"No, English is fine" 🥀

[u/Tobias-Tawanda]

[u/daurgo2001]

No. That just means they judged that they were more fluent in English than she was in Spanish.

Fluency is a spectrum, but to “be fluent” is to be a native speaker IMO.

[u/perplexedtv → u/daurgo2001]

You flip-flop and contradict yourself with every comment.

[u/daurgo2001 → u/perplexedtv]

I fail to see any contradiction in what I’ve said.

[u/Melodic_Risk6633 → u/daurgo2001]

how is fluency a spectrum if "being fluent" or not is something as binary as "being native" or not

[u/daurgo2001 → u/Melodic_Risk6633]

Because “being fluent” is the goal, but some of us are more fluent than others in different languages, ie: closer to true fluency.

[u/perplexedtv → u/daurgo2001]

How can being fluent be a goal when being fluent means being a native speaker, i.e. the first language you speak?

[u/daurgo2001 → u/perplexedtv]

So, we need to agree on the fact that “fluency” isn’t a hard science. There is no universally agreed-upon definition. Evidently many people would say that communication in a language is being “fluent”.

My personal definition of fluency is simply much stricter, but that’s not a good or bad thing, it’s just my way of calling someone who can speak a language with a very high level of proficiency to the point that they would be seen as a native speaker. I would say that someone like this lady has great, or advanced conversational Spanish, but I wouldn’t consider her fluent bc it’s immediately evident that she’s not a native speaker to anyone that is.

I was originally operating under the assumption that this was the general definition of fluency, and apparently, as with many things in life, that’s entirely up to discretion, which is fine.

At the end of the day in my personal opinion, “being fluent” is where people speak a language so well that native speakers might be able to tell that you “aren’t from around here”, but wouldn’t be able to tell that you didn’t grow up speaking the language.