Can I ask respectfully what you mean by fluent?

Only because...the textbook definition and the colloquial definition differ. I think generally when people say 'fluent' they mean 'native speaker level at reading, writing and speaking language X', whereas fluent actually means you can speak without hesitation on a range of topics.

Just a clarification, not an attack!

Edit: Plus, I wouldn't knock wordlists. I started trying to make wordlists only out of words I had some connection to, but you end up spending an inordinate amount of time making cards, and also then it's tempting to keep interrupting your reading to make new flashcards.

I am 'fluent' in mandarin, and use HSK6 wordlists as a base. I learn a bunch of random words and then suddenly, when I'm reading an article, there's the word I learned a month ago. I don't need to interrupt my reading flow, and the connection has been made. Sometimes at advanced levels, you won't see a word that often, so it's wasteful to see it once, make a flashcard, and then never have another chance to see the word in a real world context for another 6 months.

One test of fluency would be to have the person watch a modern film in the language of interest and ask them to transcribe the dialogue into text and also describe in own words (in language of interest) what is going on in the movie.

You can then put that person on a scale from 0 to 100 by comparing the score by a random sample of "known" native speakers.

This test is nice because it probes many aspects of language: listening, speaking, and writing (but not reading), which can vary greatly between people.

If you're interested in probing reading, then I suggest asking the person to explain meanings of songs or poems.

I don't know about other languages, but the French government actually does have tests of French fluency (DELF/DALF exam), which test you in a range of ways (oral comprehension - usually a radio emission, written comprehension - usually a news article, writing on a choice of subjects and speaking - presenting a view on a subject and then debating), at a variety of levels. I took one of these tests (I'm fluent, yay!), and it certainly was testing. But it seemed fair and appropriate, also seemed to correlate with my experiences speaking to French people in France.

Movies are, in my humble opinion, not the best "standard" yard stick to measure fluency. First thing is that films most often use quite limited vocabulary, and it's wildly different vocabulary than, say, found in newspapers, technical writing or in business language. Moreover films present a wide variety of communication styles. It's much easier to understand James Bond than South Park, because humour is actually quite high and demanding register of speech.

It really depends on the film though. There are family dramas I can understand 100% but I watch a movie with lawyers or science or high level government or military meetings and I'm lost.

Interesting. When watching movies in English as a native Spanish speaker it's the other way around, at least for me. It's much easier to understand a movie with plenty of scientists, intellectuals or government officials than one with average people, as those tend to use slang, colloquial expressions and Americanisms that they don't teach you in courses. In fact teenage flicks are probably the hardest genre to understand...

There's that too. And that's more evidence I'm not fluent. In English if someone uses new slang on me I understand it almost immediately from context. In my 2nd language I'm lost

I also have a problem with the word "fluent". Ok you say you're fluent, here's a simple self-check: Explain to someone in the language you claim to be fluent in how you'd go about making a fire without any matches. (hint: you need to use words like tinder, kindling, flint, etc.). If you can't do this, or grapple with the fact that you don't have a repertoire of these words in your vocabulary, you might want to reconsider your definition of "fluent".

> Explain to someone in the language you claim to be fluent in how you'd go about making a fire without any matches. (hint: you need to use words like tinder, kindling, flint, etc.)

I wouldn't be able to do this in my own native language (aside from "stone" and "stick", I'm clueless about the tools involved), let alone in a foreign one. I think this is way too specific to be a good test for fluency.

The problem is not (quite) with the concept of "fluency", it's that we we confuse it with being good at a language.

Given your situation, I would just launch into a German explanation complete with the bit where I say I don't know the real German words. Then I will muck about with hand gestures and phrases like "smaller bits of would" etc until they get it.

I would do all of this while screwing up my declensions and conjugations. And I would do most of the screwing up fluently. Less fluently if I notice the error.

There are different fluencies, all context dependent. A woodsman who knows all about kindling and flint would be bemused in an office environment where KPIs and stakeholder deliverables are core terms. In a programming environment they'd be utterly lost regarding the detail, even if they grasp basics like who's in charge. Or a chemistry lab, a surgical theatre, etc.

This is why there are courses in "business" versions of languages, for example.

