Are you fluent?If so,  I wanna know how you did it. How long did it take? what methods did you use?

You're probably not getting response to this because it's a very vague question.... starting from the term 'fluent' which has very little meaning. Some people consider 'fluent' the same as 'can hold a halting conversation without resorting to a dictionary' and others consider fluent to be 'near-native abilities'....

If you're looking for the person with the methods that take the least time, it's not a useful search. People's learning styles differ dramatically. The one thing I will say is that you'll never get 'fluent' from learning materials alone unless you have a very low bar for fluency. Make sure to tackle native materials early and often. When they get too frustrating go back to studying and try again the next day.

The linguistic meaning of fluent refers to the fluidity of any skill. Proficiency is the accurate term here. Of course, people will continue to confuse the term fluency for proficiency, or one's ability in a language.


Edits;

One trick that might help
Envision the ideal point(s) you wish to reach in the language and follow through the steps necessary to acquire these skills. Four core areas to hone in language learning include: reading, listening, comprehensible output, and form-focused instruction. An aim for fluency isn't necessary and may hold you back, in the sense that fluency in that sense is very arbitrary and will never truly satisfy you. Reach a natural language learning flow by aiming for smaller, enjoyable / manageable endpoints and milestones that can be handled in the present moment. If fluency were just one single point in a far off uncertain future; reaching for it would be pretty unsatisfying. Learn steadily.

Attaining fluency, in that sense, is akin to losing one's virginity in that it's a socially misconstrued point of advancement or graduation. Might be a reflection of the status-based society we currently live in. To reach a certain arbitrary endpoint that somehow heightens your sense of self-worth.

Emphasis by me. Somewhat relevant. The links below contain quite a bit of information about goal perspective.

darkjapanese Wrote:The key with this idea is the ideal L2 self, the self we want to become, who has ultimate attainment of the L2. This idea subsumes previous notions of integrativeness and instrumentality, where positive feelings towards the L2 community and the desire for pragmatic benefits motivate learning. Your disposition towards L2 users is tied to how attractive you find the ideal L2 self. The more positive that disposition, the more attractive the related possible self becomes. Many researchers (Erling, 2004; Irie, 2003; Lamb, 2004; McClelland, 2000; Yashima, 2000) suggest that integration with the global community and language variants rather than assimilation with native users is the most useful aim (Dornyei, et al., 2006).[...]

lolajatt Wrote:There is no end. There is only more 5. So either you’re happy with your Japanese now, or you’re never happy with it, because more of it will not (and this is hard to believe) make you happier than the current amount: it’ll just make you numb…in a good way — it’ll numb you to Japanese itself and graduate you to another level, and give you other things to focus on; so the time to love it is now. The payoff, the fun, the joy is now or never. Ahora o nunca, meng. [...]

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Really, I think academics should update the definition of 'fluency' and simply accept the general populace's definition which conflates fluency with proficiency. Hell if you look at the Wikipedia entry for fluency, they even have a link to "Language proficiency" in the article and even reference the dual use of the word.

Quote:In the sense of proficiency, "fluency" encompasses a number of related but separable skills:

If we equate fluency and proficiency then the answer becomes more clear or at least less muddy.

Study a combination of vocabulary and grammar with a spaced repetition flashcard system, rote memorization, or a combination of the two until you gain enough proficiency to start immersing yourself in the native language. Once your reading and listening gain enough proficiency to interact with native speakers then write and speak to them until they have trouble distinguishing your output from another native speaker.

The methods are well documented here and on language blogs such as AJATT and JALUP. The most successful methods seem to be a highly individualized thing.

The time it takes to reach near-native proficiency is sufficiently long as to be largely irrelevant. The more time you can devote to active study the fewer years you will incur getting there.

Anything details beyond this generic answer probably incur the wrath of some successful method and even mentioning space-repition and rote memorization in the same sentence has already incurred the wrath of a significant portion of the Japanese learning community.

TLDR: It depends on several factors around which there are endless arguments.

I think I'm fairly good at this point, and I attribute it to sticking with learning the language for 8+ years.  It's gonna take a long time whatever you do, so it's mostly about willpower.

Then again, tonight at a dinner party I asked a friend how she's be doing lately and she said 最近荒波があった (or something like that) and I was like 'WTF is aranami'?  Anytime you have a complete conversation breakdown you still feel kinda dumb.

(2015-12-28, 11:27 am)Tzadeck Wrote: ... she said 最近荒波があった (or something like that) and I was like 'WTF is aranami'?  Anytime you have a complete conversation breakdown you still feel kinda dumb.

life would be easier with subtitles!

@Tzadeck
I feel incredibly dumb whenever I try to converse with my tutor, because I have little problem following her (I'm definitely still getting considerable allowance for vocabulary, but she only slows down if I ask her to repeat something), but when it comes time to speak... Charades might still be slightly more efficient...

