I don’t believe it’s true that the average native speaker has level B2. There might be many natives who don’t write very well, but (as our academic linguist friends always delight in telling us) language is primarily spoken. And when it comes to speaking a native is never going to be anything less than C2, in my opinion.
I suspect that one has to be completely immersed in a foreign language for decades - quite literally - in order to be fully native-like. There are non-natives here who write English to an excellent level, but I still ask myself whether they would have the full vocabulary range, the mastery of register and idiom, and all of the subtle nuances of a native? Only those who have been functioning continually in English and surrounded by English native speakers for a very long time most probably do this.
Of course, one can be pretty darned good in a foreign language (good enough to work in the language or to attend courses at university, say) without being remotely at native level. I know this from my time living in Germany - I could understand virtually everything and function without any real problems in the language. Yet nobody would have mistaken me for a native speaker in a thousand years!
I would say that the gap between C1 and C2 is massively greater than the gap between B2 and C1.
I largely agree. I’ve rarely met a non-native who spoke German in a way that he could be mistaken as a native. Even people with excellent German have problems with some phrases and expressions and you recognize that he is not native. I’ve listened to a podcast with Lucca and Steve. Lucca’s German is great but he missed some words that natives would definitely know. I’m not sure about my level in English, but I’m sure I would have to live for a long, long time in an English speaking environment to reach level C2, and still then people would recognize that I’m not a native.
Yes, the Dutch are definitely in their own class. Although, in part, they cheat: second language education begins very early, and English is linguistically very close to Dutch.
I have no idea what that test is about. But if it is an English proficiency exam then the reason why non native people score higher on it than natives may simply be that they are better at taking exams. A high score does not necessarily have a very high correlation with the person’s actual level of mastery, since test biases are inevitable and it is hard to improve the validity and reliability of a test. From my psychology class I learned that even SAT and GRE exams are doing poorly at predicting the future performance of students. I have seen a lot of Chinese memorizing huge amount of materials before English exams (even before oral exams when they would actually prepare and memorize answers beforehand to every possible question during the exam), and they get high scores when they do not have an equivalent command of English.
That’s interesting. I thought I heard somewhere that Germans said he sounded native-like. It’s always nice to get information from a direct source rather than hearsay. His English is excellent, however he doesn’t sound like a native to me, however he might sound like a native to non-natives.
His pronunciation is amazing. And all over all his German is outstanding. It was a longer discussion that Lucca had with Steve when I was able to here some things that Germans would not say. If you hear 2 or 3 sentences only, you could take him as a native. But not if you listen to a longer piece. The best German from a non native that I’ve heard was from David Martin. Even in long speeches I couldn’t hear a difference.