How to achieve fluency in a foreign language is a perennial hot topic in the language groups and forums that I visit. It's also a marketing hook - "fluent in 10 days" - as you've probably seen.
But what does "fluency" really mean? How do you get there? And, how long does it really take?
To most people, being "fluent" means that you can speak a language easily and freely. In other words, you're not speaking in fits and starts, and for sure you're not constantly groping for words.
Everyone gets to fluency a little differently. But for most, these steps are key: 1) Begin speaking the language as soon as you know how to say a few words. 2) Focus more on communicating and less on grammar. 3) Improve your pronunciation as you go along.
SPEAKING RIGHT FROM THE START
If your goal is "conversational fluency" in a foreign language, you'll want to start practicing your new skill right from day one. Whatever words and expressions you're learning, start using them whenever you can.
Until you find a conversation partner, you may be limited to repeating aloud or talking to yourself. In addition, use a language program that lets you repeat and record words and phrases.
You need to train your ear as well as master the right mouth mechanics. Whatever you do, it's crucial that you move your mouth to form the words and say them out ALOUD.
COMMUNICATING IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN GRAMMAR
From other language learners, I often hear: "Talk, don't care about correctness. ... If it's close enough it's good enough."
Being a language teacher, I'm surprised that I don't balk at this. But that's what the real world looks like: If you're not speaking your native language, you're bound to make mistakes.
Look at me. I'm fluent in Dutch. When I'm in the Netherlands, people are surprised at how well I speak Dutch. Yet, when I post on a site for learning Dutch, I get corrected on details.
For example, I'm told that you say: "ik zat in school" (I sat in school) instead of "ik was in school" (I was in school) - to mean that I went to school in the Netherlands, which I actually did for a couple of years.
I like these corrections, and I'm learning a lot. But the bottom line is that I have absolutely no problem communicating in Dutch, even though I do make mistakes.
IMPROVING YOUR PRONUNCIATION GRADUALLY
A perfect pronunciation is not a requirement for fluency. There, I've said it. I know plenty of people who are fluent in a language and who still have a foreign accent. A German friend of mine has lived in French Switzerland for quite a few years. She has family there and runs a successful business. French is the language of her daily life and she navigates through French easily - with a delightful German accent. It's clear that her foreign accent in no way impedes her fluency in French and that it doesn't affect her business nor her friendships in a negative way.
So, accent is not something you need to worry about - unless people can't understand what you're saying. What we do know, though, is that you can work on your accent to make it sound closer to that of a native speaker. Sounds are produced by the way you move your mouth. With practice - by repeating and recording your own voice - you can learn to say sounds that are not part of your native language. If you're really serious, you can take accent reduction training online, or with a professional in your own neighborhood. (My German husband did this and can now pronounce the American "w," a difficult sound to learn for German speakers.) But most of us find that our pronunciation can get better by practicing on our own.
HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE YOU TO BECOME FLUENT?
The part I haven't mentioned yet is that you'll want to have lots of vocabulary. In order to talk about various subjects, you need enough words to cover them. The most powerful way to acquire vocabulary is to read. I enjoy novels because they give me information about levels of language (also called "registers") and about the culture of a country where the language is spoken. My husband, on the other hand, prefers to keep his languages current by reading online foreign newspapers every day.
How long does it take you to get to fluency? It's up to you and the time and effort you are willing to put into your language learning. Benny Lewis, a popular blogger on language learning, likes to aim for 3 months. Is that a challenge you want to take?
I think there's something to the three-months time frame. When my family moved to the Netherlands and I got plunked into school there, it took me close to three months until I felt comfortable enough to give a talk in front of the class. Similarly, when I moved to Canada, it was after about three months that people stopped asking me where I was from. But clearly, total immersion is different from learning online on your own. But if you can stay motivated, fluency is bound to be within reach.
Some time ago we wrote a blog post Fluent in Ten Days? The idea for it was related to the more outrageous marketing claims and promises that we found on the internet as we started GamesforLanguage.com. Most people do understand that you can't become “fluent” in a foreign language in 10 days, even if you studied 24 hours a day.
