Learn Spanish Travel Spanish Blog

When Sherry and I first started thinking about learning Spanish, we knew that we were starting from zero.  We had some exposure to other languages – picking up some phrases for our trips abroad, etc.  But we didn’t really know where to start.   We knew we had a few questions to ask ourselves.

The first question we needed to ask was very basic. Well, it was two questions, really: What is fluency and how fluent do we want to be?   Okay, okay, three questions, the third being: how difficult was it going to be to get to the fluency level we wanted?   So I began by trying to find the official fluency levels. Surprise — it depends on who you ask. There are a couple of certifying bodies for language study and, although their definitions are similar, they aren’t quite the same. A look on   some  travel forums (likeTripAdvisor ) leads to the conclusion that what one person considers fluent is not what another person considers fluent. You could be “fluent” but not sound like a native. You could have a high level of understanding, and be able to make yourself understood, but not have perfect grammar. And I guess you could be functionally fluent (but not really fluent), which is sort of like being functionally literate (but not really literate) . Here are a few websites that examine (and test) fluency.

http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/the-three-stages-of-language-fluency/

Tags:   fluency · fluent · Learn Spanish · proficiency · SpanishNo Comments