Shanghai Bob

With Chinese, I’m still at the rote memorization stage.  I was talking with Manny last night about techniques for learning dialogues by heart, and thinking about the long road from here to fluency.  How do you know when you are fluent in a language?  Many people answer that question by saying, “When you start dreaming in it.”  Can that be the right answer?

I’ve had dreams in which I can fly, but I don’t think that means that I really can fly, or even that I know what it would feel like to be a bird or Superman.  That’s part of the magic of dreams, you can have the feeling of doing something without the reality of it.

I have a stronger reason to doubt the dream hypothesis:  I’ve dreamt that I could speak Ancient Greek.  After six years of study, I can read Homer and the early Platonic dialogues with not much effort, but I can’t speak Ancient Greek.  And I had just started studying Greek in a summer intensive program when I had this dream, so I couldn’t even read that much without a dictionary.

I think that dreaming in a language is an indication that you are immersed in the language, but isn’t necessarily a sign of fluency.  I also think that you probably gain fluency in different domains more quickly.  Many gaijin are fluent in “Taxi Japanese”, and can get home from any part of the city, but many of them have no other Japanese language competence.

I began to suspect that I was gaining general fluency in Japanese the day I got on the train at Shinjuku station, then immediately jumped off when the conductor announced that it would be an express train (which skips my station).  I didn’t have time to reflect on or translate the announcement — I reacted to the words subconsciously.

In France, I met an apple farmer during a bike ride to Mont-Saint-Michel.  After some minutes of conversation, he asked if I were Breton.  No one would mistake me for French (there are not many 6′4″ blond Frenchmen), but to be mistaken for the Celtic minority of Bretagne made me realize my studying had paid off.

In Germany, a good comeback made me feel like I had reached a degree of fluency in everyday conversation.  I was in the student cafeteria (the Mensa), testing bottles of soda to find a cold one.  I finally took one from the back of the rack, and the server scolded me in German:  ”They are all the same!”  I replied without thinking, also in German:  ”Then it doesn’t matter which one I take, does it?”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 11:27 am and is filed under linguistics.