@OP
The above is entirely because I've only just started focusing on conversation skills; my listening is decent because I needed it for the JLPT (and to listen to things I was interested in), but there's no speaking portion, so I've barely worked on it at all.
The point being, you'll improve at what you put time and effort into.

I'm fluent. This is why.




Also being in a 100% Japanese environment 100% of the time has given me multiple hours of speaking and listening practice a day, every day. But if I had to choose the most effective of the two, I'd definitely go with the half a million Anki reviews. Speaking of which, I still have another 200 to go today. Have fun.

Scheisse mate, for a second I was like "how is he doing 20k a month" and then I realized looking at my own stats that I was looking at weeks. I'm at 15k a month (3rd month of using anki).

[Zgarbas]

There's this thing where a lot of people who are by all means fluent (and no one cares about the prescriptive use of fluent vs proficiency) will not call themselves that because of the sheer pressure that using the word to describe yourself has on you. People who are quick to use the word 'fluent' are usually the ones who are not . It's a known phenomenon. It's particularly bad when it comes to Japanese, since you just get used to telling people that no, you're not fluent yet (even if you are).

I'm pretty good. Took me about 3 years of occasional study + 2 years of intensive study. Mostly used SRS programs, with a bit of other stuff thrown in for safe measure (some online conversation classes, dozens of hours of anime, a bit of reading, a bit of kanjibox and other drill programs, a few textbooks, lots of crying).

(2016-01-04, 10:41 am)Zgarbas Wrote: There's this thing where a lot of people who are by all means fluent (and no one cares about the prescriptive use of fluent vs proficiency) will not call themselves that because of the sheer pressure that using the word to describe yourself has on you. People who are quick to use the word 'fluent' are usually the ones who are not . It's a known phenomenon. It's particularly bad when it comes to Japanese, since you just get used to telling people that no, you're not fluent yet (even if you are).

I'm pretty good. Took me about 3 years of occasional study + 2 years of intensive study. Mostly used SRS programs, with a bit of other stuff thrown in for safe measure (some online conversation classes, dozens of hours of anime, a bit of reading, a bit of kanjibox and other drill programs, a few textbooks, lots of crying).

That's the thing, a lot of the benchmarks that people might use to evaluate their skill level are lacking in certain areas. I passed JLPT N1. That means I can read & listen decently, but my speaking needs work & my writing is rusty, because work has been keeping me very busy lately. I'm not sure if I'll ever be satisfied enough with all my Japanese skills to call myself overall fluent.

There's also probably a fair amount of "imposter syndrome" when it comes to advanced learners...

Quote:People who are quick to use the word 'fluent' are usually the ones who are not .

Quote:There's also probably a fair amount of "imposter syndrome" when it comes to advanced learners...

This is probably something you only really see outside Japan where there isn't a ton of feedback on one's skill and it's easy to mislead oneself. At least in the circles I have experience in (mostly ex-pat communities out in the boondocks of Gunma and to a lesser extent in Tokyo) people who call themselves fluent actually tend to be quite good. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that when you are surrounded by Japanese every day, you get a much better gauge of your level.

So now that I've claimed to be fluent I guess I should explain what that means to me: being able to converse smoothly at normal speed with native speakers solely in the native language across the entire range of normal conversation (not excluding the hard stuff). Concretely, that means my wife doesn't speak a word of English, I stand an alright chance at whipping your average Japanese person's ass at 山手線ゲーム, and most Japanese speakers of English will switch to Japanese when speaking with me. In terms of actual academic performance, I'm not really sure. I've never taken the JLPT but the last time I parsed my Anki decks there were 13,000 unique words and I ostensibly know all of them (with about 80% having their own production cards). Speaking and listening are what I excel at and that's what I am mostly interested in -- I do not now and never have had any interest in anime, manga, or really anything overtly Japanese. I just want to be able to communicate with people and get shit done without asking for help all the time like a child.

[Zgarbas]

I think that there's a lot of deception even when you live in Japan. Japanese people can usually understand you even if you make a lot of mistakes, and so you can easily become unaware of them. For example, the only people who note that I sound foreign are foreigners themselves. I have no problems with everyday life in Japan and can (with a proofreader) write decent academic stuff in Japanese, but I know that they're not even close to perfect, and I retain a lot of fairly basic grammar mistakes that come from being self-taught and not caring much for improvement. I am what most people would call fluent, and I fulfill most commonly accepted benchmarks for fluency (N1, reading books without a dictionary, grad school classes), but I think that I am far from it, objectively speaking.

I've had a few expats try to give me advice about improving my Japanese even if they were way below my level (this is made possible by talking about Japanese in English); It was really awkward. Self-perceived fluency depends a lot on individual factors (how many other languages you know, how much exposure you've had to non-native speakers, and how much time you've spent in a gaijin bubble. I find that people from Tokyo and English Teacher bubbles have ridiculously low standards for 'knowing Japanese' since they're only surrounded by expats who are absolute beginners and become the best Japanese speaker among them by default)

Like we've seen from the start of this thread a lot is going to depend on your definition of fluency. Yours seems to be "indistinguishable from a native speaker" which is as strict as the definition gets and certainly much higher than my own definition (smoothly communicating across the entire range of everyday situations).

