How fluent do you think one have to be to be considered "bilingual"?

Do you think that the person must be

  1. born in a bilingual country / completely indifferent to native, educated speakers of the language
  2. able to write, speak and hear with little to no grammatical errors in almost any situations / able to take college level classes without language barrier.
  3. able to conduct any casual conversations with little to no grammatical errors

or worse?

English is not my first language but I’m quite confident myself. And I’m always torn between saying that I’m bilingual or just fluent.

A lot of the times, I think in English and sometimes even dream in English but I also have never spent a single day in an English speaking country in my life. It’s weird to know that I’m not a bilingual per se but to think like one. Just wanted to know if anyone had similar experience.

lightstream,

It’s worth mentioning that the word bilingual has different meanings in US English and in British English.

For native British speakers, someone who is bilingual is someone who speaks two languages at a native level, while the accepted US meaning is someone who can speak two languages, especially with equal or nearly equal fluency.

With the British definition, it’s pretty clear whether someone is bilingual or not. Most people are not, and it’s almost impossible for an adult to become bilingual later in life. Generally it only happens when someone has two parents each with a different mother tongue.

The US meaning is much wider than the British one, and I guess it’s the meaning you’re intending with your question. It basically comes down to the definition of fluent. It’s completely possible to be fluent in a language while still having a foreign accent and still making the occasional grammar mistake. My personal definition of fluency is when you are able to talk to native speakers on pretty much any subject without serious misunderstandings. You don’t need to know every word you may encounter, as you can simply ask the other person what a word means just as native speakers do all the time.

ShadowAether,

Um the first part of 2 and the 2nd part of 2 are two very different things. I know lots of people who pass the language test to get into college but make a lot of grammatical errors. Also basically require spellcheck/chatgpt to write a basic email. Also even my roommate makes grammatical errors in conversation and she has to do her job in her second language. You seem bilingual to me, seems kind of silly you seem to think you need to spent a year in England or something to be considered bilingual.

Dirk,
@Dirk@lemmy.ml avatar

If you can switch mid-sentence to another language and continue the conversation on native speaker level.

HorrorSpirit,
@HorrorSpirit@lemmy.ml avatar

The entire idea of “knowing” a language is a complete mess. When do you know that you know? There are only two languages i can confidently say i am fluent in yet i know bits and pieces of random other languages, sometimes enough to follow simple conversation, and i taught myself to read some foreign scripts for fun despite not knowing the language(s) they are used to write.

cwagner,

I’d say somewhere between 2 and 3.

The first option would also result in the weird situation that most South Africans (11 official languages), who use English in everyday life, would not count as bilingual because there’s still a bit of a difference to fully native speakers. My wife grew up with Sesotho, but started learning English from 1st grade on and all her classes in school and university have been in English. Her English is better than mine (5th grade, and all but English-classes in German), but worse than that of my USA or British friends.

born in a bilingual country / completely indifferent to native, educated speakers of the language

While we are on the topic, you wouldn’t normally use “indifferent” like that. A better word would be “indistinguishable”.

balance_sheet,

I mean indifferent as basically the same. Stronger than indistinguishable. You can be pretty much indistinguishable and have some differences to native speakers

cwagner,

It was clear what you meant. But while this might be used in very rare cases like indistinguishable, it almost never is. If it’s not distinguishable, you can’t get stronger ;)

balance_sheet,

Thank you for the clarification. Guess I still have a lot to learn :)

darkan15,

For me personally, when you reach a level where you can think, and communicate in the non-native language (without doing mental translations back and forth) with enough ease and speed, no mater the topic at hand (meaning that even if you don’t know a technical or specific word you can make yourself understood), and even if you make grammatical mistakes or have an accent, the point of the conversation is not lost between participants, then you can consider yourself fluent enough on said language.

My native tongue is Spanish (could you tell if I didn’t mention it?), but I have consumed so much content throughout (and yes I did check how to spell throughout) my life only in English and practiced enough doing conversations both writing and speaking (even with an accent) on the internet that I can communicate with ease and be understood.

I have visited the United States a handful of times for around a month for vacations with family, so I can say that I had to communicate with native people outside the internet now, but I haven’t had any formal education except a few very basic English courses in high school.

InEnduringGrowStrong,
@InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works avatar

By now I think in either, but not always the one I mean to speak in. So sometimes I’m looking for words in my native language and I only have the English one in mind.

CaspianXI,
@CaspianXI@lemmy.world avatar

“Bilingual” is really hard to define.

I live in Taiwan (English is my native language), and have studied Chinese to be passably fluent. I can trick people into thinking I can follow advanced conversations, interjecting comments here or there (even though I’m mostly lost – just picking out the tidbits I do understand and commenting on them).

But am I bilingual? At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. What matters the most is whether your level is “good enough” to do what you want! In my case, I just want to be able to go to the store, buy things, and hang out with friends. I can read the newspaper, but I’ll never be able to read/write business contracts – but that’s not a goal of mine.

There are so many different shades of bilingual. Don’t worry about it… and just be as good as you need to reach your goals!

RBWells,

I would say if you are both fluent and sometimes think in both languages (not translating when you talk) you are bilingual. So yes you are bilingual not ‘just fluent’, though in my opinion being fluent without visiting an English speaking country is quite an accomplishment.

cwagner,

being fluent without visiting an English speaking country is quite an accomplishment.

It helps if at the age of ~16 you start consuming only English media (books, movies, TV-shows), and are in many English online communities ;)

I would also like to thank the people who laughed at me and my friend for having German MtG cards when we were 10 years old, that was one huge boost to my vocabulary :D

LrdThndr,

Judging by the text of your post alone, you’re bilingual.

Had you not said that English wasn’t your first language, I, a native English speaker, would never have know.

meiti,

Fun observation: as a native, just like many natives, you have made a grammer mistake. “have known” and not “have know”. Might be a typo though.

My fun theory is that grammer is just a form of heuristic made up by humans to simplify understanding languages.

I’m not a native.

LrdThndr,

Ah, dammit. Yeah, that was a typo :).

Zagorath,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

you have made a grammer mistake

I love a good case of Muphry’s Law.

*grammar

Interesting_Test_814,

Muphry’s Law.

Was this one intentional ?

*Murphy’s Law

Zagorath,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

Intentional.

Interesting_Test_814,

TIL

meiti,

Haha good catch!

InEnduringGrowStrong,
@InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works avatar

I think there are even a few grammatical errors that native english speaking people are more likely to be doing that us folks who learned it as a second language.
When I see things like “should of”, “would of”, “for all intensive purposes” it’s usually coming from a native speaker.
I think someone who learned speaking the language before first and writing it second is more likely to make these.
I assimilated “should”, “have” and “of” before I really used contractions, so I never make that mistake.
It’s even somewhat jarring to read.
should of… of what?

Snowman44,

Different people have different standard of what it means to be fluent in a language. I would say that if you can comfortably have a casual conversation you’re fluent. If you’re fluent in 2 languages I would call that bilingual. You don’t have to be as good as a native speaker in both languages.

English is your second language and you typed a pretty long post in perfect grammar so I would say you’re bilingual.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • uselessserver093
  • Food
  • [email protected]
  • aaaaaaacccccccce
  • test
  • CafeMeta
  • testmag
  • MUD
  • RhythmGameZone
  • RSS
  • dabs
  • oklahoma
  • Socialism
  • KbinCafe
  • TheResearchGuardian
  • SuperSentai
  • feritale
  • KamenRider
  • All magazines
    •