I remember a story my mom once told me many years ago. She was sitting at the airport waiting for her connecting flight when a man walked up to her and asked if she could speak French. She responded with a “yes” but before she could qualify that “yes”, he’d switched to fluent French; a word of which she didn’t understand. Finally breaking his free flow with a hand gesture, she explained that she’d taken high school French and proceeded to unleash a few beginner phrases that started with “My name is…“.
She probably won’t think me sharing this story is amusing, but it definitely has been on my mind recently and has got me thinking about all those “Fluent in 3 months” pitches I’ve been seeing.
Can one really master someone else’s language in just 3-6 months and if so, what exactly is one’s definition of fluency?
Are you truly doing their language justice when even native speakers are still figuring out some of their own cultural nuances?
I speak Swedish. I don’t consider myself fluent because I take that word seriously. I’ve been swimming in the sea of intermediate speakers for a long time now. It’s going to take me awhile to reach fluency because for me, it means speaking smoothly without pausing for a split second to collect my thoughts.
It means eliminating the “ehms, umms,” and other filler words we use while we mentally construct or translate a sentence (quickly) from that language to our own native tongue and then back.
Even if we end up translating the sentence perfectly. Even if we speak correctly with sound grammar. Fluency to me means effortless flow. No “ehms” and “umms“.
Do you speak more than one language? Do you consider yourself fluent and if so, how do you define fluency?
@DTravelsRound – I hear you. This topic has been swirling round my head for awhile since someone said they’d now mastered a language and I actually heard them speak it.
@Perlina – Thanks for chiming in as well. I agree. 3 months is definitely not enough.
Hej,
I really don’t think that 3 months is enough to be fluent. I speak 5 languages.
I am fluent in french because it’s my native language and in italian, because i lived in Italy for 7 years when i was a child (from 7 to 14 years old). It’s funny because when i speak with an italian he can guess the city where i lived with my family. But i have to say that i am loosing words. Even if i have the accent i forgot some words since i don’t live there and don’t use it everyday. But in a conversation or when i go there, some words come back. It’s like an old song you know, but you have forgot the lyrics and as soon as you hear it again, you start to remember it and then you start to sing it again.(it was my poetic moment )
My dream, to be fluent in swedish. But i have to live there for that…soon, very soon ;
@Carolina – Thanks for your thoughts, and I definitely agree it does take more than 3 months no matter how gifted the person is.
@Eileen – Thanks for chiming in! I love that line “room for improvement” and I do agree. My written Swedish is pretty good and I could start publishing in Swedish magazines but maybe I’m always feeling like there’s room for improvement. I certainly hope to be fluent (almost native-like) by 7 years.
@Amanda – I think you’re right. it’s probably a bit of repressed perfectionism bubbling to the surface. Funny story – I tried learning German once and kept struggling until I figured out that I couldn’t pronounce the “h” sound properly because it doesn’t exist in Yoruba – my native Nigerian tongue. So “haus” was “aaaus” 🙂
@Julie – I watched your interview in Spanish while in the Pyrennees and was blown away by just how fluid (and super fast!) your Spanish was. Definitely fluent in my book 🙂 It’s definitely about understanding the underlying constructs and nuances. A personal goal of mine is to be able to author a book in Swedish. One day.
@Theresa – Absolutely and that’s why I was curious to see how everyone else defined fluency. I think you definitely hit it with the phrase “Fluency isn’t something you should be able to lose if you don’t use it.” Bang on! That was what I think I was trying to get at in a not-so-eloquent way.
@Andi – I hear you! I’ve been speaking English all my life as well and still make embarrassing spelling errors and mistakes all the time.
@Nailah – I’ve been actively (well semi-actively) studying and speaking Swedish for roughly 2 years now. I think my Swedish might be a bit better than I actually let on just because I personally feel I haven’t reached where I want to be by now (I’m my own toughest critic/competitor). Yes, most people speak English here so it can be tricky but I keep speaking Swedish to them even when they switch or try to switch to English.
@Oneika – Yes, native English speakers (especially North Americans I find) definitely claim fluency quicker. I know Europeans who are fluent in 4-5 languages and who still feel uncomfortable claiming it. And I think Theresa hit it right with her comment that fluency isn’t something you lose even if you don’t use it for years. That’s where I think my definition of fluency also lies. If you don’t use French for 5-10 years, will you forget a signification portion of it? That’s where I am with Swedish. If I stopped speaking it for 5 years, I’ll probably forget some key words and constructs and revert back down to conversational Swedish.
