Fluency in Language

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If you have “liked” la vache on facebook you will have seen a link to an article I posted yesterday from Zen Habits*. It is a guest post by Benny the Irish polyglot entitled “Simple guide to speaking foreign languages”. With a title like this, my curiosity was piqued and I wanted to discuss it a little.

Benny started learning languages besides his native English seven years ago, and is apparently now fluent in no fewer than eight languages. Eight. Now, this may seem like a near incredible claim, but depending on how loosely you define “fluent”, I’d be inclined to buy it. I am the first to realize that being understood is the most important. The rest comes with practice.

Our Irish polyglot goes onto how the “want” to speak a language is much weaker than the “need” to speak it. He points out that it is only too human to study, study, study a language, waiting for the day when it’s perfect, only then to break it out and speak. That defeats the purpose. You have to speak to perfect.

His arguments spoke to me, because I am definitely the kind of perfectionist he is writing of. In middle school, I lived in France for three years and hardly opened my mouth to parler le français. I didn’t speak it well enough in my eyes. Talk about a wasted opportunity! I speak it alright now, but only after I got over my obsession with not making mistakes.

Nonetheless, I would still do well to remind myself that everyone has to make a fool of themselves, just a tiny bit, to really learn a language.

What is your definition of "fluent"? Are you a perfectionist when it comes to language learning or do you jump right in?

* via Colin Wright at Exile Lifestyle