What does it mean to “master” a foreign language?
I was reading an interesting discussion in a research paper today. It turns out there is a term “native-like”. Some people are native speakers, some are “native-like”.
“….how will we be really ‘mastering’ a language or be fluent like someone whose grandmother was singing lullabies in English? Will we be able to wake up from anaesthesia in English? Will we be saying” ouch’ when it hurts or dream in English as well? Is the criteria only ‘academic’ when it comes to achieving native or native-like mastery ?”
”Academic” criteria rely on the amount of words a person knows and mastery of grammar rules:
“Estimates on the number of words a native speaker might know to vary a lot but an educated person may know around 20,000-word families and possibly 50,000 individual words, which out of the approximately 1,000,000 words in the English language, is not very many. I would expect many native speakers to know far less than that and many non-native speakers to know almost that many”.
Good pronunciation alone is not enough:
“I am sure that pronunciation is not sufficient for mastery, since I can pronounce (repeat) anything I can hear in any language, whether or not I have ever heard it before (the African languages with clicks in them are the hardest for me, since I have not heard anything like them enough) — if I hear a few phrases, I can pronounce them correctly — that means that I am often mistaken for fluent when I am not, and I am very very far from a master”.
People are the best indicators.
“If after a long conversation native speakers are convinced that you are a native speaker of their language, you’ve probably mastered that language”.
Another crucial criteria is the ability to THINK in a foreign language:
“When a person is able to think in the second language and changes from one to the other without difficulty, he/she has mastered the second language well. The ability to write creatively in the second language can illustrate that the person has mastered the language well enough. Pronunciation can be misleading, especially for English speakers. In many parts of the world native English speakers have completely different pronunciation/dialects of the language, but those who speak English as a second language often have complete mastery of the written language although their pronunciation may vary from Oxford English”.
Most English native speakers, though, find it very difficult to master pronunciation of other languages, especially names, and just change words to sound English even if it changes the meaning totally.
Cultural aspect is often overlooked when academics argue.
I am convinced that mastering a foreign language means developing a skill to effortlessly operate in a different cognitive system, to easily switch between systems and to be able to make meaningful connections with real people who understand different jokes, who grew up watching different cartoons and who wanted to be an unknown superhero (to me) when they were little.
It’s all about giving a lot of effort effortlessly.