So someone can be functionally fluent in the contexts they typically encounter, while being non-fluent outside them. I doubt any native speaker can be fully fluent in all possible contexts.

Problem is that I'm not sure I'd be able to convey that message to someone even in my native language (it's a Romance one). I'd probably use two archaisms for "smaller pieces of wood" (probably the "tinder" and "flint" words you mention) and then I'd use "small rock" and "rub the thing between your hands until you get tired of it and then use a lighter".

There's lots of words in my native language of which I know the meaning of, technically, but practically speaking they might as well be Greek to me.

There are all of these types of flowers, trees, countryside-related mechanical terms (my peasant brother knows the names of all the pieces of which his wooden-made carriage is made of, I have no such knowledge) which might as well be from a foreign language to me. They sound right but I don't know exactly what they represent.

I'd say that you can call yourself fluent in a language once you can express feelings like anger, love, nostalgia etc. and can understand and make jokes in said language.

To be fair, there's a lot of native English speakers who can't explain how to make a fire with any matches, and wouldn't know what tinder and kindling are.

That is a reasonably specific domain of knowledge.

The thing with fluency isn't that you know all of the language or can explain everything. A person can be considered fluent and not be able to explain that sentence - mostly because that is pretty far outside a situation most folks find themselves in. Heck, in English I'd not use words like tinder and kindling. You might not know obscure words for some things, and you get to words you don't know.

Fluency means that most of the time you understand the conversations around you, about a wide range of topics. You can understand not only the local dialect, but others as well, and communicate effectively. You understand slang. When you don't understand, it is usually just a subject that is new to you or the usage is wrong.

Think about what age people understand children to be fluent in a language. Most folks by 14 or 15 (in English) have enough vocabulary to get by without learning more the rest of their life, but won't know specialty terms such as the one in your firestarting example.

I've not personally reached fluency in my second language, I just can see the goal. My spouse is fluent in English, though, and has a wider English vocabulary than I do. Lots of work on his behalf and years more practice and an interest in archaic terms. He still gets stumped, forgets a word here or there, has an accent, and all that, however, and likely reached complete fluency some time back.

Is tinder a real word? I thought it was just a made up word for an app? I can't be expected to explain such words in another language when I can't explain them in my native language. But I think if you said spark instead that would be more reasonable such you need to rub two pieces of wood together and create a spark and then a fire starts.

Yes tinder is a real word. It's material used to kindle a fire.

Silicon valley has ruined all these words.

Then again, most people don't have to start fires.

Well the way I learned it, you kindle fires by igniting the kindling. The kindling then ignites tinder (an intermediate stage), which then ignites the real fuel.

But I also often hear the two-step usage where tinder is includes kindling.

To me it's just the opposite. It's why the concept of a tinderbox makes sense (it contains grass or paper or something else easily ignited by a spark or small fire).

Kindling is actually a verb, as in, the act of 'kindling' a fire, even though it's also used to describe the material used to kindle a fire. Tinder is just the material.

There are two definitions, the verb and the noun.

Now there are. -ing words typically started as verbs. Eating, sleeping, etc...

This is why English is a clusterfuck, and makes no sense compared to most languages. Imagine if we called food 'eatings', that'd be weird, eh?

We can complain about English in all sorts of ways, but the fact that gerunds are distinct from infinitives is not exactly a problem.

http://www.englishpage.com/gerunds/part_1.htm

Perhaps you are complaining that gerunds (which are already nouns) can grow extra meanings over time. But all languages do this kind of stuff.

German has exactly the "problem" you are talking about, only worse. Depending on capitalisation, "Essen/essen" can be the noun "food" or the the verb "to eat", But when used as verb, it is usally used in the sense of the English gerund "eating".

The icon for Tinder is literally a flame :)

> hint: you need to use words like tinder, kindling, flint, etc.)

My language doesn't have a word for "kindling". If you want to translate it, you would use something like "material used to start the fire". So, by you reasoning, for someone from my country to be fluent in English, they also have to know that concept of "kindling" exists and has a name?

Thinking about it, I can't say I disagree. You have to know about the way people reason about stuff, not just words to name them.

While I know the word kindling in English (which is a second language for me), I don't even know it in my native language... So, I don't think that's a good test.

