When you learn a language, at what point would you say you've made it, that you "know" the language? Is it when you're at a C Level, is it when you can interact with people in it? Is it when you can talk about philosophical concepts in it? Do you have different goals for different languages?

I know 3 languages. In order of fluency: English, Cebuano/Bisaya, and Tagalog. So I am multilingual.

I am learning Classical Latin, and everytime I feel exhausted I would read through some posts in language learning communities.

I read one post about how it actually takes years of consistent study to be able to be considered "fluent", not to mention the expectation of being college-level in a language in the span of 3 years or less being common is absurd, when native speakers are immersed day and night for probably 18 years to reach that point.

I saw then a controversial comment, that being no one is truly fluent at 3 languages or more. That made me wonder.

I can spell in Tagalog and I have an instinctive sense for proper agglutination, and I can understand anything on TV (which is in Tagalog), but when I write essays for school subjects in Tagalog I am often at a loss for the precise or deeper words I specifically want so I would use a thesaurus or google translate and find the equivalent of a word I know in english. I can write without them but it takes me a while to find the specific words. And I can't speak in it at a fast pace.

I can talk to others in Bisaya, but I probably suck at spelling in it because we don't have a subject for it at school, though it is the primary language of where I live. Not to mention I have never actually encountered any complex compositions in it of any sort until I was in university, where we had a yearly Art & Literary school journal. However, I usually don't see anyone else care about spelling in this language on texts or in facebook.

For English I was tested and got a score of C2. I read old literature, classic literature, novels, journals, fanfiction, poetry, and I can understand multiple registers and english dialects.

I would say I'm fluent in English and Bisaya, but my Bisaya is far behind from my English. As for Tagalog, I wouldn't say I'm at a native level but I could use it and write in it. As for my current Target Language, I hope to be able to write about my life and thoughts in Latin on my journal as well as I could in English.

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[–] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I considered myself a Spanish speaker after having conversations with people that don't speak English (in my case, while travelling). Am I good or fluent? No, but I could get by ok. Before that, people would ask me if I spoke it and I'd just answer, "Idk, I know a little".

Another milestone was making it through a paperback novel, without doing constant lookups. Sure I didn't understand fully, but I got the gist. Then again, I can still watch tv in the language and barely understand what's going on, so I have a long way yet to go.

I heard a language teacher on Youtube once explain that he moved to Japan, interviewed for a job in Japanese (and got it), but still couldn't understand it when overhearing other people have a conversation. Maybe that's a standard, when you can effortlessly eavesdrop on native speakers who aren't trying to dumb it down for you, lol.

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