Another reason why I will never be fluent.
I have been living in Mexico for six years now, speaking Spanish on a daily basis as my primary language. And today I came across a new word for a very common thing.
Mear(se): to pee (o.s.)
Now I have known and used orinar all this time and have never heard this word used (it was in a subtitle) so I looked it up. Such a common thing; to pee.
As an English speaker I know several words for this as I am sure you do as well. And I am sure that native speakers are familiar with "mear", and maybe others.
My point is the amount of vocabulary needed to be fluent is tremendous. Sure we can be conversant or conversational with a much smaller vocabulary, but to be fluent. Well your vocabulary has to be huge and takes tons of reading or a lifetime of living in a language.
13 Answers
Mear is rather crude, so you don´t really need to use it to sound fluent. Orinar / hacer pis / evacuar are sufficient.
Please, do not confuse fluency with knowledge.
Check here for a test in English. Test your vocabulary.
I will disclose my score(s) later and how I did it....
A nine year old is fluent and I bet you would give your right arm to talk like any nine year old kid. At that age they might be starting to touch some of the grammar in school, but are fluent. No doubt.
The way I see it, I realized that I didn't have any problem with English after a year of being here. That meant that if I herd a new word, all I needed to do was to ask or look up for its meaning and that was it. I still had not "translated" all of the words that I knew in Spanish to English, and as far as fluency, to me it came like 3 or 4 years later, because I didn't follow my own advice and dropped all the exercises I was doing at the one year mark. That's also why I still have an accent. I have no doubts that if I start to record myself while reading out loud I will soften even more my accent, that is if I don't lose it all together. But I am not interested in that, I don't want to impress no one, much less myself.
:-D
edit:
Reading on some of the comments... the fact that you speak good/proper or bad/cuss words doesn't mean you are going or not going to be fluent.
Take for instance someone who did not go to school, so he or she does not know how to read or write his or her native language. Is that person fluent?
Would you or would you not like to talk with that person's fluency?
I guess it comes down to one's idea of what fluency actually means.
I say I am fluent in English but there are times when I am "in the dark" about what is really being said.
I am sure there are many that share your frustration. I for one often become frustrated with myself when I miss things I consider easy. However, your post also made me think about the recorded statics of individual's native languages, and my findings have left me more encouraged than ever about my ability to learn a 2nd language. I hope they help you too.
Google tells me the average English vocabulary is between 10,000 - 20,000 words. Wikipedia further states the average English vocabulary is between 10,000 - 12,000 words for junior-high students, 12,000 - 17,000 words for college students, and 17,000 - 21,000 words for elderly adults. Google says these results are based on imperfect tests, but that is why they are called estimates, right? Google also tells me there are 616,500 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Based on these estimates we can infer several things: 1. If we are being extremely generous the average elderly adult only uses 21,000/616,500 = 3.4% of documented available words in their native language, and some college students are only using 12,000/616,500 = 1.95%. 2. 616,500 is just the number documented English words, when you include even "simple" slang terms the number of existing English words well surpasses a million. 3. People with as few as a 10,000 word vocabulary are considered "fluent" according to well publicized tests. 4. For most, learning your native language is a life-time activity (let alone a 2nd language) 5. If the average college graduate know 17,000 words and is 23 years old, and the average elderly adult knows 21,000 and is 67 years old(retirement age) then, 21,000 - 17,000 = 4,000 and 67 - 23 = 44, and 4,000/44 = 90.91. This means the average adult learns 90 new words a year in their native language.
All math aside, I think the most important thing we can learn from this is that "fluent" is a very indirect form of measurement, just as much as saying that some food is "spicy" or an individual is "healthy". Thank you for taking the time to share, and I am sorry for your frustration.
Mear is actually one of the first words I learned (in California from a Mexican friend who said "Tengo que mear"), so I think it all just depends on your experience. I consider myself fluent in English (my native language), but I am still constantly learning new words!
mear is to pee. you would use it around friends... Its better to use orinar.
Just like Chileno said being fluid and knowing is not the same thing. If some one does not become a fluent person is because they just don't want to. I'm from Puerto Rico so I speak Spanish as my primary language and my second language is English. I'm fluent in both and I can speak English with any English speaker. Sure, a native English speaker has more years of experience in the language so, that person will know some words that I've never heard or won't remember. So being my being fluid is not glued to the knowledge of the language.
That's why I wanted to talk to you over on Skype, but you just brushed me off, and you "accepting" the fact that you will never be fluent...it's well... unacceptable, if you know what mean.
:-D
But, what can I do?