I'd say that someone is fluent when he starts thinking in the language and is able to have everyday conversations with other people at normal speed without the native interlocutors feeling that they need to simplify their speech.

That's... a terrible test.

I am native speaker/reader/writer fluent in my 2nd language, and I don't know the word for kindling. I am reasonably certain there is one, but would have to look it up, and so would any other native speaker that wasn't a linguist.

In fact, if I did happen to know the word and used it, no native speaker would understand me without an explanation.

The way I (and practically any other native speaker) would describe that portion of the task would be to say something like "use a small amount of paper, twigs, sawdust, dry leaves, or any other easily ignited material as a starter".

I used to get very frustrated at all the English words that didn't have direct equivalents, such that I found the 2nd language rather limiting in it's expressiveness.

In fact, I am pretty sure that the way most native speakers would approach the 'explain how to make fire' task would to say "here, let me show you how to do it."

Example: there exist equivalents to the words shiny, glittery, sparkly and most other common variations on the concept (some translate to the same word), but if you want to express 'pearlescent', the best you could do is 'lustrous like a pearl'.

Worse yet, often if I did find an obscure equivalent word and used it no one else would recognize it, and even if they figure it out from context they would still think I was weird or trying to score points with my vocabulary.

Further, in the 20 years since I actually lived there, using English loan words has become rampant, so much so that by not using them my speech comes across as rather affected, stuffy, and snobbish (eg. the word for upgrade (noun or verb) is for all intents and purposes 'upgrade', even though a perfectly understandable equivalent does actually exist).

I mostly agree with you. I might not know every English word but I won't consider myself fluent until I can understand and use my second language at the same level as my first.

In other words I should be able to easily explain anything I can explain in my 1st language whether it's how to drive, how to change a tire, what the parts of a bicycle are (wheels, spokes, chain, gears, handlebars, tire, kick stand, peddles, brakes, )etc. Any native 8 yr old can name all those things.

Similarly describing a car. The stick shift, clutch, odometer, glove compartment, engine, seat belts, arm rest, windshield, wheel well, windshield wipers, reat view mirror, antenna, etc.

Any native speaker will know all those words. I'm still at the "explain with smaller words" phase like "antenna" would be "metal stick that receives radio waves".

I'm not fluent.

Well, yeah that's why I have trouble with it. At least in Mandarin Chinese, which I have experience with, I've seen people describing themselves as 'fluent' when in reality they are either (a) lying or (b) meaning that they can speak conversationally.

My real world rule of thumb is that if I wrote "Fluent in Mandarin" on my CV, but then in the interview I couldn't read or write decent responses to emails or something like that, then most people wouldn't consider that as fluent (despite the dictionary definition).

You don't need to use direct translations of those words to express their purpose in the process. After all, if you're explaining what tinder, kindling, and flint are you wouldn't use those words in their definitions.

As a guy who grew up in French immersion schools in Canada, I consider myself to be fluent in French, although my grammar isn't quite perfect. I don't mentally translate it to English in order to understand it, at any rate.

Recently, I took a short trip that included a few days in Paris, and I made a point of defaulting to French when starting conversations. However, for the most part, as soon as a French person realizes that French is not my first language, they switch the conversation to English, even if their English is worse than my French (according to my perception).

I wonder if this is unique to the culture of France, or at least Paris, that they do not like to hear their language from a foreigner? Maybe the language is part of a group identity, used to identify locals who can be trusted to follow local customs? It was a little saddening. In Africa and the Middle East however, when I am in predominantly French speaking communities, the locals seem quite happy to have conversations in French, even though our accents differ greatly.

>I wonder if this is unique to the culture of France, or at least Paris, that they do not like to hear their language from a foreigner? Maybe the language is part of a group identity, used to identify locals who can be trusted to follow local customs? It was a little saddening.

I'm sorry to hear that. As a Parisian, I don't think this had anything to do with protecting an identity, rather we're just as happy to practice our (often terrible!) English as you are to practice your French!

Haha, I never even considered that angle. Sorry for jumping to conclusions. Paris was amazing, and the people were merveilleux :)

The French used to have a reputation for haughtily refusing to speak anything but French to tourists. I never observed such behaviour though.

Was this reputation always a myth? Or is it something that used to happen until a cultural change took place?

