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Varying degrees of fluency | ||
Tags: Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| J T Newbie Australia Joined 5688 days ago 12 posts - 16 votes | Message 1 of 19 19 January 2010 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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To all of you who study (or have studied) foreign languages, I want to know how you
define the three common levels of fluency: basic fluency, intermediate fluency and advanced fluency. Also, in whatever language you studied, how long did it take you to reach each level (assuming that you were studying the language on a consistent basis)? Thanks Edited by J T on 19 January 2010 at 5:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Paskwc Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5678 days ago 450 posts - 624 votes  Speaks: Hindi, Urdu*, Arabic (Levantine), French, English Studies: Persian, Spanish | Message 2 of 19 19 January 2010 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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These definitions are really arbitrary unless we refer to some set of universal
criteria. For example, some people look at the levels like this: Basic Fluency (limited comprehension) Intermediate Fluency (intermediate comprehension) Advanced Fluency (advanced comprehension) In this case, the word fluency is used in a way many people will find unwarranted. Alternatively, you can also look at the stages like this: Beginner (A1) Breakthrough (A2) Lower Intermediate (B1) Upper Intermediate (B2) Basic Fluency (C1) Advanced Fluency (C2) In this case, the term fluency is reserved for a much higher level of comprehension. For a native English speaker (which I assume you are), reaching a B2 level in European languages is probably achievable in a year's time. If you were to go after one of the more exotic languages, than you might be looking at two or three years. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| victor-osorio Diglot Groupie Venezuela Joined 5433 days ago 73 posts - 129 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Italian | Message 3 of 19 19 January 2010 at 6:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think is difficult to make limits between those concepts. For me, basic fluency means you're not still not fluent but are on the right road, intermediate fluency means you're almost fluent but have some mistakes you have to correct or some areas where you should improve a little bit and advanced fluency means... yes, that you're fluent as a bird flying in the middle of a summer sky. Native-fluency without being a native-speaker. Here's a more specific approach... Basic fluency: you can carry on very restricted conversations without any problem. E.g: talking with a girl in a supermarket about how high the prices are there or how do you love to eat japanese rice. No silences, everything coming out of your head without effort. Intermediate fluency: you can carry on conversations with a less restriction and a wide range of themes. E.g: talking to a girl in the supermarket about the problem with Michael Jackson being such a perverted guy and why do you believe he must have been jailed when he was alive (just an example, I didn't have anything against Michael). Advanced fluency: you can carry on conversations to the extreme. E.g: talking about complex scientific issues; making associations between the perspective of a viewer and an object falling at high speed, how does the perception of the speed gets distorted as the person who's seeing moves his head. Even if you could carry any of these conversations with a basic fluency level. BUT a fluent speaker should have those conversations without stopping to think "how can I say this?" 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| victor-osorio Diglot Groupie Venezuela Joined 5433 days ago 73 posts - 129 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Italian | Message 4 of 19 19 January 2010 at 6:25pm | IP Logged | ||
I just realised this is ridiculous... I meant having a very abstract conversation, including scientific discussions. But people don't talk about that in supermarkets, do they? And I don't know much about physics sooo... bad example. Edited by victor-osorio on 19 January 2010 at 6:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 19 19 January 2010 at 7:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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The fact that the question needs asked shows how useless the word "fluency" is.
