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Becoming fluent | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 1 of 38 17 February 2010 at 5:09am | IP Logged | ||
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In a forum like this, certain themes keep regularly coming back. I'm sure fluency must be one of those. I suggest
we have another go at it because it is such a central issue that touches on many aspects of independent language learning. The basic question is: How and when does one become fluent in a target language? Of course, we have to address a very thorny question. What do we mean by fluency or being fluent in another language? Here's my take. First, we are talking about oral proficiency, the ability to actually understand and speak the language. Second, we're not talking necessarily about native-like proficiency. It seems to me that one can be fluent and not pass for a native speaker. Let's say that being fluent means having enough mastery of the phonetics, grammar and vocabulary to be able to communicate well in certain relatively ordinary situations. Actually, I prefer the term "comfortable". Basically, I want to feel comfortable in the language. I might not have the range of expression that I have in my native tongue, but I'm able to freely meet my everyday needs. I'm sure people have opinions on the definition of fluency. The more important topic of course is how does one become comfortable speaking a language. I know a lot has been written on learning methods, but I want to focus particularly on the passage from non-fluent to fluent. I have my own ideas and methods, but I would prefer to open the debate rather than make this text too long. Edited by s_allard on 17 February 2010 at 5:49pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Paskwc Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5679 days ago 450 posts - 624 votes Speaks: Hindi, Urdu*, Arabic (Levantine), French, English Studies: Persian, Spanish | Message 2 of 38 17 February 2010 at 6:05am | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with putting the focus on comfortability. I believe myself to be fluent when I am
comfortable in its presence and am not apprehensive. Really, it sort of comes down to a level of mental security and peace of mind. A definition in three words? Comfort, security, & confidence. Edited by Paskwc on 17 February 2010 at 6:08am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Johntm Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5424 days ago 616 posts - 725 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 38 17 February 2010 at 8:13am | IP Logged | ||
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I consider one fluent when there speech is flowing (after all, fluent comes from a latin word meaning "flow") and they make only small mistakes, if any. The mistakes are so small and few that they can still be understood. Also they have no hesitation when speaking in everyday situations.
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| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6867 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 4 of 38 17 February 2010 at 9:03am | IP Logged | ||
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I think fluent is a word that can mean different things to different people
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| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5671 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 5 of 38 17 February 2010 at 10:48am | IP Logged | ||
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It is obviously a debatable point, but I always see fluency as involving more than one person. We can prepare well for monologues - but it doesn't help us much when we are talking WITH (rather than TO) other people. Sure you can make a You Tube video that will demonstrate great vocabulary, but it doesn't tell us anything about your conversational ability.
This point was brought home to me at my own wedding several years ago: I gave a lengthy wedding speech in Czech, and several guests came up to me and said "Wow - you are fluent!" yet I couldn't hold even a basic conversation with them. I could never go beyond a few fumbled words - everybody would get embarrassed, and the conversation would end. Since then, I have met plenty of folks suffering from the same problem - where they knew a lot about some foreign language, but could hardly use it at all in real conversations. I knew something was wrong - after all we had all been studying for months or even years. Either we were stupid (probably true in my case), or more likely we were focusing on the wrong things. The answer hit me out of the blue in a normal conversation with a friend who complained that she could blurt out very short sentences but was unable to string a long sentence together. What I realised was that all my prior training had focused on single question and answer pairs. The focus was on giving a short answer to a simple question and then stopping. We had no preparation for keeping the conversation going. I realised that conversations have to flow back and forth between the participants. This ongoing flow of conversation (which was missing) is what I call fluency. Since that realisation, my focus switched away from being primarily about vocab and grammar to developing conversational fluency. In particular, I started to focus on how to ensure that all the parties are comfortable with, and actually want to, keep the conversation going. I have taught this idea to a few other language learners. It probably doesn't help beginners that much - but several people who felt stuck at the intermediate level told me that applying some of these ideas helped unlock the fluency that was trapped inside them. A few months back I wrote a page about this idea on my website where there is a link on top left of the home page called "What is Fluency?" There are some other pages on there which go into some of my ideas on how to achieve this. Some of them may be specific to Czech, but others should be pretty universal. Edited by Splog on 17 February 2010 at 11:00am 16 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 6 of 38 17 February 2010 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks Splog. You've really hit it on the nail. I was planning to write something about types of fluency, including
conversational fluency, but you have articulated it much better than I could. I'll drop by the website. Maybe one could distinguish between interactive / conversational fluency and expository / narrative fluency. Actually, the distinction is probably more between formal language fluency where one prepares a speech or text in advance and informal fluency where one has to improvise continuously. Before getting into specific strategies, I would like to state that in my opinion fluency, especially informal or conversational fluency, requires some form of meaningful interactive linguistic immersion. I know it may sound a bit convoluted, but I say it because there are many historical and contemporary examples of people who do not learn the language of the country or region where they live. This is because they have little interaction in the surrounding language. That caveat out of the way, in my observation, the fluent multilingual individuals I have met have nearly all had some immersive experience with the language through work, live, study or love. Of course, this does not in any way imply that studying a language outside immersion is useless. Quite the contrary, we're all here because we believe that one can study a language formally and achieve good results. But, to be frank, whether you are a fan of Michel Thomas, Assimil, Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone, FSI, Linguaphone, among the many self-study methods, you have to admit that, despite the marketing hype and the writing on the box, you will probably not become very fluent solely with these methods . At some point, you must take the plunge and spend some time actually living the language. One of the most obvious reasons is to learn how to interact with native speakers. And it's not easy. Going from listening to mp3 files while driving to work to actually ordering a meal in a restaurant can be a shock. As we all know, real-world spoken language can be very different from the nice clear professional voices of the language tapes or CDs. As others observers have pointed out here, conversational fluency implies mastering certain skills that apply specifically to maintaining the interactive flow. This is something that is rarely taught and is usually learned by observation and imitation. Two examples come to mind. The French "c'est bien" or the Spanish "asi es" (I don't know how to input accented characters yet) can be used over and over just to help the conversation moving along. As an aside, if you master these interactive techniques and stick to short phrases and simple question forms you can have quite a conversation and lead people to believe you are very fluent, Edited by s_allard on 17 February 2010 at 4:04pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| JoshN Newbie United States Joined 5412 days ago 8 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* | Message 7 of 38 17 February 2010 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | ||
I am just getting into the study of learning languages. I read Lomb's "Polyglot" and I think your experience is why she recommends reading modern novels ASAP when one begins learning a language. Real communication is not simple exchanges in a vacuum, but a series of ideas conveyed organically. I am glad to have found this forum, and thank you fine folk for sharing your language experiences, so newbies like myself can get a head start. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6153 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 8 of 38 17 February 2010 at 5:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Splog, I've just had a quick look at your site, and your discusssion of connectors is very interesting. As I thought about this in relation to Spanish, and French, it seems that a lot of conversation is kept flowing by the use of the subjunctive tenses.
E.g. Spanish: No creo que (I don't believe) .., Con tal de que (Provided that) .., Me parace estupido que (It seems stupid that) ... French: Il est à souhaiter que (It is hoped that) .., Il est normal que (It's normal that) ..., Il vaut mieux que (It's better that) As this tense is normally learnt towards the end of study, it should probably be studied earlier and practiced as much as possible. Edited by DaraghM on 17 February 2010 at 5:27pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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