In a later blog post Fluency – in Foreign Language Learning and Speaking we argue that native-like “fluency” in a foreign language clearly can be achieved by adults, even though they may have retained a distinct foreign accent.
Here's another look at the terms in question:
Fluency vs. Proficiency
The term “language fluency” is actually a speech language pathology term and refers to fluid as opposed to halting and slow speech. However, to most foreign language learners “fluency” denotes a high level of proficiency in speaking, and in comprehending spoken language.
But there's a catch. “She speaks like a native” would indeed be high praise for a young bilingual child – although he or she may not even know how to read and write, and therefore not really be “proficient” in the language. Or, on the other hand, a person may be quite proficient in reading a foreign text, but unable to engage in a conversation.
Thus, achieving “fluency” in a language is mostly understood as being able to communicate with ease in conversations. On the other hand, when you evaluate someone's “proficiency” in a language, you usually want to determine the level of proficiency in each of the four language skills.
The Four Language Skills
The four essential skills when learning a foreign language are commonly described as follows: - Listening/Comprehension: the ability to understand the meaning of foreign speech - Speaking: the ability to produce foreign speech and be understood - Reading: the ability to read and understand foreign texts - Writing: the ability to write foreign texts
Foreign language organizations in most countries have developed proficiency tests for each and all of these. This wikipedia link details it for the US. Indeed, proficiency testing has become quite an industry.
More options today
Anybody who wants to improve his or her foreign language fluency as well as their proficiency in the four language skills has many choices: foreign language apps, online courses, books, CDs, audio, traditional, or immersion courses, personal tutoring etc. (A brand new website, Sites For Teaching, ranks educational websites by popularity.)
As we describe in another blog post, the four language skills boost each other. Still, each learner may also sometimes have to decide on which of the skills to focus most: either because of a special current need, or because of a particular interest or aptitude.
But for an adult to become both fluent and proficient in a new foreign language, it will certainly take more than 10 days, more like between 100 and 1,000 days.
When starting a new language, one of the hardest things to learn is to understand a native speaker. It's definitely much easier to read a foreign language than to understand a stream of it when it’s spoken quickly.
When I started learning Italian, TV programs sounded like gibberish. But now, I’m pretty good at understanding Italian speakers and Italian TV and films. Just as with building any skill, it helped me to break down the learning process.
You can do it in these three steps.
1. Listen repeatedly to a short audio or video
Listen to a short audio of which you understand or can guess about 50%. Listen to this same audio segment several times in the next several days.
This will make your brain familiar with the "music” of the language, its melody and rhythm. Pay attention to where stress goes on words and which words are stressed in a sentence.
You’ll quickly learn to distinguish individual types of sentences (statements, questions, negative responses, short emphatic answers, etc.). You'll be surprised how repetition increases your understanding of what is being said.
Also, from day to day, your brain continues to processing the sounds that you are learning. After some time, you may find that you'll be able to identify individual words within the stream of sounds that is whooshing by. That's a huge step and a very exciting one.
To get the idea, here are the MP3 audios of Scene 2 from our four languages, French, Spanish, Italian, and German.
Pick a language that you understand somewhat. Then listen to the corresponding scene in a language you don’t know at all. It’ll give you a taste of audio learning.
2. Watch or listen to an ongoing story
Watch a TV series in your new language. Or, if one in your language is not available, look for a foreign film that's not dubbed. Watch it in short increments.
The ongoing story will provide you with related vocabulary and lots of repetition. The context of the story itself will offer plenty of clues so that you can guess the meaning of what is going on.
3. Learn by immersion with a variety of materials
Now you’re ready to tackle all kinds of different audio and video material in your new language. TV programs in the language you’re learning, films, news audios and videos, a radio station. learning, etc. Increasingly, context clues will help.
Also, in an earlier blog post, I list 10 essential grammar items to become familiar with. They’ll help you get a good start with immersion learning.
