Reaching fluency

Amen to that. :joy:
Iā€™ve seen that ā€œshiā€ poem once, it wasā€¦ mind twisting. I wish everybody here whoā€™s goal is to speak Chinese, the utmost luck.

Aria!! I am surprised that you are not a native English speaker! Your English writing is superb! I am always amazed at people (like you!) who can fluently speak more than one language. You wrote that you studied English for seven years. Was that online studying, school, or something else? I am curious which way works for you. Personally, learning a language fluently online is impossible for me, though I am sure that there are ā€œgeniusesā€ that can do just that. :wink:

I think there are three phases of acquiring fluency:

1, Getting the big picture. I remember when in high school, after 5 years of struggling, at one point English just started to make sense. Until that point, it was just the collection of illogical grammar rules and weird words. Any encounter with the language was confusing and tiresome. But all this information just accumulated to the point I got the logic behind. Iā€™ve reached the point where every new information strengthened my knowledge.
Learning a language is like climbing a mountain road with a bicycle: in the beginning you have to push hard to reach the pass. If you slow down, you lose momentum and when you donā€™t hold the brakes you roll back. But when you reach the pass, you start accelerating even if you donā€™t push the pedals - all your invested work pays off. So after reaching this turning point youā€™ll start enjoying the benefits of you new knowledge and start to look for the new encounters with the language. It wasnā€™t fluent after this turning point, but it was the key to fluency. I started reading/listening English more and more. I could read, but reading required active concentration, word by word, line by line.
2, The next phase is getting proficiency. It takes long time. Using the language more and more, getting a passive vocabulary, developing good listening skills, making communication effortless. I remember when I started working in a job where I had to talk in English every day - the first months were difficult. Although I had the feeling I can say anything in English, it turned out I can say anything if I prepare the sentence in my head. But in a conference call, thereā€™s no time to think. Also you not just have to understand everything, but you have to understand everything when youā€™re doing an other thing.
3, Native level. Well, this is another big step, and maybe Iā€™ll never reach that. Iā€™ve never been in an English-speaking country and I guess local accents (especially in the UK) might be tricky. But the hardest thing is to think in the language. Not just to use it, but feel it. Iā€™m sure I make errors I donā€™t even notice, because if I translate the sentence back to my native language, it makes sense. But a native English speaker would use completely different grammatical features to describe the same thing.

7 Likes

@VT22 ~ thank you for taking the time to share this post. I pretty much followed the same approach in the past for many years as a Bible study teacher. I encouraged my students to progress along the same lines you just cited, (albeit with the Bible as a source of study, rather than a second language). The more they did this, the more they seemed to improve in their studies and the easier it became to grasp the more difficult concepts later on. You would probably make a good language teacher, if you arenā€™t one already. Thank you again for sharing. Have a good day !

1 Like

Look I finished learning french from this course https://www.memrise.com/course/46239/hacking-french/
I finished learning the months days of the week and the seasons now I have to finished the numbers too

I also finished learning Polish now Iā€™m learning the colors

My french is like 50%
and Polish too

I finished Polish started from September to November I finished
French started September finished like in November 2017

probably like 2020 or 2021 I would speak those languages fluently
My English and Spanish is 100% Good

I had some issues reaching fluency in French. In fact a lot of my journey to creating this conlang, is actually a reference to some of the frustrations Iā€™ve had learning it. A lot of it was much of my exposure to initially learning French was either (1. From people whom had only learned it in High School and they were now 30, (2. Trying to learn it on a platform where they didnā€™t even ask if speaking French was OK on there, they just kind of suddenly spoke French, and expected you to learn their language. But then speak English when you try to speak French. Thatā€™s just extremely rude. [ Old writing site I was on. ]

But meet some actual native speakers in other countries, my journey to learning French has been a considerably better experience.

So as a courtesy, I prefer to avoid that sort of thing, and make learning my constructed language as easy as possible.

Quite possible to become fluent in Japanese, German, or Spanish-- but the investment of time will vary. If you are getting impatient, and having that breakthrough experience of speaking fluently is the top priority, the thing to do is switch to learning Spanish. Once you are able to express yourself in Spanish, you can go back to learning Japanese, convinced that youā€™ll succeed if you put in the time.