Achieving Native Fluency (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Achieving Native Fluency
Tags: Native Fluency \| 6 Weeks Challenge (6WC) \| Fluency
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Language Learning Forum : General discussion

32 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3 4 Next >>

Leopejo
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
Italy
Joined 6110 days ago
675 posts - 724 votes

Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English
Studies: French, Russian

Message 17 of 32

21 December 2008 at 4:25am | IP Logged

FrancescoP wrote:

(such as African immigrants cursing with the traditional countryside Tuscan "boia deh!")

You are painting Tuscan with too wide a brush! That oh-so-ugly deh! belongs to Western Tuscan only, and not all of it I guess (Bela Lugosi, what about Pisan?). We Florentines frown upon it - we have a standard to keep.
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FrancescoP
Octoglot
Senior Member
Italy
Joined 5951 days ago
169 posts - 258 votes

Speaks: Italian*, French, English, German, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian, Norwegian
Studies: Georgian, Japanese, Croatian, Greek

Message 18 of 32

21 December 2008 at 6:23am | IP Logged

Woah woah, than you for pointing out my awful mistakes, guys! I just hope there was more to my ramblings than a qui pro quo about soap operas, however. (By the way, I happen to know about that usage, I just misinterpreted Iversen's example... good Francesco be very sorry, sir, he try to be born in America next time)
Leo, I have been living in Tuscany for half of my life and I know what you're talking about ;) On the other hand it would have been a little pedantic to get into sub-regional differences on an international forum.
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vientito
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 6339 days ago
212 posts - 281 votes

Message 19 of 32

21 December 2008 at 8:57am | IP Logged

my opinion is that you have to get the accent dead on first. the natives would find it more natural to talk with you once you get the accent right, even if they realize the substance is a bit strange. but in terms of difficulty of getting one's accent correct, I still think it is much less than expressing and structuring thoughts like a native. Some people keep reading and writing for years and their works still contain things that give them away as a non-native speakers.
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vientito
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 6339 days ago
212 posts - 281 votes

Message 20 of 32

21 December 2008 at 8:57am | IP Logged

my opinion is that you have to get the accent dead on first. the natives would find it more natural to talk with you once you get the accent right, even if they realize the substance is a bit strange. but in terms of difficulty of getting one's accent correct, I still think it is much less than expressing and structuring thoughts like a native. Some people keep reading and writing for years and their works still contain things that give them away as non-native speakers.
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Juan M.
Senior Member
Colombia
Joined 5900 days ago
460 posts - 597 votes

Message 21 of 32

21 December 2008 at 10:25am | IP Logged

mairovster wrote:

By the way, we talk a lot about how to learn a language, but I would like to know more about how to improve in a language, especially a language you're already in an intermediate/advanced level.

Any suggestions?

You said it yourself: read, read, read. When I began reading in English on my own after 10 years of bilingual school I distinctly remember struggling with words such as 'though' and 'indeed'. As I read on however my English improved substantially. I always kept a dictionary by my side and looked up every word that I didn't know. I did it not because I was consciously working on my English, but because I read for its own sake and thus I wanted to fully understand everything. In relatively little time, and through no deliberate effort of my own, I built up my English to what I consider to be a satisfactory level.

For colloquial and spoken language, you need to complement the above with radio and TV.

I've found that you don't learn a language by studying it as much as by simply engaging in it. I've never picked up an English grammar.
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Adumb
Newbie
United States
Joined 5821 days ago
14 posts - 14 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish, French

Message 22 of 32

21 December 2008 at 8:47pm | IP Logged

My old coworker Aaron acheived native fluency. He said it took him about 6 years of study and practice. To me, he sounds like a native Spanish speaker. His wife and her family all speak Spanish and he learned as he went. But I'm sure once in awhile he come across some words he doesn't know yet. At that point though, it's easier because your vocab and grammar is good enough that you can figure out a word based on context.
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irrationale
Tetraglot
Senior Member
China
Joined 6051 days ago
669 posts - 1023 votes

2 sounds
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog
Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese

Message 23 of 32

28 September 2009 at 6:27am | IP Logged

FrancescoP wrote:

mairovster wrote:

By the way, we talk a lot about how to learn a language, but I would like to know more about how to improve in a language, especially a language you're already in an intermediate/advanced level

