The Moving Target of Language Fluency

The more I work to gain what I thought of as fluency in the French language, the more I realize the term “fluency” is, well, fluid. Perhaps appropriately, given the words’ common etymology, but not, perhaps, evidently.

I’d just assumed, as I believe do most of us, that a person reaches a given point at which she’s just fluent and—a-ha!—goal reached. You’ve made it.

When I started my language learning, I wanted to get as fluent as possible as quickly as possible. I shared this with my language teachers as my objective, even.

And today, officially—in that I have a nightmarish-to-obtain diploma saying so—I am fluent in French.

I don’t feel that way. Far from it, in fact.

The Impossibility of Defining “Fluency”

The more I learn and work with French in speaking it, writing it, reading it, and listening to it, the more I realize I do not know it. The more I realize that I am awkward in ways I don’t want to be.

What does fluency even mean, really?

We assume that it means you can consume and produce a given language with facility near to the level of a native speaker. Maybe you have a slight accent, sure. Maybe you occasionally say something differently in terms of word choice or order. But in a group of people speaking the target language, you blend in.

Blending in as a nonnative speaker among native speakers, I’ve grown to believe, is near impossible.

I’ll probably never come across as completely “fluent” to a native speaker. The best I’ll get in terms of language proficiency is to have an accent that doesn’t make people squint when I speak as they strive to understand, to formulate things strangely though still intelligibly, and to minimally mix up my idioms. (As in, for example, when my French teacher recently redirected me from the not-used “laisser prise,” or “let go,” to the more-normal “lâcher prise,” or “release hold,” when I attempted to use an idiomatic turn of phrase in French to congratulate her on forgetting about her errands that weekend. Any French speaker would understand what I’d said and meant, most likely, but one is “normal” phrasing and the other is, well, less so.)

Even if I use the language with more technical correctness than a native speaker, native speakers have a fluidity, flexibility, and nuance with their language—from its word order and choice to its pronunciations and cadences—that allows them to dip into and out of “correct” language use in ways that nonnative speakers rarely master.

We’ve all heard the nonnative speaker of our own native languages employ overly precise, correct, stilted-to-our-ears language, pegging them as nonnative speakers even if they have undetectable accents. (I’ve run into many of these people, especially here in Europe, when it comes to English. There’ll always be a slight turn of phrase or word use that’s a “tell.”)

We can objectively define certain aspects of what people consider fluency—that native speakers can understand you, that your speech has no pauses while you search for words and phrases, for examples. No one could consider a person fluent in a language if he cannot get a native speaker to understand him or if native speakers find him tedious, complicated, or frustrating in conversation.

Yet beyond these broad strokes, what counts as “fluent” has a lot of subjectivity.

If people understand you and you can speak with them, but you make frequent grammatical errors, have painful pronunciation, and communicate through physical gestures as much as language, even though you don’t halt your phrases or search for words—how many people have I heard use the French equivalent for the word “thing” over and over, because they don’t have the right word, even if they don’t necessarily pause to search for that right word?—you could still count as fluent, even if you might not quite pass muster in certain environments and, without question, with any French language teacher.

Defining Your Own “Fluency”

I had a friend tell me she considered fluency—her goal—as achieving complete comprehension of everything she and others in her group said in a loud, crowded bar. No matter the level of background noise, the overlapping conversations even at her own table, the interruptions in the flow of phrases, sentences, and thoughts between boisterous friends, she wanted the interaction to flow through her just as easily as it would in the same setting in her native language.

In a busy bar with a bunch of boisterous people, even in English, I can’t say I catch everything. (Frankly, I probably don’t even want to catch everything.)

But good on her, and I hope she gets there.

What I wonder, though, is that even if she does get there—in a crowded bar, understanding and interacting as well as she would in her native language—would she know it?

Because while, in a crowded bar in English, when I don’t understand everything and must repeat myself more than once for my friends to understand what I’ve said, I don’t layer onto these frustrations the additional concern that I’m incompetent in the language. I know I’m competent in English. We’re just in a loud, obnoxious place that makes communication difficult.

In French, I’d feel certain that the misunderstandings and miscomprehensions stemmed from my incompetence in the language.

Letting Go of “Fluency”

Feeling incapable of communicating effectively weighs on a person’s self-confidence and feeling of connection. (For more on this point, read my post about what happens when we don’t feel understood.)

At some point, at least when it comes to this fluency business, we have to just “lâcher prise.”

Too bad I’m not so good at that, eh?

What, then, is my new language goal, now that I no longer feel that whatever I thought was fluency really is fluency—or that, if it is fluency, I can attain it?

What’s Leslie’s definition of fluency for Leslie?

I don’t know anymore. Like the horizon, once I get to the point where I thought it would be, it’s slid into the distance.