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Achieving Native Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6234 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes  Studies: German | Message 9 of 32 19 December 2008 at 12:12am | IP Logged | ||
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I believe he learned it in a year and a half and he has already done some podcasts in Japanese.
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| mairovster Diglot Newbie Brazil thelanguagelearningbRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5778 days ago 21 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 10 of 32 19 December 2008 at 9:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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This is a very interesting question.
Although I can understand and speak English fluently, I still don't know how to jump from the intermediate to the advanced level, how to understand more and speak a native-like English. (I'm not talking about accent!). Recently, I have been working on my writing skills, because I like to write and it seems to be a great way to improve my English. However, I always fell I need to read more if I want to improve my writing... 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? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| FrancescoP Octoglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5737 days ago 169 posts - 258 votes Speaks: Italian*, French, English, German, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian, Norwegian Studies: Georgian, Japanese, Croatian, Greek | Message 11 of 32 20 December 2008 at 2:20am | IP Logged | ||
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). 51 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Leopejo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5896 days ago 675 posts - 724 votes Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English Studies: French, Russian | Message 12 of 32 20 December 2008 at 2:27am | IP Logged | ||
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Francesco, thank you for this excellent post.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6490 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 13 of 32 20 December 2008 at 2:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Excellent post, FrancescoP. I can't see anything much to add (except that activities like reading grammars, collecting idioms and making wordlists still are relevant for advanced learners - and even native speakers might benefit from them).
Personally I don't claim native fluency in any language except Danish, not even English. But I claim something different, namely a linguistical competence that in some areas put me at least on a par with native speakers, while it is fairly limited in other areas (such as the languages of fashion and sports). However it is difficult to separate general knowledge and linguistical skills: if I don't know a certain soap or a soccer player is it then a hole in my linguistical knowledge? Besides I haven't had any reason to choose and maybe even acquire a specific dialect so my speech would be a dead give-away that I am not a native Anglophone from some specific spot on the map. But I'm not overly worried about that, - as long as I can see my skills in a number of languages creep steadily upwards I'm content. I'm tend to focus more on those languages that aren't quite fluent yet. Edited by Iversen on 20 December 2008 at 2:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 5837 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 14 of 32 20 December 2008 at 3:09am | IP Logged | ||
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If native fluency is functioning linguistically exactly as a native, is this even possible to achieve outside of a country that speaks that language? Or at least constantly immersed with natives?
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| FrancescoP Octoglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5737 days ago 169 posts - 258 votes Speaks: Italian*, French, English, German, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian, Norwegian Studies: Georgian, Japanese, Croatian, Greek | Message 15 of 32 20 December 2008 at 3:22am | IP Logged | ||
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I wholeheartedly agree on your philosophy and attitude, Iversen. In my case I tend to focus a little too specifically on written output (for professional reasons), so accent is not a real problem with me, as long as I sound clean and convincing enough. Fluency, in my opinion, is about expressing one's thoughts without effort in the most precise and elegant way, not mimicking sounds. I have met foreigners who managed to pick up an Italian regional accent pretty fine, but 1. for some reasons there are words and expressions that unmistakeably give the away as Germans or Englishmen because they don't fit in the general accent pattern; 2. they generally sound a little grotesque (such as African immigrants cursing with the traditional countryside Tuscan "boia deh!").
As for your soap brand example, I'm afraid there's a point where purely linguistic competence and cultural familiarity overlap. There's no helping it. Contemporary American literature would be hard to understand, at times, if you couldn't decypher allusions to brands of food, toys and old tv shows. Contemporary Italian is literally shot through with hidden quotations from old, even archaic commercials. Even gestuality is a part of the language, somehow. When I was in Russia I had trouble ordering stuff in bars because I didn't know the "moves" and contradicted the "script" of expected reactions, which I hardly ever perceive as such in an Italian bar. Of course I could express my needs and wishes in words, but it kind of felt wrong anyway. Of course nobody is going to question one's fluency in the name of cheese brands or football technicalities, but there's no denying that humorous allusions to a cult dairy product brand such as "La vache qui rit" is so common in French conversation that it just belongs in one's toolkit along with Hugo and Camus quotes. Translators must be full of this stuff before they can make a good job with a novel. Again, I see it from my own perspective. Fact is, I really love to pick up these things: sharing another country's everyday culture is where the old saying "so many languages you know so many people you are" begin to take on a richer sound... (Hell I'm lenghty today) 11 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| GoldFibre Diglot Senior Member Kuwait koreaninkuwait.com Joined 5766 days ago 467 posts - 472 votes Speaks: English*, Korean | Message 16 of 32 21 December 2008 at 4:18am | IP Logged | ||
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. Edited by GoldFibre on 21 December 2008 at 7:49am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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