I guess my own experience in education bubbles has been different than yours, but I tend not to spend a huge amount of time around foreigners. I don't know how to put it nicely, but Japan doesn't exactly attract the best crowd. I have my core circle which, because it includes a bunch of Japanese (and Brazilians, heh) who don't speak any English, tends to be pretty straight forward in talking about ability (with most people self-describing as somewhere between shit and very-shit). Things might be different in other crowds where the Japanese all speak some level of English and the foreigners actually believe said Japanese when they gush over even the most rudimentary of language skills--I don't really know.

Because we've got very different definitions of fluency, I feel no contradiction in saying that I am fluent in Japanese and, at the same time, that I suck at Japanese. Because although I meet the condition of speaking smoothly and confidently across pretty much any given topic, I'm still acutely aware of the gap between my own level and that of the native speakers around me.

[Zgarbas]

Sorry, I didn't mean to be condescending and go into yet another 'what is fluency anyway' polemic, I just tend to accidentally go off on random tangents.
What matters is your personal satisfaction with your skills and your language skill's ability to fulfill your actual needs. Satisfaction > fulfilling whatever arbitrary definition of fluency. I don't really hang out outside campus, but every now and then I find myself interacting with expat bubbles and it's always interesting for me to see their idea of Japan and Japanese.

This thread got me thinking on what I consider fluency to be. Imo, the worst aspect of the word is not that has no definite definition, it is that it focuses on your spoken output. More so, it focuses on the lack of pauses and such, i.e. its fluidity. Therefore, someone who confidently machine guns out ungrammatical speech with a limited vocabulary and horrible pronunciation could be considered fluent.

I for one, would (kinda) feel comfortable calling myself fluent if I was effectively at a native level when I comes to comprehension (i.e. would be able to get the meaning of unknown words from the context when listening) and I only made minor errors when producing the language. Another, even more subjective definition would be when the language ceases to feel like a foreign language.

(2016-01-05, 2:29 am)Zgarbas Wrote: I don't really hang out outside campus, but every now and then I find myself interacting with expat bubbles and it's always interesting for me to see their idea of Japan and Japanese.

I'd be interested in hearing your take on the same, given you live in what is essentially just another type of bubble. No offense taken or meant, honestly curious. Although definitely a subject for another thread.

Getting back to fluency, it would probably be helpful if we all state up front what we mean by 'fluent' and go from there.

(2016-01-05, 4:15 am)tetsueda Wrote: Imo, the worst aspect of the word is not that has no definite definition, it is that it focuses on your spoken output. More so, it focuses on the lack of pauses and such, i.e. its fluidity.

The thing is, fluency really is much more about spoken output and listening comprehension than it is about reading and writing. If you say "Yeah he's fluent, but he can't speak very well" it doesn't make any sense, because fluency is about naturally producing language. However, if you turn that sentence around and say "He's fluent, but he can't read or write" it makes perfect sense because fluency doesn't have anything to do with those skills. It's for that reason that we have the word 'literacy,' because being fluent and being literate are two different things--even if they are often related.

(2015-12-27, 11:22 am)cae99v Wrote: Are you fluent?If so,  I wanna know how you did it. How long did it take? what methods did you use?

I became fluent in English at around the age of 7-8 years old. It is now also my primary language as my fluency in my native tongue has drastically declined. I had no choice but to be fluent as I moved to the US around that age. It helped that I was already going to an all English speaking school in my country of origin.

Being immersed in the language and interacting in the said language helped immensely. My parents had bought a huge box of Disney VHS tapes and I would watch them often with my siblings. Being in school speaking English 24/7 was another aspect. There was no real method for me as I was just a child.

If you want to ask if I have become fluent in a language as an adult learner (i.e Japanese)? Sadly no. My wish would be, like I assume all of us here, is to achieve fluency in Japanese.

They really should add a find-and-replace to this forum to change "fluent" to "really good at." Presumably, that's what the OP meant.

(2016-01-07, 8:15 pm)afterglowefx Wrote:

(2016-01-05, 4:15 am)tetsueda Wrote: Imo, the worst aspect of the word is not that has no definite definition, it is that it focuses on your spoken output. More so, it focuses on the lack of pauses and such, i.e. its fluidity.

The thing is, fluency really is much more about spoken output and listening comprehension than it is about reading and writing. If you say "Yeah he's fluent, but he can't speak very well" it doesn't make any sense, because fluency is about naturally producing language. However, if you turn that sentence around and say "He's fluent, but he can't read or write" it makes perfect sense because fluency doesn't have anything to do with those skills. It's for that reason that we have the word 'literacy,' because being fluent and being literate are two different things--even if they are often related.

That's why I mentioned understanding basically everything you hear.