i recall marjane satrapi saying something like: you know you're fluent when you get a native speaker's jokes. stranger in a strange land says something similar -- mike is human when and only when he can laugh.
I'm sure there are some objective standards, but personally I've always said "proficient" for "able to communicate through typical, everyday situations", and "fluent" for "able to shoot the shit with my buds almost like there's no language barrier at all". I think i'm fluent in Spanish, and at one point i was proficient in Japanese. (I guess the nice thing about "proficient" is that it's pretty easy to tell -- you just put yourself in a bunch of everyday situations and see if you survive :) Fluency is a bit more subtle..)
i recall marjane satrapi saying something like: you know you're fluent when you get a native speaker's jokes. stranger in a strange land says something similar -- mike is human when and only when he can laugh.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure there are some objective standards, but personally I've always said "proficient" for "able to communicate through typical, everyday situations", and "fluent" for "able to shoot the shit with my buds almost like there's no language barrier at all". I think i'm fluent in Spanish, and at one point i was proficient in Japanese. (I guess the nice thing about "proficient" is that it's pretty easy to tell -- you just put yourself in a bunch of everyday situations and see if you survive :) Fluency is a bit more subtle..)
ReplyDeleteI still don't have an answer to this... but I like the above two comments.
ReplyDeleteIn Dutch, I can't always "shoot the shit" ("schijt schieten") very comfortably, so maybe I'm not that fluent afterall.