On Fluency

What is Fluency?

Fluency is a concept that's discussed a lot in the context of language learning, and it means many different things to different types of people. For some, it's a goal to reach when studying a language. When it comes to defining the word, however, you end up with a range of interesting considerations. For instance, I personally don't consider myself a fluent Chinese speaker, although I hope that will change at some point in the next year or so. That being said, I have had other people describe me as fluent, and although I disagree, I can see where they're coming from. I've spent significant time in Chinese-speaking countries, I can hold conversations in Chinese fairly well, I've dreamt in Chinese, and I sometimes use Chinese words reflexively without intending to switch languages. All of that seems characteristic of a fluent speaker, but when I watch Chinese videos, listen to Chinese music, read Chinese articles or social media posts online, etc, I still have issues with comprehension. I won't be able to parse the sounds or I won't know important characters. I think the point where I don't have that problem anymore is the point where I'll consider myself fluent. That criteria is very specific to my situation, however, so I'd also like to look at more objective criteria.

One easy way to define fluency is "proficient to a degree roughly comparable to a native speaker of the given language", and I think that is a good definition in many ways, but it also invites the question of "which native speaker?". An obvious consideration is age. The average Chinese person who's the same age as me absolutely speaks better Chinese than I do, but is the same true for a five-year-old? A five-year-old child whose native language is Mandarin will absolutely know less Chinese than me in many important ways. They don't have a lot of adult vocabulary, they can't yet read or write well, etc. I can say "努力工作能提高你的经济地位，但加班对你的心里和身体健康有不好的影响", and they likely could not. That being said, their Chinese is also much better than mine in other very important ways. As a native speaker, their brain is wired to operate using Chinese as a default. I've gotten much closer to that point in recent times, but there's still no possiblity that I ever truly switch my brain's default setting. I can learn to process things like grammar and syntax more automatically, but there's always a fundamental gap between myself and someone whose brain's language processing centers literally formed and built themselves up according to the rules of Chinese. Even in the example sentence above, I'm not sure what I wrote is grammatical. It could be "努力工作能提高你的经济地位，但加班有对你的心里和身体健康不好的影响" or some other word order. I know what the sentence means and I'm sure most Chinese native speakers would understand it, but the parts of my brain that handle grammar don't automatically know what's correct in the same way theirs do.

Outside of age, there's also the question of education. For example, the 80% of Chinese people prior to the 1950's could not read. It's inarguable that they were