🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan25.112426.1@unca.edu>, bthurman@unca.edu writes:
> since the term 'fluency' seems so subjective, it has been my practice in
> dealing with students who ask "are you fluent in greek?" or the like to reply:
> sometimes, especially when i'm over there, persons will come and speak to me in
> greek in my dreams.  if a person dreams, one may suppose that one could be
> approaching fluency when this happens.
> would welcome critique of this as a response, if reasons accompany response.
> thanks, bearded Bill Thurman

One thing that has often occurred to me is that fluency is a rather
useless indicator of a person's command of a language, at least in
view of what we normally think of as "command of a language."  We've
all known people who can babble away with great ease in a language
they are butchering wildly.  They have either simply lost their
inhibition without gaining command, or have internalized what I guess
ESL theorists call an "interlanguage."

Conversely we've all known careful and hesitating speakers who rarely
make a grammatical mistake (probably because it matters to them), and
we might want to allow that these are very compentent speakers but not
fluent ones.

As for dreaming in a language or of a language, in the 60s I ran into
mystically inclined romantics who were convinced they understood
Sanskrit in their dreams or while they were under the influence, but
I'm here to say they did not...!

-Ken
-- 
miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu | Nobody can explain everything to everybody.
opinions are my own      | G. K. Chesterton