Excellent point! That's the trickiest part, and that's where the real trouble is. Achieving basic fluency in a foreign language can be a simple and exhalting experience: you suddenly skyrocket from 0 to 10, from nothing to something. A month ago you couldn't tell Japanese from Korean, now you would be able to chat with a waiter in Tokyo. You start to boast with your friends that you "know" the language (!) and you feel proud. Getting from 20 to 60 is a lot trickier, and far less rewarding: the feeling of elation and sudden enlightenment is gone, sometimes you feel like you're crossing an endless desert (the plateau effect), the amount of things with a name you have to label all over again, maybe for the third or fourth time, is discouraging. The final 40 is the real challenge, though. A solid 80% of courses in print only cover a 20% of the language, at best. Some advanced resources exist (great stuff is available for Russian, or for technical English) but you have to track them down and not all are going to work for your individual case (many are redundant and full of words that are all but dead). What's worse, there seems to be an irritatingly fine line between a competent foreigner and a native. No matter how hard you try, people will always point out something weird about the way you speak or write, even if your vocabulary is the same as an educated native's, or better. When I submit papers abroad I always get a lot of "oooh"s but also a lot of "suggestions" for improvement. That's annoying, but it's a part of the game...
It would be nice to join forces and write a checklist for those who wish to take their language to the next level. Here are some random ideas:

1. Lowbrow mags. It might sound weird, coming from a man, but the freshest side of my French is straight out of the issues of Elle and Marie Claire my girlfriend used to read when we were living in Paris. You pick up a lot of up-to-date jargon. Even better, you learn to differentiate between idioms that are really in use and old fashioned expressions that are just quoted for irony. A great school, and you get a lot to chew for little or no money. Wish other national editions were as nicely written and cool as the French, but nope...

2. Collections of proverbs, sayings and naturalized quotations from national classics, the Bible, etc. Sooner or later you'll have to tackle these. The problem is, you can live 20 years without hearing one of these lines, but you'll need to know the damn thing when it comes up, as a part of the linguistic subconscious of competent speakers. Perhaps it in the primary school curriculum and people bring it up from time to time. This probably doesn't apply to conversations about football and sex, but there you don't have to be particularly fluent anyway. The internet might be a great resource here, if used with discrimination (Wikipedia has a list of 1000 Russian proverbs, and experience will show that you HAVE to know them to get by on a near-native level).

3. Hanging around with natives with a linguistic interest, so you can reciprocate and get things explained properly and understandingly

4. Be always on the lookout for new things, take mental notes whenever possible, develop a supernatural sensitivity for nuances. As soon as a native, an actor or a radio speaker says something you could have not said the same way toggle your instant learning mode. Find other instances or wait to hear it again before you try to use it actively: it might be a regionalism, a personal knack or a mistake... Have a new words quarantine ready in a corner of your brain

5. Buy an issue of Newsweek, der Spiegel or Le Monde Diplomatique (or similar) and check yourself against top-notch journalism. Chances are you'll stumble on a dozen words you are not familiar with. Be selective, but try to learn all there is to learn. Repeat the following week if necessary. Serious journalism is one of the main standards against which contemporary usage and competence are measured.

The bad news is that whereas respectable fluency can be achieved on the basis of 10.000 / 20.000 lexical units (including idioms, etc), approximation to a complete mastery of a language probably requires 10 times that much, or even more. The last step, in other words, is hardest to climb than all the rest put together, and it's made of things you won't need in most situations (frustrating to some).

Excellent advice!
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RealGodiva
Diglot
Newbie
Canada
Joined 5232 days ago
8 posts - 12 votes
Speaks: Russian*, English^C2

Message 24 of 32

31 July 2010 at 7:40am | IP Logged

Thanks a lot, Francesco! That was the first time I found somebody thinking about this problem and the solutions. I recently came to Canada, to stay for good, and I'm trying to improve my accent and master my English in general. I want to get as close to the native speaker's level as possible.

The main problem - I wasn't sure what would be the most efficient way to achieve it. I asked different people such kind of questions from time to time, but all the native speakers around me are SO nice and politically correct - they keep telling me that my English is "perfect".

I was also thinking whether I should get some job which requires a lot of talking on different topics. Still have no idea what kind of job it could be. Call center - no. Supermarket - no. Office - no. I tried office for 2 months, but it's all the same stuff you say all day long and the colleagues do not really communicate a lot with each other. Those of them who chat, prefer to chat in their native language. Yes, Toronto IS a multicultural city..

What do you think, may be you or other people on this forum could give some ideas about the kind of a job for the purpose of mastering English only?

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