Language learning is not a linear process
You may want to go back to any of the previous steps from time to time. Learning to understand a new language is not a linear process, it's more like a fun zig-zag, filled with new discoveries all the time.
Of course, if you can interact with native speakers, you'll want to do that right from the start. They'll make your language learning personal, add direct experience of the language, and give your valuable feedback.
Have fun! And yes, research shows that these “language exercises” have all kinds of good benefits for your brain.
As said by the writer Rita Mae Brown: "Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going."
Much has been learned about language acquisition by children. There appears to be some consensus by linguists that by the age of seven, children will have fully acquired the intonation and sounds of their first language. On the other hand, when they learn another language later in life, they will rarely equal the intonation of a native speaker in that language.
Does this mean the goal of foreign language “fluency” will be elusive to an adult?
Fluency
A recent Wikipedia entry surfaced the following definition:
“Language fluency is used informally to denote broadly a high level of language proficiency, most typically foreign language or another learned language, and more narrowly to denote fluid language use, as opposed to slow, halting use. In this narrow sense, fluency is necessary but not sufficientfor language proficiency: fluent language users (particularly uneducated native speakers) may have narrow vocabularies, limited discourse strategies, and inaccurate word use. They may be illiterate, as well. Native language speakers are often incorrectly referred to as fluent.” [Wikipedia: "Fluency"]
Well-known Public Figures
For Americans, there are wonderful examples of well-known public figures who came to the US as teenagers or adults and whose English could not be called anything but “fluent” - although their accent may still identify them as non-natives.
- Henry Kissinger was 15 when he arrived in the US in 1938. - Arnold Schwarzenegger was 21 when he arrived in the US in 1968. - Arianna Huffington was 19 when she moved to England in 1969 - Martina Navratilova was 19 when she came to the US in 1975
Most readers will have heard at least of one of these celebrities on radio and/or television. You probably would call their English fluent – even though their more or less distinct accent makes it clear that they learned their English later in life.
(Other examples, such as Albert Einstein, Leoh Ming Pei, the famous architect, Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court Justice, etc. could also be listed, but their voices are less well known.)
It's likely, however, that most of these immigrants already had a basic knowledge of English when they arrived in the US. And, they perfected their new language in school and/or through diligent study.
So for all of you who shy away from learning a new foreign language or improving an “old” one, because you fear that you won't be able to speak it fluently: It is certainly not too late to start (again). You may never sound exactly like a native. It may even take an extended stay in the foreign country to give you full “fluency.”
But learning and practicing to speak, read, and write another language will open up a new world and - as an added benefit – it will keep your brain neurons moving...
We are speaking German with Calvin, our three-year-old grandson. We don't need a "method." His brain is a sponge that soaks up whatever strikes him as fun.
Telling him that "apple juice" is "AHP-fell-sahft" has him laughing out loud. He repeats the word a couple of times and looks at me to see if I'm laughing. I'm thrilled. I'm amazed at how good his pronunciation is.
PERFECT PRETEND GERMAN
Then we're playing trains. Calvin likes the word "Lo-ko-mo-TIH-veh," which I sneak in, as we make the train chug along.
Suddenly he laughs again. Then he lets loose a stream of "pretend German." It sounds like German, with its characteristic consonants and intonation, but what he's spouting is total nonsense.
I sure can't understand what he's saying. Later, when I think about this, it occurs to me that Calvin is recreating the sounds he hears when my husband and I are having a conversation in German.
He doesn't understand many of the words. But he has definitely picked up the melody and the rhythm, in short, the sounds of the German language and is mimicking them well.
FROM GIBBERISH TO VERB-NOUN SENTENCES
In my mind, this clicks with something I noticed when Calvin was an eighteen-month-old toddler. At that age, he was already able to say a few words. These he used insistently when he wanted something.
But other times he just talked away - in pure gibberish. But this "gibberish" had the melody and the rhythm of American English. No question about that. He was talking in nonsense sentences.
