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What does "basic fluency" really mean? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 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 49 of 106 27 July 2006 at 4:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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Captlemuel injects some common sense into the thread, and shows us that
the word "fluent" is indeed both meaningful and useful. 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 50 of 106 19 September 2006 at 3:01am | IP Logged | |||||
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I just noticed this discussion while searching Google for "I hate Pimsleur" (because I do).
The definition of "fluency" seems pretty simple to me. If you can enter a university and take classes in the target language (aside from language instruction courses), and pass, then you're fluent. If you can't do this, then you're not fluent. I live in Seoul, South Korea, and study full-time at Yonsei University's Korean Language Institute. I spend four hours a day in-class. I know how to tell when someone is "fluent" in Korean, and when someone isn't. Most people who say they are "fluent" are not fluent. I hope to one day be fluent in Korean. How will I prove that I'm fluent? There is a standardized test that you take to prove that you're fluent. If you pass it with a university-level score, you're fluent. If you don't, then you aren't. There are a few people who fail it but actually speak really good Korean, and a few people who pass it who probably shouldn't, but most of the time, it probably works pretty well. In determining English fluency, there's the TOEFL. Japanese has the JLPT. For all practical purposes, being native-level is impossible, at least in languages as far apart as English and Korean. However, if you can enter a university, you have proven your ability to deal with the highest-level tasks in the language. You are effectively fluent. Let's not speculate about a theoretical like a white person like myself becoming so native at Korean, someone on the other end of the phone doesn't know he's white. That never happens. I go to the most renowned Korean school on the planet, and I don't know any non-Korean who has achieved "native" Korean. What is "basic fluency?" Well, in this context, "fluency" means "speed." When I get my grades from an exam at Yonsei, one of the categories is "yuchangseong," or "fluency." They have different categories for intonation and vocabulary. "Basic fluency" means "basic speed." If you're at a "basic" level, you can, in basic terms, express what you need. Maybe this is different in an easier language like French or German, but in Korean, if you know 1,000 words, you can "get around." You will not understand what the heck people are saying after 1,000 words. You will not understand what the heck people are saying after 2,000 words. I don't know when you will understand, but it's long after either of those two figures. Edited by Charlie on 19 September 2006 at 3:02am 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 51 of 106 19 September 2006 at 6:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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Charlie, you have chosen a difficult language, and you have clearly braced yourself for a hard fight to learn it. Good luck with that. But it seems to me that in the process you have pushed the target of being fluent to a level that is unrealistically high. You demand that to be fluent you should be able to take a certain university level test (I haven't seen that test, but expect it to be difficult). You write "if you can enter a university, you have proven your ability to deal with the highest-level tasks in the language. You are effectively fluent."
Excuse me, isn't that irrelevant and even unrealistic? Fluency is mainly a question of being able to think and speak about just about anything without having to search for words or frantically constructing phrases in your head. If you can do this about everything that occupies you, and your grammar, pronunciation and 'usage' is as close as anybody can expect from a foreigner, then you definitely have got near native fluency (or advanced fluency), - you don't need to be on a university level in any field. If you produce your utterances with confidence and speed, but within a more restricted range and maybe with slight errors or suboptimal choice of words here and there and a slightly flawed pronunciation, then you can still be said to possess basic fluency. If you have 'holes' in your language competence that regularly block your performance then intermediate is the right word for you, and if you are blocked most of the time then you are a beginner (and you can for that matter stay a beginner for fifty years). Edited by Iversen on 19 September 2006 at 7:56am 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 52 of 106 19 September 2006 at 7:41am | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, in my opinion, "fluent" is not a word to be taken lightly. For lesser levels of proficiency, I think "conversational," "intermediate," or "passable" are more appropriate.
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 53 of 106 19 September 2006 at 7:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree with Charlie's high bar for identifying fluency. Being able to speak easily and effortlessly with practically no errors of grammar or pronunciation is fluency. Being able to produce understandable but error-ridden utterances with confidence and speed doesn't qualify.
Strictly speaking though, since fluency refers to one's verbal and conversational skills, it's possible to be fluent and illiterate, or conversely to pass a difficult test (like JLPT-1 in Japanese) without being fluent. I knew plenty of people who studied at English-language colleges in Canada but were not fluent. They could understand much of what they heard and make themselves understood, but producing even a single error-free sentence was a rare event. The TOEC and college entrance tests are not a particularly good predictor of fluency. Edited by Captain Haddock on 19 September 2006 at 7:59am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| japkorengchi Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6477 days ago 334 posts - 355 votes | Message 54 of 106 19 September 2006 at 9:15am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have a new standard to test whether you are fluent or not: if you can DEBATE in a language you are learning, you are fluent in it. I apply this standard because there are a lot of things to be done with debating. You have to mind your selections of words, your gestures, your speaking speed, your intonation, etc. All these are essential items that a fluent speaker of any language must be qualified with. So if you find yourself debating with people logically in a foreign language, you have probably reached a high level of it, though it is something difficult to achieve. Edited by japkorengchi on 19 September 2006 at 9:17am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lengua Senior Member United States polyglottery.wordpre Joined 6481 days ago 549 posts - 595 votes Studies: French, Italian, Spanish, German | Message 55 of 106 19 September 2006 at 9:20am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm not sure what fluency is, but I am sure that the less time we spend debating it, the more we can spend achieving it - in a variety of languages. Come on people - if someone asks you if you're fluent in a language on the street, only you will know yourself enough to say, but whether you say you are or aren't shouldn't keep you from doing all you can with the language - no matter how much or how little you know in it. Whether we call it fluency, proficiency, knowledge, conversationality, competence, mastery, or whatever, the goal is to use the language. Let's not get too stuck on terms, or else we'll forever constrain our abilities by them.
Haha - I added a tiny bit after Patuco's post - the sentiments are the same though! Edited by lengua on 19 September 2006 at 9:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 6812 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 56 of 106 19 September 2006 at 9:22am | IP Logged | |||||
The majority of people from any one country don't actually go to university. Does that mean that they aren't fluent in their own language? Surely there's more to university than being fluent. I consider myself fluent in English and Spanish. However, if I went to an English or Spanish lecture on quantum chromodyamics, even though my backgound is in science and engineering, I might possibly understand the language but not the content.
Very true! I think that sometimes we forget to see the wood for the trees. Edited by patuco on 19 September 2006 at 9:26am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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