WHAT IS LANGUAGE FLUENCY?
VOCABULARY NOT DIRECTLY IMPORTANT
Intuition suggests you are fluent in a language, when you know all the words. This is false. The way I see it, you're fluent in a language when you know what things AREN'T words.
Or at least, you're fluent when you know what things aren't *important* words.
I've been speaking English for a long time, and enjoy a commanding grasp of it. And yet, whenever I read the news, I see new words everywhere. When I encounter a new English word, it usually falls into one of two categories: an obscure noun, or an obscure adverb. If the word is an obscure noun, you can usually make a rough guess what it means. If it's an obscure adverb, you can usually just ignore it and the meaning of the sentence doesn't change.
When I'm reading in a 2nd language like Japanese, and I encounter a new word, I pretty much have to look it up and see what it means. The big difference between my English and my Japanese (or my German, or my Mandarin, or my Spanish, or even my Esperanto), is that I can recognize English words as being unimportant. Somehow, you can tell when a word in your native tongue is "skippable", or you can assemble a rough idea what it means based on context, root words, and even just how it sounds. The fact that my English *vocabulary* is a couple orders of magnitude above my Japanese vocabulary, is only a minor difference.
Suppose you stumble across a German paragraph. Where you know all but three of the words. Those three missing words are an obscure noun and a couple obscure adverbs. German not being your native tongue, you're pretty much out of luck: you have to consult a dictionary. Now suppose a typical German adult reads the same paragraph. And, just by sheer coincidence, the exact same three words are unfamiliar. Probably, the German will have no trouble getting the overall sense of the paragraph. She probably won't need a dictionary.
Is it because she knows more German words? No, her giant German vocabulary failed her at the same place your beginner vocabulary failed you. The difference is a matter of confidence: to the German speaker, she knows that if the word is unfamiliar, it MUST be obscure, thus less important!
Let's compare the strategies that a fluent English speaker, and a non-fluent ESL student, use to determine, "Is this English word obscure?"
English speaker: Do I know the word? YES: It's common. NO: It's obscure.
ESL student: Do I know the word? YES: It's common. NO: Check the dictionary.
Identifying parts of speech in a sentence is as important, if not more important, than knowing what those individual words actually mean.
DEFINITIONS NOT IMPORTANT
Another phenomenon you notice in fluency, is that it's possible to understand a word used in context, and yet have quite a bit of difficulty defining the word. This is because your brain doesn't really use definitions to parse language. Instead it uses experiences. The way your brain understands a word, is based on the experiences you've had of that word throughout your life. Your experience of cats, and of talking about cats, determines the meaning of the word "cat" to you. Faced with an alien with no cat experience, you'd have a very hard time defining the word "cat".
I think most adult language learners go through an "interpretation" stage where they understand words in the target language by memorizing corresponding English words. There's a misconception that languages have nice 1-1 correspondences. It just isn't so. Even if it were, it takes way too long to recollect the English equivalents of all the words in a sentence. Especially when the sentence is being rattled off at lightning speed by an angry cop or excited lover.
Rote-memorized vocabulary lists rely entirely on the conscious mind. The conscious mind is hopelessly weak compared to the awesome power of the subconscious mind. The conscious mind will never manage to speak a language fluently- not even your mother tongue. The only way to speak a language is to have it programmed into the subconscious mind, and let that do all the work. Unfortunately we can't directly control the subconscious mind. All we can do is feed it enough input and let it figure out the rest. And that, my friend, is the language acquisition process.
What exactly ARE the definitions in a dictionary? They do not create the language; contrary to their name, they do not define the language. The language is created and defined by what its speakers say and what they write. Dictionaries are just a model, like Newtonian physics is a close but not absolutely true model of physics. Memorizing the dictionary will not give you fluency.
PRESENT LISTENING
When you and I are communicating in our native tongue, I can rest my entire conscious attention on you yourself, relaxed and effortlessly listening to your words, and my subconscious mind takes care of the business of parsing your words into meaning. In essence, it's as though we're directly sharing thoughts: as far as our conscious minds are concerned, we basically ARE directly sharing thoughts.
As you describe some event that happened to you today, I effortlessly "see" the event like I'm watching a movie: I don't have to consciously struggle to grasp the meaning of what you're saying, our words just naturally flow back and forth, easily, clearly, and without any conscious work.
This allows deeper communication. When two fluent speakers, like you and I, speak, there's a great linguistic intimacy that comes from being able to really pay attention to eachother, instead of consciously grappling with language.