Google tells me the average English vocabulary is between 10,000 - 20,000 words. Wikipedia further states the average English vocabulary is between 10,000 - 12,000 words for junior-high students, 12,000 - 17,000 words for college students, and 17,000 - 21,000 words for elderly adults. Google says these results are based on imperfect tests, but that is why they are called estimates, right? Google also tells me there are 616,500 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Yes, but of the 600K plus words how many are in common usage? 100K? 50K? How many are words in the same family? I.e. stress, stressful, distress, etc. How many are technical words related to specific fields of endeavour?
Assuming I am average in English then my vocabulary is around 20K words. Yet I seldom hear a word in English that I need to look up to understand. So does a 20K vocabulary make you reasonably fluent. Maybe. A linguist would need to answer.
So what is my Spanish vocabulary? Heck if I know. But I do know it is no where near as large as my English vocabulary. And I continue to encounter new words almost daily.
Finally, college students have a vocabulary of say 17K words and it took them 18-22 years to acquire that vocabulary. But let's go back to junior high school kids with an average vocabulary or 10K words at age 13-17. Are they fluent in the language? Arguably yes, yet they are only half way to their final average vocabulary. So maybe 10K makes you reasonably fluent.
Many here want to become fluent in Spanish in a year. Yet we spend a life time becoming fluent in our native language. Even if you discount the first 5-6 years we still take a decade to get there.
So maybe if I continue living in Mexico and grow to be 75 or so I may become fluent. Wouldn't that be a kick.
Mate , don't worry about it , if you came down here for a visit you would wonder
where your fluency went , there are hundreds of words that would totally confuse
you , and many that you may find obscene and offensive . The point is one can
never be fluent in any language under all conditions everywhere , you are doing
very well under the circumstances , you are my hero mate.
Interesting!
I understand all to well what gringo is talking about, and now that jubilado mentions translating as part of fluency, makes me look like I am brilliant! But I know I'm not.
I can translate simultaneously in court (workman's compensation), the speed done at these hearing is not as like required by the U.N.
Translating simultaneously is an activity that will get you fluent, but does not mean you are or you are not fluent. Take for instance a person who is totally bilingual, born "here" or "there". The person might or might not have a high degree of academic education, but speak both languages comfortably.
That person might be able to translate, read convey ideas, to and fro both languages, which is not really translating. To me that is interpreting. In any event, the person is fluent in both languages.
What happens with a person who is not fluent in both languages, namely what happens to a lot of latino kids whose parents in need of learning English spoke English and Spanish to their kids in their efforts to learn the language, hence forcing the parent to speak mostly in English. Those kids today, understand Spanish, but can barely speak Spanish, broken at best.
These kids were their parent's primary interpreters in all aspects of life. Parents waited for the kid to be off school to go shopping, dr's appointments etc.
No doubt the kids can interpret, their Spanish is broken...are they or are they not fluent in both languages?
:-D
Gringo, for all I know could be very fluent with his broken Spanish. I will say that.
Your thoughts and musings about fluency, as well as those of the others who have answered, are worthwhile I think for self motivation and challenges. I would consider myself fluent if I could do the following:
Talk to a child of 4 in a way that they understand me as well as any adult speaking Spanish.
Translate in a social agency to help refugees or people in need of services who do not speak English.
Translate in a court for litigants who do not speak English.
Translate spontaneously at the United Nations.
However I do not think I will reach these capabilities so I will probably not ever be fluent in Spanish or French - both of which I understand and use with almost equal facility.
Your experience as you tell it, gringojrf, would please me immensely were it mine. When I was in Colombia in 2011, I realized how very little I knew. In the past two years, partly from using SpanishDict.com, I have learned a great deal.
Thanks for opening this discussion to which there have been a variety of different responses.
I think maybe I am being misunderstood. I am very happy with where my Spanish skills are today and so I am not studying like I used to. Because I am conversational and that is good enough for me. To me one cannot consider themselves to be fluent unless one knows and understands, just to pick a number, 90% of everything one hears. When there are words or usages that 90% of the native population would know and understand and one doesn't know those words or usages at least 90% of the time then one cannot consider themselves to be fluent. Maybe this is way to strict of a definition. Who knows.
I live in Mexico and have done so for the last six years. Other than when I am on this website and maybe ten other minutes per week I only speak Spanish. All of my friends and family speak only Spanish. I am conversational. I can and do hold conversations daily not only with my friends and family but with their friends and family and even with strangers. I have very little trouble understanding or being understood. Yes, I still mess up tenses and genders and matching and the subjunctive etc. And numerous times per week I have to ask for explanations of the particular usage of a verb or word. I still have trouble with slang and idiomatic expressions. Because of these issues I do not consider myself fluent, but rather conversational. To me fluency and conversational ability are two entirely separate things. Until I have mastered my problem areas and get my moments of confusion down to less than one a week, I will not consider myself fluent.
