So, this is one thing I like about Gabirel Wyner -- in his book, "Fluent Forever", he's got a section in the first chapter where he talks about how he defines fluency, and he fairly openly acknowledges that he personally sets a very low bar. It's basically just being able to engage in small talk without too much hesitation, with no expectations placed on developing a large vocabulary, or mastering every verb tense, or any of that.

I suspect that's what's happening with a lot of people who cultivate a reputation as hyper-polyglots: When they say "fluent", they mean, "about on par with a 4-year-old, only more literate". When everyone else hears fluent, they think they mean, "masters of the language".

(edit: I pick 4 years old because that's about on par with the benchmark Wyner is using - in his book, he seems to be using 1,500 words as the benchmark for a working vocabulary. I believe that's about average for a native English-speaking 4-year-old.)

I've heard this definition of fluent elsewhere, but I find it challenging to accept for two reasons.

1) Even in languages that I've studied for a long time and know a lot more than 1500 words, I struggle to carry on small talk. Here again, maybe we have a different definition of small talk. Sure I can navigate the world, but I can't talk politics, economics, or current events without struggling or feeling stunted.

2) I recall being a student in Germany and having a 5 year old host sister. Sure her grammar was not fully developed and her range of specialized vocabulary was limited, but she most definitely knew more than 1500 words and had a more working understanding of that language than a typical non-native speaker would even after many years of study.

The Simple English Wikipedia aims to use about 1,500 words, so that might give you a sense of what's possible. That said, if you look at it it's clearly unnatural and contrived; most people you talk to aren't going to be able to restrict themselves to the right set of words (and even then it can be dicey -- you can know all the words in the phrase "put up with something" and yet have no idea what the phrase means). https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

I didn't really get that from his book -- I thought he was saying you pick the top 1500 words (actually I think its 600 in his book) and learn how to pronounce / spell / and memorize them using Anki, and then start speaking with someone on iTalki etc and go from there. I have used this method to learn Italian and now I am doing it with French. I think the method works. Fluency is a loaded term in my opinion - from this article it seems to be defined as C1/C2, but in reality you can get by with a lot less, you need a handful for verbs and a large amount of nouns

Just double-checked the book. Relevant bits (heavily elided), from the section on deciding how much vocabulary to learn (on page 144), is, "Begin with the top thousand words. . . Your next steps depend on your individual needs. If you just want to chat in restaurants, those top thousand words may be enough."

He then goes on to describe other benchmarks you might go for. But the minimum bar he's advocating is very low compared to what I think most people would expect.

I have learned basic conversational german and spanish by doing just that - basically just drilling 2000 of the most common words in the language into my brain with complete disregard for any grammar, conjugations, etc. Then, I spend some time learning common conjugations, sentence structure, etc, and then I start talking with people where I can.

I've had much better luck with this system than with what I was forced to use in school to learn French, which was basically slowly build up all of the skills at once(learn a little grammar, a few words, at a time).

I agree, the few things I think are really valuable in that book are the following

* learn pronunciation/spelling first

* learn the top words using images and space repetition

* study every single day

I think this method is by far superior to anything taught in high schools in the US, which is very sad given a large portion of our population speaks Spanish and I think they could change the curriculum a bit an a lot more students would leave school bi-lingual

I think fluency is a bastardized term, kind of like what Facebook did to "friends". I don't like the term either. I like "proficient" better.

When someone asks me "Are you fluent in Spanish?", I take that almost always as an indication that they have no idea what it takes to learn a language and try my best to educate them about what it really takes (The 1500 words frequency-based vocabulary, for example).

Proficiency is properly a lower standard than fluency though

I'll be more than happy with "proficiency" with Spanish in conversation in a pretty loud bar with a bunch of people who I may have never met before :)

I'm not terribly convinced. The point I'm about to make may be a minor one, but... what else is he misunderstanding that I cannot judge?

In his video on https://fluent-forever.com/getting-started/ at 2:50 he claims there's a subtle pronunciation difference between German "biete" (offer) and "bete" (pray).

The problem is, the difference in pronunciation isn't subtle. It's huge. The difference in the real pronunciation of those words.

But when he demonstrates the supposed difference, I – as a native German speaker – hear the same word, "biete", both times.

His "bete" is so very wrong that no German speaker would ever consider it "bete" on its own. It's 100% "biete".

Only if you know typical English pronunciation and you have context you might draw the conclusion that "bete" is what he means.

I fully concede that hearing pronunciation differences in non-native languages is very hard. Probably more so for some people than for others. Unfortunately, I'm in the very very hard camp.

I will never hear the difference between hard and soft consonants in Russian. I listened to audio CDs, I listened to a native speaker who assured me the difference was as night and day. To no avail.

And I seem to hear something very different from a Swedish native speaker when a sj sound is spoken (the sj sound has wildly different phonetics throughout Sweden). There seem to be some Swedish dialects where I hear a very clear [x] (velar frivative) sound, but native speakers assure me it's far from it.

So he's certainly no dummy, but maybe not as successful in learning languages as he thinks.

It can be very hard to learn to hear distinctions that don't exist in your native language. It took my wife, who's Korean, ages to sort of start to hear the differences between "i" and "ee." And I can listen to her go through triplets of Korean consonants that are meant to be distinct over and over and really have trouble discerning any difference.

That makes sense - I consider myself reasonably fluent in three languages - my native Norwegian, English and German.

I can, however, make small talk without embarrassing myself too much in three additional ones - Portuguese, Russian and Monokotuba. (Funny, that last one - a result of being stuck in the Congo for work...)

I don't put the last three ones on my CV, though - while I do make myself understood, to a fluent speaker it is probably a lot like conversing a four year old (with rather particular interests for a four year old!)

Tip: People who claim to be masters of anything rarely are. True mastery is not common, and those that do achieve mastery often suffer badly from impostor syndrome or realize they have so much more to learn, so stay humble.