This present listening is what allows any kind of multitasking while we talk. You can speak in your native tongue while doing any number of complex, mentally demanding tasks.
HOW TO BECOME FLUENT
When it comes to acquiring language as an adult, we have lots of advantages over infants. We have a solid grasp of abstract logical reasoning far beyond that of the infant. We have the ability to read and discuss complicated grammar using our base language, infants have no such ability. We should use these advantages to their fullest. However, we shouldn't forget the fundamentals, which we used as an infant. Those fundamentals are simple and obvious: soak up the language for hours, days, months, years; listen to the language, speak in the language, THINK in the language tirelessly.
People marvel at the "miracle" of infants learning language. It's not a miracle at all: they're surrounded by the language nonstop for YEARS before they learn their first words! Take ANY adult, and submerse them to that level in the target language, and they'll gain fluency.
That's pretty inconvenient though, for most working adults. The best a busy adult can do, is take in input where she can, listening to language files on her mp3 player, reading in her freetime.
The ability to read, though, allows us to make up the lost immersion. Someone learning a 2nd language can start reading almost immediately. Yes, even a "hard" reading language like Japanese or Chinese. And reading allows an intense, bootcamp style immersion. While a baby is immersed constantly in his country's language, the language around him is generally fairly laid back and slow. A determined, disciplined adult, can read more sheer volume of language in a few hours, than a typical baby hears in a whole day. (This is assuming some repetitiveness in what the adult is reading-- e.g., sentence flashcards-- but as long as new material is gradually added, this is fine for language acquisition. Babies, too, get a lot of repetition of the same basic spoken material.)
So to answer the question, "how do you become fluent", it boils down to just massively getting lots and lots of input in the target language. Learn the essential grammar using material in your base language, and you'll cut out a couple years the infant would be struggling to reinvent that wheel. When the dust settles, you have quite the advantage over the infant. That's assuming you're willing to put in a LOT of effort, though.
WHAT IS FLUENCY?
VOCABULARY NOT DIRECTLY IMPORTANT
Intuition suggests you are fluent in a language, when you know all the words. This is false. The way I see it, you're fluent in a language when you know what things AREN'T words.
Or at least, you're fluent when you know what things aren't *important* words.
I've been speaking English for a long time, and enjoy a commanding grasp of it. And yet, whenever I read the news, I see new words everywhere. When I encounter a new English word, it usually falls into one of two categories: an obscure noun, or an obscure adverb. If the word is an obscure noun, you can usually make a rough guess what it means. If it's an obscure adverb, you can usually just ignore it and the meaning of the sentence doesn't change.
When I'm reading in a 2nd language like Japanese, and I encounter a new word, I pretty much have to look it up and see what it means. The big difference between my English and my Japanese (or my German, or my Mandarin, or my Spanish, or even my Esperanto), is that I can recognize English words as being unimportant. Somehow, you can tell when a word in your native tongue is "skippable", or you can assemble a rough idea what it means based on context, root words, and even just how it sounds. The fact that my English *vocabulary* is a couple orders of magnitude above my Japanese vocabulary, is only a minor difference.Suppose you stumble across a German paragraph. Where you know all but three of the words. Those three missing words are an obscure noun and a couple obscure adverbs. German not being your native tongue, you're pretty much out of luck: you have to consult a dictionary. Now suppose a typical German adult reads the same paragraph. And, just by sheer coincidence, the exact same three words are unfamiliar. Probably, the German will have no trouble getting the overall sense of the paragraph. She probably won't need a dictionary.
Is it because she knows more German words? No, her giant German vocabulary failed her at the same place your beginner vocabulary failed you. The difference is a matter of confidence: to the German speaker, she knows that if the word is unfamiliar, it MUST be obscure, thus less important!
Let's compare the strategies that a fluent English speaker, and a non-fluent ESL student, use to determine, "Is this English word obscure?"
English speaker: Do I know the word? YES: It's common. NO: It's obscure.
ESL student: Do I know the word? YES: It's common. NO: Check the dictionary.
Identifying parts of speech in a sentence is as important, if not more important, than knowing what those individual words actually mean.
