Agree and I’d even push it further : Mastering a language has too many different dimensions to be able to really split them explicitly. And unfortunately, “Fluency” is an amalgam that try to define “a level sufficient to be native-like”. But unfortunately, all native don’t have the same mastery. For example, I’m learning Children of Dune right now in my mother tongue, french, and many words were completely unknown to me.
Things that I think we often forget :
- How culturally, words can be charged with emotion, meaning. Using the word “race” to describe skin color seems OK in english, in french talking about “race” is already quite extreme, we prefer using terms like “skin color”, “ethnicity”.
- How interactions works in a language. In English/French, it’s quite rude to make noises when someone talks to you. In Japanese, live-acknowleding seems way more natural (うん、そう…) even when your interlocutor is still speaking.
- How Formality / Politeness work together, and how many levels of them there is.
- How much energy in how you talk is too much energy, and what are the underlying signals you’re sending by doing so. Talking suddenly slowly and using more formal vocabulary can be a sign of aggression, even if you sound more calm and “polite” in how you chose your words.
And thus, why I think how we learn extra languages can’t be totally seen like learning your first language : We know some of those things, we know that languages also describe immaterial/abstract concepts, which, for our first language, we discovered alongside the language. Things like “The crimson sea echoed the tragedy of those who fell …” would not have been interpreted correctly when you were still a kid, even if someone explained the words to you.
But now that you’re an adult, a lot of abstract/immaterial things are already wired in your brain. That’s why I think things like しまう can be sometimes difficult to learn how to use at first, because there is so no 1:1 mapping with a concept we have in EN/FR.
To learn your first language, you had an “empty inner voice” that got filled at the same time you apprehended the world and the words people around you used to describe it. For the subsequent languages, based on how distant they are from the first one, more “dedicated effort” will be necessary to be able create new constructs (based on culture, social expectation, history, …) because no one will ever play the roles your parents played at first, when they made your “education” (teaching you those things)
So, just to summarize, I don’t disagree at all with anything that is said, but I like to really insist on why, for me, immersion might not be sufficient, especially when immersion is convoluted with “anime” or “tv shows”. Once again, I’ve been using english almost exclusively for the ~15 past years on the internet, consuming EN-only content and worked for 3 years in a multinational environment, but when I visit an US state where accents are strong, I always feel like I’m a novice in terms of english fluency.