It's mainly so they can practice their English, or just what they're used to with most foreigners.

Leave the centre of Paris and they'll speak French, leave Paris and they won't speak English at all.

No, this isn't unique. If you know English (and I assume everyone here does), that'll likely be one of the highest barriers to clear when trying to learn a foreign language. People will either want to be helpful and speak English, or they'll want to practice English - or both.

Volunteering with exchange students in Norway[1], those that generally learn Norwegian the best in a year here, living in a Norwegian family, going to Norwegian school - are those that either speak little or no English, or those that manage to insist on speaking Norwegian (to the point of pretending not to understand English, even if that's their native language).

A suitable trade-off might be to make a deal with your friends/co-workers - only <native language> on Fridays, or (as you progress) English only allowed after hours Monday through Thursday etc.

For exchange students in the age group 16-18, those that speak a related native language (ie: indo-european), will generally start speak the language after 3 months, reaching fluency after 6 (a little faster for German, Dutch, a little slower for Spanish, French - about in-between for English). For those that don't (eg: Japanese), the bars are moved: starting to speak the language after 6, and fluency after a little less than 9 (slower start, but they tend to catch up).

It's quite refreshing to learn a language by immersion, rather than by tedious school lessons - the same way we all learn as children.

Another tip is to avoid jumping between languages as much as possible - or at least only jump between your native tongue, and the foreign language you're studying. Your brain seem to work better with immersion.

As for my personal experience, I learned English in school, from reading books and magazines, and watching movies and tv programs. While I agree that tv/film production often have overly clear dialogue - watching films first with subtitles, and later without, is great practice (for those that want a challenge in American English, I recommend trying to watch all of HBO's "The Wire" without subtitles).

After years of French in school, I also speak and understand some French, but I would probably have to go live some months in France (or some other place people speak French) in order to attain what I'd call proper fluency.

After spending a year as an exchange student in Japan, I'd say I speak fluent Japanese, but not quite at native level - I'm also somewhat stuck at "high-school" level, so I'm not quite comfortable in a "grown up" work setting. After my year there, it felt like I'd forgotten all my French - but as I've gradually improved my Japanese, my French as "come back".

Finally, I haven't seen singing mentioned here. Singing is a great way to improve pronunciation.

For what it's worth, I've heard people say that learning languages get easier after the fifth one. If I'm not counting Danish and Swedish (which one really shouldn't, as a Norwegian) I guess that means I have one more to go after I manage to brush off my French.

[1] http://www.afs.org/

> The most important part in my opinion is to live in a country that speaks the language you want to learn. You have to immerse yourself as much as possible with the culture and language. Also very important that you aren't afraid to try to use what you learned.

I cannot agree with this more. Coincidentally, I'm also fluent in German and English, and am learning Japanese.

At school, I took French, but I hated it. It only clicked when I went on an exchange, although I never kept it up. With English it was easier to pick up because of TV, films and games. But I only got good at it when I moved to the UK. The same with Japanese. Made almost no (real) progress until I went to Japan, and started using what I'd learned. Sure, learning the alphabet first helps, but language relies on being spoken IMO.

If you can, take a chance and just move to a country that speaks the language you want to learn.

I had the same experience with French. I learned it for 10 years, I even won a national essay competition - guess what, when I was in France, I couldn't open my mouth. English on the other hand - I had only 2 years of study under my belt, and lots and lots of practice - movies, programming books, Shogun by James Clavell, song lyrics, chats on IRC, and so on. I'm fairly confident in my English skills. I know Russian a fair bit, and it's just a consequence of living in Moldova, where we have a lot of Russian influence and a lot of speakers of the language (16%) - but since I don't use it every day, I tend to forget it.

I am learning french as well, via Duolingo. Spoken french fries my brain, I just cant keep up. So many words seem to be pronounced the same way. And they speak so fast!

For example, did they say:

jeune

Jaune

john

je une

Je un

Joan

Je ont

Jean

Je ne

....

Perhaps it's just an unconscious bias on my part. Just for reference, I am fluent in at least two more languages apart from my mother tongue.

