Can you be fluent with a small vocabulary?

Open Forum in English
41

I like this idea of trying to define fluency. It helps keep me motivated to keep going!

For example for me if you give me something vague and say “Ok at some point a few years from now you will be fluent.” Well that doesn’t keep me motivated at all and motivation is huge for me if I want to invest countless hours of my life studying a language.

But if you tell me I can acheive fluency (at least on an input basis) around 40,000 words for example, then I have a clear goal and it’ll motivate me to achieve that goal. (I’m still wondering what that number actually is in french?)

I feel like I wasted a lot of time on these stupid begginer courses who lied to me and said I would be fluent after their course and after doing like five of these I was still a begginer. WASTE OF TIME! (well doing five is)

But after I finally decided to pay for lingq my learning feels like its progressing and I have a clear goal. (I suppose all these begginer courses weren’t a complete waste since I notice when I go through native level novels I usually check off twice as many words as opposed to how much I lingq)

I don’t like this idea of basic fluency though. It’s easy for me to flow and have a conversation in french for an hour with my tutor but that doesn’t compare to the real world in my opinion. Yeah we might talk about various topics but my tutor is just keeping the conversation going at this simple pace which isn’t native level.

But Fluency for me is:

  1. I want to be able to go to the movies with my fiancé in Québec city and watch a normal hollywood film in french! Or turn on the tv to any channel an enjoy all the jokes or solve a mystery.

  2. I want to be part of conversations when native Québécois are speaking amongst themselves!

I hope lingq will help me get there. I have a little over 18,000 french words but I’m definetely not fluent yet.

42

The challenge for learning Québécois might be finding good material for listening and reading. If you only work with materials in Standard French, you may become fluent in French but still not understand informal Québécois. Have you tried offqc.com or “Le québécois en 10 leçons” by Alexandre Coutu?

43

Yeah I actually do use both of those, they are excellent resources which have both been verified by my fiancé. I don’t think my biggest problem right now is so much a lack of vocabulary or québécois expressions (although I’m going to continue here on lingq to bring that up) My problem is being able to hear what people are saying when they speak rapidly, or when there’s five people talking all at once, or when someone is talking really soft and not enunciating. Then mix in all these filler words such as: “genre, faque, quand même, voyons, bin là…” it starts to get all mixed up and I lose the meaning of the story. Also I have the complete series 1 and 2 of the québécois show called “Les Parent” which I’ll be watching in the coming months. Hopefully this will allow me to reach my goals.