a fast food place and he actually had to go inside because he couldn't understand what the attendant was saying. I guess I'm still trying to figure out the exact definition of fluency too.
I think the fluent means you can talk natural with out really thinking about what verb conjugation to used etc..
Think about your own language that you speak...you never think which verb tense do I need to use now.
Its like having all the pieces of the jigsaw and fitting them together only then can you see the bigger picture
By the way I dream in Spanish but I am not fluent...I find myself conjugating words... what a nightmare! lol
I think that true fluency occurs when the language roles right off your tongue. That is, there is no internal dialogue or rehearsal of what you are going to say before you say it. Its simply a process of idea ? speech. True fluency, then, is the ability to process, seamlessly, the ideas in your head to the utterances that represent such ideas.
The same goes for listening. To be fluent, it should be possible to hear the words and immediately process these as the ideas that they are meant to represent rather than using any particular process of mental cross talk between what you hear and your native language.
On the other hand, I also think that it is possible to have a functional understanding of the language (i.e. be able to maintain a conversation in the target language) without necessarily being fluent.
I would say that one is fluent when they can communicate their ideas thoroughly and understand everything being said (or read) without the need to translate.
This is my opinion, but my philosophy is that "the more you know the more you know you don't know".
Everyone has their own operational definition of fluency. I have heard people claim to be fluent if they can carry on a conversation with a waiter in a restaurant.
There are specific assessments that measure a person's fluency in spoken language. When measuring fluency in Spanish, the type of Spanish spoken (Peninsular, Mexican, Cuban, Argentine, etc.) needs to be considered.
Regarding body language and gestures: yes, this is an important part of fluency, in my opinion.