Context is king. Language is pretty verbose, most of the time you can understand the gist without understanding 100%. So at least you can make a start - that's the first step! It doesn't have to be perfect. Granted, the French can be gruff about it, but most cultures appreciate you trying to learn and will accommodate you a bit.

It could be the training material. I'm an auditory learner and the Michel Thomas courses work amazingly for me. I also ignore spelling until later, because I find conversations much more important and also pleasurable (so I'm more likely to stick with it). My English spelling was atrocious, I still rely on Chrome's spellchecker (actually, so do many of my English friends!).

Keep at it, everybody's different!

Well half of those you can eliminate because they're grammatically incorrect or make no sense. (Je une = nonsense, unless you mean J'ai une whatever, but still, very different)

The others all have different pronunciations.

When you live in a foreign country, how do you make sure that you have plenty of opportunities to talk to people?

Well, a job or education are obviously the best way to do this. University is amazing for this. Sports work well, e.g. finding an amateur football (soccer) league. Most people hang around before and after.

I've had great success in hackspaces. They're a great place to meet geeky, like-minded people. They can be a bit dead in smaller cities though.

Chat to somebody at a language school and see if they meet up and they'd be interested in speaking to a native speaker. This seems counter-intuitive, but it's about growing your friend circle, and ultimately will probably relapse into the country's tongue. Plus, they're way more sympathetic to your situation.

When you live in a foreign country many things will be different/new, and so you have the perfect excuse to talk to strangers.

"Does this tram go to the (railway) station?", "Do you sell edam?", "How much is this?", "How do I buy a bus-pass?", etc.

I've recently moved from Scotland to Finland, and finding reasons to speak to strangers has not been difficult. Too often they reply in English, but every now and again I pass and have a conversation, albeit brief, entirely in Finnish - it's a little victory.

Strongly agree that wordlists are useless (beyond the first few hundred that you are going to see constantly anyway) and making connections is key to retaining vocabulary.

Another tip is to pull vocabulary lists from reading material, and then to review them you just re-read that text until it becomes easy.

I think wordlists and learning tons of vocabulary through deliberate study are generally underrated. However, I do agree that once you've got a good foundation, pulling words from texts is a great idea.

I think the ideal thing to do is to get a list of words from a text before you read it, then prime yourself on them, and then really solidify them by reading the text. I think it makes the text a lot more enjoyable.

I actually just put together a prototype of a tool for doing this and wanted to polish it more before posting it, but I'd love any feedback / ideas from people who are into language learning here: https://langtools.curtis.io/

You can test it out with a guest account: [email protected], password "guest". Or just sign up, I don't validate your email or anything.

It's pretty rough but I think the basic idea of uploading a text, and seeing which lemmas are unknown to you so that you can pre-learn them is a good one.

btw here's some german if you want something to paste into it: http://lpaste.net/267332

I can't seem to register for your site. I humbly suggest removing the requirement to sign up/in.

Based on what you have said in your text, you might find this old tool to be interesting:

http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/

The lextutor site has quite a bit of interesting information, although the interface and some of the tools are very dated.

I wanted to remove the login (or set up a dedicated demo page) when I planned on posting it in a week or so but this seemed like an opportune time to drop a link.

I assumed someone just changed the guest password, but it appears the database got in some strange locked state over night. It's sqlite since I want this to be as self-hostable as possible. Not sure if I somehow created a deadlock.

It should be fixed now. I'd never seen this lextutor site, I find it very interesting, it looks like its they've got very similar ideas, I found this on the research page: "One ineresting use of VP (I believe the main one for users of online VP) is to evaluate the suitability of reading texts for various levels of learners.".

That's basically what I'm doing at the moment. I'd also like to add an estimate of how many of the unknown lemma's i'm showing that you'd need to learn to get your comprehensions to 98% (or something like that) so that you'd know how much pre-studying might be worthwhile before diving into the text.

I haven't done much research into it but the 98% number gets through around a lot as an ideal place to be to pick up the remaining words through context.

edit: ah, just a few sentences down: "As a rule of thumb, learners can not do much with a text if they know fewer than 90% of its words. From 90% to 95% the text can be used intensively (for dictionary work, contextual inference, re-reads, etc.). From 95% to about 98%, the text can be used for fluency building. Above 98% the text can be used for 'reading to learn' rather than 'learning to read.'"

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