How to Push Past Fluent to Fluency in a Language

The term “fluency” becomes ever more vague the deeper you get into a language. Remember this entire article I wrote about fluency as a moving target?

In that article, I pointed out that what counts as fluency to one group doesn’t pass muster for another. Frankly, like it or not (and for me, the answer is “not”), you’ll never sound fluent to a native speaker. You’ll always have an accent, even if only a light one. You’ll always have a slightly different turn of phrase than would someone who lived in the language for a lifetime. You’ll always miss cultural references—mainly because, in many cases, you didn’t live in that language or culture whenever the referenced thing happened.

You’ll always live a little outside, no matter how much language-learning work you do.

However, even if all the tests tell you that you’ve arrived when it comes to fluency—as they have for me—you can still improve.

Your goal, in terms of gaining more fluency even after you’ve earned the “fluent” badge, is to gain ground in fluidity and facility—to speak your target language with an ever more natural cadence, phrasing, and accent. You want to get to the point that you can understand the different registers of a language—the most casual to the most formal—the layers of meaning in different registers, and the nuances and intentions when it comes to shifts native speakers make between these registers (sometimes even in the same phrase). You may never quite manage to produce all the different language capacities with the same finesse as a native speaker, but you want to at least understand them without inordinate difficulty.

So How Do You Do That?

After I received the designation of “fluent” from several different assessments and tests, I didn’t feel anywhere close to fluent. Even though I’ll never have the facility in French that I have in my native language of English, I’ll never feel fluent until I do—which means I’ll never feel fluent. (Sigh.)

However, I do know that I can keep working to improve. I don’t want to consider myself “done” with learning French. After all, I can still progress. I still learn things about English, after all.

So what do you do to continue to improve in your target language after all the normal assessments out there tell you that you’ve reached your goal and are now fluent? When you can no longer find language classes at your level because you’ve gone through classes at the highest level you can go?

A few ideas based on what I’ve done (and continue to do).

Turn Away from the Professional Productions

Tune in to audio, visual, and text content that is not “professionally” produced.

Yes, that means reading blogs and social media rambles as well as listening to random podcasts produced by regular-person individuals—not radio and television channels. Watch on-line videos uploaded on channels run by everyday people on YouTube and other platforms and read the comments. (Sorry—I know the comments are not always pleasant—but they’re usually written in very typical conversational language and with the commonly encountered typos and spelling mistakes that native-speakers make and that you need to understand.)

While wonderful, information produced by professionals will not be as layered with double-meanings, slang, colloquialisms, cultural references, and idioms and normal speech and writing. Also, because professionally produced material often has great production quality—audio, trained editors, and so on—it won’t challenge your ear or your brain enough when it comes to comprehension.

Produce the Language Frequently

As language learners, we may speak the target language in classes and in language exchanges and other language-learning settings and we may use the language a bit when we go out into the world as a resident or a tourist in a region that speaks our target language (having simple exchanges with store clerks and so on), but these types of settings will not get you to more fluency and fluidity in a language.

The biggest hold-back I see in language learning—true for me, true for friends, true for people with whom I’ve spoken—is limited production in the target language.

Don’t just speak the language as much as possible, as often as possible, and in conversations that go deeper than asking for a certain size of clothing, product availability, or commentary on the weather. Join a discussion or launch debate on a subject via the many groups that meet on-line (yes, even after COVID times, you’ll find them). Join an on-line book club run by native speakers in your target language and read and discuss the books. Just two examples, but you can find plenty of ideas along these lines!

And write in your target language as much as you possibly can. Find pen pals for e-mail exchanges, social media contacts, and beyond. Read what they write, respond, exchange.

Start a free blog or website and write articles, essays, or even diary-style entries in your target language. If you don’t want your posts in the public domain on a public website, keep them in regular documents either on paper or in your digital files in a word-processing format.

Your challenge: Continuing with this practice when it’s not necessary for life or school. After all, if you don’t have to write a diary entry or essay or have a book-club debate in your target language, it’s easy not to do it. Finding the motivation and drive to produce the language even when you don’t want to make the effort will link 100 percent to how motivated you are to improve your language skills. Want to improve? Really and truly? Then you’ve got to use it and work with it. Struggle leads to progress.

Commit Yourself to Real-World Language Production

Because, yes, it’s very hard to drop the hard production work when you don’t have to do it—even for the most motivated among us—find a way to have to do it.

Find opportunities to volunteer in your target language or even take a simple job or limited-term contract position in your target language. Seem like an extreme step? Maybe—but only if you really don’t have the time (you can find opportunities that require only an hour or so a week) or don’t have the motivation in a given moment.

Taking this sort of step comes easier if you live in a place where the population speaks the language you want to learn, but you can find opportunities almost anywhere to volunteer or work in person or even on-line in your target language via a simple web search. For volunteering opportunities, try searching “multilingual or bilingual volunteer” and the name of your area or adding “online.” For jobs and contracts, type in the name of your target language and the type of work you’d be open to doing in your “spare” time.

After I reached the “fluent” level, having commitments to volunteer in French—which required not just performing the volunteering activity entirely in French but communicating via e-mail, text, and phone with people in French—really vaulted me to an entirely new level and continues to do so.

I’m Still Learning

Hey, my journey with gaining ever greater fluidity in French continues—and probably always will.

So will my ebbs and flows in motivation and, yep, frustration as well.

If you’re out there trying to learn a language to the fluency level, we’re in it together. I’d love any ideas or practical tips you’ve had that helped you continue to advance past “fluency.”

And for more information on my language-learning journey with French, click here for my repository of articles (which I find continues to grow, even when I think I’ve covered it all!).