Some of his sentences clearly had the intonation of questions, others were statements, some where emphatic, others more tentative. He was reproducing conversational talk that he hears all the time at home.
In what he was saying, occasionally a word would pop up that I could identify as English. Within weeks, the number of individual words increased that I could understand. A few months later, the gibberish stopped and Calvin started talking in short noun-verb sentences.
As a toddler, he had picked up the melody and rhythm of English and was mimicking those perfectly.
FOREIGN LANGUAGE STREAM OF SOUNDS
And with that, I remember an experience of my own. Five years ago, when my husband and I had just arrived in Rome, we started watching a half-hour of TV every evening.
We were going to spend several months in Italy, and we were determined to learn Italian. During the morning, we worked with a tutor; in the afternoon, we walked the city; then, after a late dinner, we let an Italian soap opera or news program wash over us.
That's what the daily television experience felt like: The language just washed over us. We heard a fast stream of sounds and rhythms. Beautiful sounds.
But we barely caught a familiar word. The stream of Italian sounds was gibberish to us.
However, over time, this stream of sounds seemed to slow down. Here and there, we started to identify familiar words, then phrases. By the end of our stay in Rome, we could pretty well follow a story, for example, the story of the Italian TV series “Orgoglio” (Pride), which was running at that time.
I can well imagine the excitement Calvin feels as he gradually begins to master his languages. I've been there as an adult. My brain too went from hearing a stream of gibberish, to understanding words, and then to understanding their meaning.
I now watch an online soap opera in Italian called “Un posto al sole” (A place in the sun). And, I'm looking around for the next language to learn. I love these new beginnings.
(Updated: You can also listen to this YouTube clip) Fluent in a foreign language in 10 days?
It's a catchy idea, but can it really happen? Can you become a good tennis player in ten days? Or a great cook? You can't. Skill mastery takes time. So, if you want to learn a language, you have to find a way to make it part of your day.
GETTING STARTED
First you need to get started. You can faithfully go to a language school. Or, if you are into self-learning, you can work with a language learning course, let's say French from a book, from CDs and DVD's, or from a French online course.
Once you have a good foundation in your new language, you need to maintain momentum and build on your skills. Certainly, you should READ books, newspaper articles, or online articles in the foreign language.
And you should find ways to LISTEN your new language with audios, podcasts, videos and movies. For some, SPEAKING may come early, for others more slowly, but we all know: Nobody can learn a foreign language FOR YOU - in order to be able to listen, read, speak and write, you have to practice all those skills!
Keeping a notebook to WRITE DOWN words, phrases, and sentences can be very helpful for recall.
RESOURCES TO HELP YOU CONTINUE
Fortunately, with the wealth of technology available, there are many resources. The Internet opens a new gateway to foreign language text, audio, and video content. - French online newspaper articles are as easy to find as Italian news videos and Spanish online soap operas. - You can join a foreign language learning website. - You can sign up to exchange conversations with someone who is trying to learn English. - There are television programs in Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese, etc., on the various international channels in the U.S.
PRACTICE OFTEN AND REGULARLY
The bottom line is that if you want to become fluent, you have to engage with your new foreign language often and regularly. The key is “often and regularly.” You have to find ways to hear, read, write, and speak your new language.
It's as simple or as complicated as that. But whatever you do to START your foreign language learning, you'll have to find ways to stay motivated and engaged with the language.
Gamesforlanguage's snappy and easy language games are one way to make language learning fun. And at any stage, adding fun and challenging games can help you maintain your motivation and momentum.
How to achieve fluency in a foreign language is a perennial hot topic in the language groups and forums that I visit. It's also a marketing hook - "fluent in 10 days" - as you've probably seen. 
If it's close enough it's good enough." 
A perfect pronunciation is not a requirement for fluency. There, I've said it. 
We are speaking German with Calvin, our three-year-old grandson. We don't need a "method." His brain is a sponge that soaks up whatever strikes him as fun. 
(Updated: You can also listen to this