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.