DEFINITIONS NOT IMPORTANT
Another phenomenon you notice in fluency, is that it's possible to understand a word used in context, and yet have quite a bit of difficulty defining the word. This is because your brain doesn't really use definitions to parse language. Instead it uses experiences. The way your brain understands a word, is based on the experiences you've had of that word throughout your life. Your experience of cats, and of talking about cats, determines the meaning of the word "cat" to you. Faced with an alien with no cat experience, you'd have a very hard time defining the word "cat".I think most adult language learners go through an "interpretation" stage where they understand words in the target language by memorizing corresponding English words. There's a misconception that languages have nice 1-1 correspondences. It just isn't so. Even if it were, it takes way too long to recollect the English equivalents of all the words in a sentence. Especially when the sentence is being rattled off at lightning speed by an angry cop or excited lover.
Rote-memorized vocabulary lists rely entirely on the conscious mind. The conscious mind is hopelessly weak compared to the awesome power of the subconscious mind. The conscious mind will never manage to speak a language fluently- not even your mother tongue. The only way to speak a language is to have it programmed into the subconscious mind, and let that do all the work. Unfortunately we can't directly control the subconscious mind. All we can do is feed it enough input and let it figure out the rest. And that, my friend, is the language acquisition process.
What exactly ARE the definitions in a dictionary? They do not create the language; contrary to their name, they do not define the language. The language is created and defined by what its speakers say and what they write. Dictionaries are just a model, like Newtonian physics is a close but not absolutely true model of physics. Memorizing the dictionary will not give you fluency.
PRESENT LISTENING
When you and I are communicating in our native tongue, I can rest my entire conscious attention on you yourself, relaxed and effortlessly listening to your words, and my subconscious mind takes care of the business of parsing your words into meaning. In essence, it's as though we're directly sharing thoughts: as far as our conscious minds are concerned, we basically ARE directly sharing thoughts.As you describe some event that happened to you today, I effortlessly "see" the event like I'm watching a movie: I don't have to consciously struggle to grasp the meaning of what you're saying, our words just naturally flow back and forth, easily, clearly, and without any conscious work.
This allows deeper communication. When two fluent speakers, like you and I, speak, there's a great linguistic intimacy that comes from being able to really pay attention to eachother, instead of consciously grappling with language.
This present listening is what allows any kind of multitasking while we talk. You can speak in your native tongue while doing any number of complex, mentally demanding tasks.
HOW TO BECOME FLUENT
When it comes to acquiring language as an adult, we have lots of advantages over infants. We have a solid grasp of abstract logical reasoning far beyond that of the infant. We have the ability to read and discuss complicated grammar using our base language, infants have no such ability. We should use these advantages to their fullest. However, we shouldn't forget the fundamentals, which we used as an infant. Those fundamentals are simple and obvious: soak up the language for hours, days, months, years; listen to the language, speak in the language, THINK in the language tirelessly.People marvel at the "miracle" of infants learning language. It's not a miracle at all: they're surrounded by the language nonstop for YEARS before they learn their first words! Take ANY adult, and submerse them to that level in the target language, and they'll gain fluency.
That's pretty inconvenient though, for most working adults. The best a busy adult can do, is take in input where she can, listening to language files on her mp3 player, reading in her freetime.
The ability to read, though, allows us to make up the lost immersion. Someone learning a 2nd language can start reading almost immediately. Yes, even a "hard" reading language like Japanese or Chinese. And reading allows an intense, bootcamp style immersion. While a baby is immersed constantly in his country's language, the language around him is generally fairly laid back and slow. A determined, disciplined adult, can read more sheer volume of language in a few hours, than a typical baby hears in a whole day. (This is assuming some repetitiveness in what the adult is reading-- e.g., sentence flashcards-- but as long as new material is gradually added, this is fine for language acquisition. Babies, too, get a lot of repetition of the same basic spoken material.)
So to answer the question, "how do you become fluent", it boils down to just massively getting lots and lots of input in the target language. Learn the essential grammar using material in your base language, and you'll cut out a couple years the infant would be struggling to reinvent that wheel. When the dust settles, you have quite the advantage over the infant. That's assuming you're willing to put in a LOT of effort, though.
WHAT IS FLUENCY?
Linguistic fluency is what you get when you take a comfortable conversation. And take away the vocabulary. And take away the definitions. And take away the conscious focus on the language itself. What remains (consciously) is a seamless transfer of ideas.
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Read the following articles and you'll magically learn every language in the world.
Learn the idioms, not just the words
Short story: The Mirror
The Two Types of Music
-------------------------
Read the following articles and you'll magically learn every language in the world.
Learn the idioms, not just the words
Short story: The Mirror
The Two Types of Music
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