|
 |
Studying a language to native fluency | ||
Tags: Native Fluency | Fluency | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6372 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 41 of 96 08 October 2009 at 9:01am | IP Logged | ||
|
People simply don't understand or respect how deep the knowledge of a native is.
You can learn to express yourself. You can learn to get across any meaning you can think of, but that doesn't mean you have native level fluency. Honestly, it's almost an insult to say you'll be fluent in 10 months. You'll speak it with a certain degree of fluency such that you are very capable, but when you pick up a book written for native adults, I doubt you'll understand everything. Unless you study 6 hours a day for 10 months, you must understand how many idioms, expressions, and vocabulary words there are. You cannot know them all without a lot of study. I think everyone who learns their first second language will realize this. You'll get to a point where you think 'oh yes! I'm so close to native fluency now, not much left to learn!' and then you start to get a rude awakening that everything you know only constitutes the equivalent of a white belt. Until you can express yourself well with extremely accurate grammar and pleasant accent, you don't even have a white belt yet. Edited by zerothinking on 08 October 2009 at 9:06am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| zenmonkey Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6552 days ago 803 posts - 1119 votes 1 sounds Speaks: EnglishC2*, Spanish*, French, German Studies: Italian, Modern Hebrew | Message 42 of 96 08 October 2009 at 11:37am | IP Logged | ||
|
I think a lot of people are confusing cultural fluency with language fluency.
One can have extreme ease in a language and still be easily outed as not local. For you French speakers, here is an easy test. Ton céfran, c'est bléca? <<-- It's street French, but you need to be of a specific culture to get that (Parigot, 70s) and the thousands of current expressions. Listen to this video -- Tu kiff? (Do you understand) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N_3NMN-w7U There are different levels of fluency within a culture - that video I understand 100% while my French mother-in-law only gets 50%. So who is the white belt or black belt? Or as my daughters say "Parle a ma main" ;) Edited by zenmonkey on 08 October 2009 at 11:41am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sonsenfrancais Groupie United Kingdom sonsenfrancais. Joined 5979 days ago 75 posts - 85 votes Speaks: FrenchC2 | Message 43 of 96 08 October 2009 at 11:59am | IP Logged | ||
|
This is a fascinating question. I've spent the last six years learning French as an adult student at our local university. I've passed the DALF C2 exam, the highest available. That's supposed to be 'near native fluency' But it's not, not really. I don't get tied up when I speak, I can write reasonably accurate French. But my goodness, there's a gulf in between me and a native speaker.
And I've never met anyone who has learned French as a foreign language who has native fluency. On the television - yes. Jane Birkin, for example. But most journalists working in Paris (the American Ted Stanger, for example) don't speak with native fluency. Even when the French is extremely good - the British Ambassador to France, Peter Westmacott - it's not completely 'native' I remember seeing an interview with Peter Ustinov on French television. In Britain Ustinov had a terrific reputation as a polyglot. When he spoke English he spoke as a middle class highly educated Englishman. When he spoke French he spoke - as a middle class highly educated Englishman. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6050 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 45 of 96 08 October 2009 at 1:21pm | IP Logged | ||
|
So I take it that no one here claims to have reached "native fluency". If such a person exists, make your self known here. If not, can we all assume it is practically impossible for an adult, then? Even the most dedicated among us language learners haven't done this?
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Leopejo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6109 days ago 675 posts - 724 votes Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English Studies: French, Russian | Message 46 of 96 08 October 2009 at 1:31pm | IP Logged | ||
I don't think it is many language learners' ultimate goal. Once they reach (not native) fluency, they might switch to another language, or start writing a novel in that language, or something else. Therefore I wouldn't judge the possibility of reaching native fluency by forum members reaching it or not. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6439 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 47 of 96 08 October 2009 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | ||
I can think of forum members who effectively did (I'm not one). I doubt anyone will stand up to the plate on this though - all it would do is have any mistakes that they might make (... and natives make mistakes and have incomplete cultural knowledge too) held up against them, etc. Most natives don't write like professional writers - the profession exists for a reason, after all - or speak like professional speakers. If an educated adult writes sloppily in his/her native language sometimes, it's written off; the same slack isn't given to anyone claiming native fluency as a non-native. If an educated native-speaking adult doesn't care for some local type of music, and hence doesn't know much about it, it's not considered a cultural lack that makes him/her short of native fluency. There's also the question of what "native fluency" means. I know one guy who certainly has native fluency in spoken English. His English writing is comparable to that of many native-speaking graduates from English-speaking colleges - that is, it's coherent, but full of things like minor punctuation mistakes. On the other hand, he writes much better in a few other languages, including - but not only - his native one. I'd call him natively fluent in English; I'd expect other people to virulently disagree, including native English speakers writing posts in worse English than his. Edited by Volte on 08 October 2009 at 2:26pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6783 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 48 of 96 08 October 2009 at 3:48pm | IP Logged | ||
|
At the risk of stirring the pot, here's my statement: native fluency isn't even all that huge. That's right, I said it.
When you say you want to be able to speak like the natives, you beg the question: which natives? In every country there's a huge number of people who "barely" (shall we say) speak their own language, in the sense that they make lots of mistakes and they speak in a dialect that doesn't measure up to the official standards of the language. I saw this article* the other day that said foreign students of English score better on written tests than natives do in Britain. This agrees with my own observations from the net, where some portion of Brits write things like "would of" and don't even know that it's incorrect. So who's kidding who? I mean, native speakers have no bar to clear in order to qualify as natives. Whatever their level is, *that* is a native speaker. What you might want to aim for, I think, is to match the proficiency of, say, the top 1% of the population. Pick the top person in a hundred and chances are the average native will have to try hard indeed to match that person's eloquence and erudition. And obviously, this is very inexact, so you go by your own sense of what kind of level of language that would be. Of course, it's a very long road, and if it took you (hypothetically speaking) 20 years to reach that level in your first language, assuming you've always had a strong interest in language and aimed to reach high, then you might want to set aside another 10 years for your second language. In my case I qualify by definition as native in 2 languages (I also have the paperwork to prove it - high school diplomas), and English has been my de facto first language for 15 years now, so I think I've passed the native point. But as for that foggy "1% goal" I would enter the competition on my English, and I also think I could get there with my other two native languages given more day to day use. I do not have them operative at that level as of today simply because they are secondary to me, English dominates my life. Could I have them all at that level at the same time? *That* I have grave doubts about. But even though I'm planning to learn another maybe 3 foreign languages, I do *not* expect to get there in any more than possibly one of them. [*] Overseas students are better at English than the British Edited by numerodix on 08 October 2009 at 3:58pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