If people don't agree on what it means then you will have to explain every time you use it. Words are supposed to save you from having to explain yourself, and so save you time. Using a word and explaining it takes longer than just explaining to begin with, so why bother. "Fluency" is a word that sounds good, and lots of courses use it as a way of bamboozling customers with jargon. I always understood "fluent" to just mean "really good at" a language. That's the traditional common understanding of the word, and there's no such thing as "basic really good at", "intermediate really good at" and "advanced really good at". Once I started studying languages academically, I learned the technical definition of fluency: speaking without undue hesitation, gaps or errors. "Fluent" is from a Latin word meaning "with flow"/"flowingly". (cf "confluence", where two rivers flow into each other to for a single river.) "Basic flow", "intermediate flow" and "advanced flow" really aren't any better than basic, intermediate and advanced "really good at", which leaves us with this undefined word that no-one really understands, so no-one can fully deny any claims. Substitute it with any made-up word and you don't lose any information: that's the definition of a useless word. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5957 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 6 of 19 19 January 2010 at 8:15pm | IP Logged | ||
I think that is a helpful and appropriate definition of "fluent" and I generally agree that whether one is fluent or not is more of an either/or proposition rather than a spectrum classification. I read the qualifiers "basic" v. "advanced" as more relating to vocabulary. That is, one could be characterized as fluent in basic French (one can speak and understand without undue hesitation, gaps or errors provided the conversation falls within a vaguely-defined set of basic vocabulary and sentence patterns). Edited by Spanky on 19 January 2010 at 8:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 19 20 January 2010 at 2:04am | IP Logged | ||
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It is essentially meaningless to give one score for fluency in a language. Personally I'm fairly good at reading in a lot of languages which I only can speak at a mediocre level. So you should at least give separate scores for Reading, listening, writing, thinking and speaking (2 passive and 3 active skills), - maybe also a separate score for theoretical knowledge.
Besides academical texts may not be the most difficult genre, - actually I find a fragmentary discussion between youngsters in a bus much more difficult to follow. And articles in popular scientific mags are my preferred reading right now, precisely because they are both interesting and fairly easy to read due to the number of international words. My personal criterion for claiming basic fluency in a language is that I can stay for at least 3-4 days, but preferably longer in a suitable country speaking only the local language. And I don't mean asking for a bread in a shop or things like that - if I can't discuss things like travelling and politics and language learning with the natives then it doesn't count. And we should be able to communicate without too much effort in spite of my errors and bad pronunciation. Asking for directions and things like that are only sufficient for intermediate fluency. And on the passive side I wouldn't claim intermediate fluency if I couldn't get the general meaning of a common magazine article or the news on TV, and I would also expect to be able to think simple thoughts in the language - but I would probably try to avoid complicated discussions. Advanced fluency is developed from basic fluency by weeding out errors and acquiring a more idiomatic style - which includes some cultural knowledge. Let me add that I made some estimates of my passive vocabulary in different languages last year (in my log thread), and the numbers I got correlated reasonably well with my perceived level in those languages. This doesn't mean that you can speak a language just by learning a lot of words, but vocabulary size is important for fluency. And quite generally I only feel comfortable when I get an estimate of at least 15-20.000 passive words, using a midsized dictionary of something like 30-60.000 lexemes.The number of active words is much more difficult to estimate, but the better you know a language, the higher the percentage of the words you know are active. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 8 of 19 20 January 2010 at 4:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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When we describe someone as capable of speaking a language fluently, I think most people refer specifically to the ability to speak in a fashion that is somewhat native-like. That is to say with good pronunciation, lack of egregious hesitation and relatively accurate grammar. This may sound vague, but I think the concept of fluency is fundamentally vague although for academic purposes one could measure things such as pauses and repetiions in the oral stream.
Like others, I find it hard to distinguish between beginning, intermediate and advanced fluency if we mix up phonetics, grammar and vocabulary. Couldn't one be very fluent, phonetically speaking, with limited vocabulary and grammar? It happens all the time. I'm sure many of us have had the experience of "sounding" much better than we really are because we have mastered certain simple patterns. I can sound very fluent in Spanish in short conversations with my neighbours, but I wouldn't want to do an interview on Spanish television or have to explain how a computer works. Actually, I think most of us strive to sound "good" in our target language. That, after all, is what really impresses people. The trick, in my mind, is to combine good phonetics with basic grammar and a limited but high-value vocabulary. Then stick to short sentences and the right connectors. Haven't studies shown that most people talk with a vocabulary of less than 1000 words? To read a newspaper or a novel, yes, you need much more than that, but this is not what fluency is about. You can go very far with little. Edited by s_allard on 20 January 2010 at 4:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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