Determining 'fluency' with a language

[Koiyuki]

As an amateur teacher and student of the language, one thing I've always wondered is when, exactly, someone is 'fluent' with a language. Do they know certain words or a certain amount of them? Do they know enough sentence structures? Do have to be able to understand a brand new word they've just encountered just by certain context clues within the word itself?


What do you think?  

[Euphonious Cantabile]

I believe one is fluent in a language when they can easily communicate with the native speakers of that language without having to think about it, such as trying to convert the learned language back into English or whatever their native language happens to be.  

[Sakura Latte]

I associate fluency with how well you can carry a conversation with another person as well as being able to read and write at the appropriate level for your age range. A five-year-old child may not know a lot of words to express his/herself or communicate with others, but they're still just as fluent as an adult. Besides, no one knows all the words in their language, anyway.  

[Fiery Hot Stud]

That's really hard to say. Some of the spanish teachers at my school aren't fluent but they know the language very well and know how to teach it. My Japanese teacher however is fluent (she grew up in tokyo and moved here). So I guess it's how easily you can communicate through the language without having to think about it  

[IdiotbyDefault]

At the base level, it's being able to understand sentences and meaning through either listening/reading or being able to convey a complete meaning to a native speaker through speaking.

As you become more fluent in a language, you rely less on your native tongue as a crutch (translating what was said in a language back to your native language), and more on the context and the explanations natives give you to describe meaning. The latter is actually an interesting way to learn...if you have the grammatical capabilities to ask how to say something or to ask what something is or explain it in another language, you reduce dependence on dictionaries and other tools.  

[angelmage99]

Well most people feel a person:

Recognizes: When the person can make out characters that are different from other languages.
Understands: When they know structure
Speak: When they know a few sentences
Read: When they can understand what those character pronounce (Even if they don't know the language)
Knows: When When they can understand what the words in a sentence they are reading
Bi-linguistic: When they can read, write, and speak over 30 different sentences.  

[IdiotbyDefault]

An addition of something I realized today:

"When I was in Japan, I always felt that my vocabulary knowledge was not up to par to how I wanted to convey myself in Japanese. I always reassured myself that your daily vocabulary (spoken) in any language is limited regardless of the language itself (as you can read more words in as an native English speaker than you speak on a daily basis). After further research/investigation, I should not have felt as strongly as I did as Japanese takes fewer words to convey the same meaning than it does in English. While I felt my sentences might have been 'simple', an equivalent sentence in English would have nearly fit the breath and range of how I normally speak."