@Polya_U – No worries at all. Your Swedish will definitely get better. Especially since you now know English and its underlying grammatical structures, it will be easier for you to pick up Swedish quicker.
My native language is Russian. But after my moving to Sweden I have to speak English every day. And I feel that it’s becoming better and better day by day, now I can speak English almost as fast as I speak Russian. But because I’m in Sweden I must study and speak Swedish. This really is a big problem for me. It takes to much time to say some basic phrases. I’ve studied Swedish for 2 months, and I hope it will be better one day. And also I try to study Italien, but I don’t belive that I will speak fluently this language because I don’t have any practic and italien people are too fast:)
I don’t think I could be fluent in any language in three months. There are far too many nuances for me to wrap my head around, let alone words to learn. Perhaps if it is what I dedicated my mind to, then MAYBE I could speak very well, but not fluent. I was in Spain for a bit of time in 2010 and picked up the language a bit, but I was by no means even close to fluent. Good topic for discussion!
As a language teacher, I’m really serious about fluency, too, but I feel like the concept is really, well.. fluid. I’m a native speaker of English, and perfected my French to what I would consider native fluency- I don’t have to pause or search for words or translate at all. I speak Spanish, but like your Swedish, I feel like I’m swimming in the sea of intermediates since I often have to pause and insert those “erms” or “ahs” to get my point across. I think that us native English speakers (at least from what I’ve seen) are really quick to claim “fluency” when she shouldn’t. I’m not too sure why that is, though!
I like your phrase “swimming in the sea of intermediate speakers” as that’s exactly where my Portuguese has been for ages. I made a lot of progress when I moved to Brasil for a few months and feel like i’ll have to do that again (but for longer) to make it to the next level. How long have you been speaking Swedish? Curious, with so many people in Sweden speaking excellent English, has it been hard to get people to speak to you in Swedish?
I’ve been speaking English my whole life and I still don’t feel fluent! 😉 I think fluency is such a hard to define word, but I think once you can start joking around in a language you’re getting close!!!
Despite majoring in German, studying in Germany for a year, and taking a job that required me to use my German every single day, I don’t consider myself fluent. I really don’t think I’ll ever be fluent in anything other than English. I can have interact on a fairly fluent level, but I simply don’t have that complete understanding of a language that I have with English. I don’t understand all the nuances, and even when I do, I can’t always use them. Perhaps I’m mislabeling fluency though and equating it with native knowledge, which would mean that I’ll never be fluent in anything but English. I also feel like fluency isn’t something you should be able to “lose” if you don’t use it. Though German comes back to me quickly when I am immersed in it, English never leaves me.
That said, with my ESL students, I consider the ability to use slang and to make and understand jokes to be signs of increasing fluency.
Great questions, Lola. I consider myself fluent in Spanish, but like Eileen, always with room for improvement, particularly because Spanish has so many regional variations.
I also think that fluency extends beyond “simple” linguistic competency, including command of vocabulary and the ability to speak without pausing to “translate”. For me, fluency is as much about understanding underlying cultural constructs of the language and what words mean to a culture. For me, that aspect of fluency will always be both exciting and yet somehow not 100% accessible to me.
I don’t think I’ll ever consider myself “properly fluent” in German, I feel like only my son (growing up bilingually) will be able to say this! I can’t imagine I will ever know German to the same extent as English, yet I can make myself understood (and even be taken for a native speaker at times).
That said, I think you’re being too hard on yourself, Lola. I know even when I speak English I use ehms and umms and even sometimes make grammar errors, but I consider myself fluent. So fluent doesn’t have to be perfect.
I do consider myself fluent in Spanish, but not without room for improvement. I spoke probably your mother’s level of French (but in Spanish) when I moved to Chile, seven years ago, and since then, have forged many friendships, written articles and explained myself in Spanish over and over and over again. There are a few areas wehre I feel less qualified to speak, because I don’t have mastery of the terms of art, but after all these years, and so much time in Spanish, I do feel like it’s okay for me to say I’m fluent. Plus Chileans tell me I am, and I figure they know what they’re talking about, no?
I wonder if feeling like you’re fluent will hit you one day, or creep up, little by little.
I agree with you, fluency in any language means to be able to speak that language without having to translate anything in your native language and back to the new language. And that takes a long time, several years at least no 3 months.
I am fluent in two language: Spanish/English.