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What does "basic fluency" really mean? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Farley Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6889 days ago 681 posts - 739 votes  1 sounds Speaks: English*, GermanB1, French Studies: Spanish | Message 73 of 106 19 September 2006 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | ||
And for the purposed of this forum is probably a 3 on the FSI scale, but that really does not seem to be the issue. I have seen the same debate pop up on other topics for over a year now. I don’t think it is a straw-tower issue; it goes straight to the heart of language learning. Just pick your side of the argument.:) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Darobat Diglot Senior Member Joined 6985 days ago 754 posts - 770 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Latin | Message 74 of 106 19 September 2006 at 11:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think the use of the phrase "basic fluency" is too odd or extreme. Yes, the word "fluent" does have the meaning "to be able to speak in a language flawlessly", but it also has the meaning as in "fluent movement", to wit, movement with ease and smoothness. In my opinion, this definition is much more suitable to the concept of "basic fluency" than the former. If you can speak (read, understand, etc.) with reasonable ease and without much hesitation, then I think you could consider yourself to have basic fluency. This by no means implies speaking without errors or knowing every word a native would, as it's still possible to speak quite confidently and fluently (the latter definition) with errors (although the errors mustn’t hinder your ability to be understood, and they should probably have more to do with phrasing or word choice than basic grammar errors), and its also possible to convey almost anything with a 5000-ish word vocabulary. It's once you've rid yourself of all the tiny mistakes that I think you can call yourself totally fluent. In the time and practice required to do this, I think your vocabulary will naturally expand, so I don't really think there's much of a vocabulary requirement to meet before you can reach this final stage.
Edit: typos Edited by Darobat on 19 September 2006 at 11:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Charlie Newbie Korea, South geocities.com/charle Joined 6438 days ago 17 posts - 18 votes Speaks: English* | Message 75 of 106 19 September 2006 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | ||
Attending a university in your foreign language is not an impossibly high standard. Here in Korea, a ton of Koreans attend English courses at their home universities, or they go to the United States or Canada and take classes in English, because it's more prestigious. Really, all that's required is really good reading ability. If you can't understand everything the teacher says, there's still the textbook. There are online courses with no spoken component. Being university-level in a foreign language is extremely difficult, but that doesn't stop literally millions of people from doing it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6565 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 76 of 106 20 September 2006 at 3:51am | IP Logged | ||
I guess I've been addressing several issues. One is that this site's skill rating system suggests that there's a level called "basic fluency" between intermediate and advanced competency. In my mind, no such thing exists, because from the beginner level through the intermediate and advanced levels, one is constantly adding and learning new skills (vocabular, grammar, etc.) — until at last, a person reaches a level where he is fluent. At this point, a person can function linguistically in all the situations a native can (although to be sure, more learning is possible). It's not a huge deal, but since this thread brought it up, it's interesting to debate. A related issue is why people would like to come up with alternate meanings of "fluent". My own guess (and I could be wrong) is because this is a label so many people aspire to, it feels good to say you're "basically" fluent once you can hold a conversation, and a lot of college students who've studied a language for four years would like to tell people they're fluent even if they couldn't actually survive using just that language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6500 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 77 of 106 20 September 2006 at 6:50am | IP Logged | ||
There are two issues here. The first is whether "fluency" in "basic fluency" really represents an alternative meaning of the word or whether it is just less of the same thing. To me - and apparently also to some other members of this forum - it is just less of the of the same thing, but you still demand quite a lot of linguistic competence. "Fluent" is not a synonym for "perfect" where anything below the real thing isn't that thing at all. The second issue is how much language it takes to survive in a foreign country, and I think that practice has shown that you can survive with very few skills, and you can go under in deep misery even with near native fluency. Let consider two persons, A and B. A can speak almost without breathing for hours on end, but with a certain amount of both grammatical, phonetical and lexical errors. B speaks in short bursts, and in between he is clearly trying to formulate the next phrase. However you can be sure that when it comes - one sentence at a time - then it's just perfect. We can of course discuss the terms, but B is in my opinion not fluent. To me somebody's language has to 'flow' before I would use the word fluent, and I would even hesitate to use the word fluent about a native with that kind of inadequate language production, - but that's a slightly different issue. And B might even be a deep thinker and a wise man, but that's also another discussion. As for A I would a priori use the word fluency, but only to a certain level. As long as a native person can concentrate fully on what is being said instead on decoding errors then I would say that there is at least basic fluency. We can discuss how many errors you have to tolerate, but to my mind there must be a (narrow) margin for errors, and we would in fact not expect perfect speech even from a native (though the errors might be of a different kind). By the way, if you take out the 'chic' factor of the word "Fluency" by accepting levels of fluency then maybe there will less temptation to use it for bragging.. Edited by Iversen on 20 September 2006 at 6:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Farley Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6889 days ago 681 posts - 739 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, GermanB1, French Studies: Spanish | Message 78 of 106 20 September 2006 at 10:27am | IP Logged | ||
Thanks for indulging my curiosity, it is interesting to clarify the arguments. On the first issue, as Platiquemos reminded us above, proficiency is a better objective description of our skills rather than fluency. On second issue Iversen already made the point that there is a difference between proficiency and fluency. So just why is “basic fluency” such a controversial topic? I really don’t think it has much to do with the definition of fluency as it does with basic human emotions – pride being at the top of the list. Edited by Farley on 20 September 2006 at 1:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hagen Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6757 days ago 171 posts - 179 votes 6 sounds Speaks: German*, English, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 79 of 106 20 September 2006 at 12:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Like Darobat and others I don't see why we would need the term "fluent" if it was just a synonym for near-native proficiency. As to Captain Haddocks argument that there is no level between "Intermediate" and "Advanced Flueny", well to me there is a noticable difference between someone who has learned quite a bit of a language (so as not to qualify as a "Beginner" anymore), but still stumbles his way through most things - that would be an "Intermediate" - and someone who can just talk without much effort, even if his choice of vocabulary is limited and he has to use some amount of circumlocutions. In my view there's nothing fundamentally wrong with calling the latter "basically fluent", even if he still has quite a long way to a really advanced level or even native-like proficiency.
In practice I would never answer "yes" or "no" to someone asking me if I was "fluent", but always answer like "It depends on what you call fluent, I can...". 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| georgedick Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6495 days ago 18 posts - 18 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian, French, Catalan, Latin | Message 80 of 106 20 September 2006 at 1:36pm | IP Logged | ||
I like the way of answering this in Spanish, "me puedo defender..." (I can defend myself...) Edited by georgedick on 20 September 2006 at 1:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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