How many books should you read to become fluent in a second language?

[LovesMacs]

The topic question begs another question, what does fluent really mean? I dream in French (not always, but at least once a week), can read Proust without a dictionary, and accomplish all my daily needs in French but I don't feel completely fluent.

Originally Posted by kacir

If you think about it, such books would be unknown to general public in UK or USA, because there is little need to provide such type of learning material. The general public in UK or USA already can speak (and read) English, don't they?

There are sizable populations within the United States who speak English at a limited level. I imagine that some books would be produced for English as a Second Language learners but they would probably have to be ordered rather than purchased in local stores.

I have occasionally seen some paperback books of simple/simplified French books (Candide is an example) with facing English translation or with definitions at the bottom of the page.

Originally Posted by kacir

In previous posts (or was it in another thread? ;-) ) somebody mentioned that there is organization specifically for promoting French language,

Look up "Alliance française". I know they have them around the world and they offer lessons but I don't know what the cost is. There had been a thread on MobileRead several months ago (before I registered) that mentioned one affiliated site offering an ebook lending library.

[ficbot]

Freeshadow, it's not just about caring and respect. I am a teacher and we had training in this; it was emphasized that a student should always be called what they prefer to be called. And yet, twice in my teaching career, I was faced with students who had names which were simply not pronounceable to English speakers. They contained sounds that we simply could not produce. I worked very hard on one of them, a little Russian girl who didn't speak English at all. I felt so bad for her because she didn't understand a thing we said---including her name. At the time, I was tutoring a child from this background and I asked about the name. She spent almost half an hour trying to work on it with me and she kept saying 'not quite, but very close. Not quite...' I just could not produce the sound the way she did.

This was the point I was making above. Someone said why should it be so hard to learn when tiny children do it, and I suggested a reason why it really might be so hard. It would be the same as if I said to you I came from a culture where ESP was prevalent and it was a matter of respect that you use ESP to read my mind. It is a matter of respect to TRY, but you just might not be able to do it. I am not being disrespectful to my Norwegian student by coming from a linguistic background which does not have a vowel that sounds like a bird chirping. What I *should* do is ask the mother what her baby is called. If she says 'her name in Norwegian is YYY but you can call her XXX' then that is fine, no?

[Freeshadow]

ficbot, I think it is. Sorry. it seems i came over harder than intended. It might be, because AFAIR, the cases I of being completely incapable of producing foreign language phonemes I read about were quite rare. As in Bushman dialects tried by European speakers.
Never wanted to insult you and hope not to accidentally managed to succeed at.

Just out of curiosity: what were the names of the girls?

[Laney is here]

Originally Posted by kacir

I heard that French speaking Canadians are very ... enthusiastic ... supporters of French language.

LOL! Yes, we are! We have to, we're surrounded in a sea of English!

[ficbot]

Thanks for clarifying, Freeshadow. The names of the girls were Ksenia and Tirel. I did okay with the 'Ks' even though most of my colleagues didn't, but I pronounced the e like 'ay' and kept getting told that was not *quite* right. Most of the other staff called her Ka-senee-ya which, from what my tutoring student's mother told me, is not right at all.

As for Tirel, it's t-long ee-r-bird chirp sound, but we may call her teer-ee-al :-)

[Laney is here]

Originally Posted by ficbot

'her name is [bird chirp noise] but you may call her Angloversion.'

That sounds adorable!

[aceflor]

Originally Posted by mbovenka

Neither can most native speakers, in my experience .

They can tell you something is right or wrong, but why it is? I am Dutch, and was taught grammar in both primary and secondary school, but I remember very little of it. A wrong sentences grates, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what grammar rule it violates. It's just 'wrong'.

Same with English. I am C2 level certified (Cambridge Proficiency) and I can tell you whether a sentence is correct English or not. But don't ask me to explain why; I probably won't be able to tell you. It just 'feels' right or wrong.

My point exactly ! I am French, and I guess I can say I am fluent in English and German (British Dad, German husband and 20 years in Germany), level C1 in Spanish (certified by the Instituto Cervantes). My best grammar level is in German. I do not make grammatical mistake at all in French nor in German, but with German, I can explain to native speaker WHY they've just made one, because I know the rules perfectly well. It is getting there now with Spanish too, I can correct my kids, the plumber and so on. And I can explain the rule. In French I obviously see the mistakes, but most of the time I have to refer to either my Bescherelle or my Bled to explain to my kids why a certain declination of the verb, or a certain tense cannot be used the way they do. For French, Bescherelle and Bled (google those, they are our grammatical bibles) belong to every good house library.

My point is : some (many?) native speakers have either a rotten level of grammtical knowledge, or cannot explain how their language is structured. Neither can kids, which explain why they may learn to speak and read a new language "on the go", but writing it is a whole different story. I am observing my two kids, 8 and 11, already fully bilingual in French and German, learning Spanish and English. Their conversational level just baffles me, but I still do need to help a lot with the written homeworks. But hey, in the end they will be at least bilingual plus two more fluent languages, so I am not complaining.

[Yapyap]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Interesting facts about the cases. Finish/Hungarian/Estonian are not usually on most people's radar screen, but known to be difficult. Strange though, since these are languages of Asian origin.

I don't know if "Asian origin" is really applicable here - Finno-Ugric languages, as the other Uralic languages, are believed to originate from somewhere in the Ural mountains region - which is the dividing line between Europe and Asia - and don't have much in common with either the main Asian language families or the Indo-European language family, although there may be some distant relationships with certain other (non-Uralic) Siberian language families.

It's interesting to me that it seems grammar isn't something that gets taught properly to native speakers in most countries. We got thorough grammar lessons from first year of school until the end, in Estonian as well as in all the foreign languages we had to learn (in my school I also had to learn Russian and English from first year onwards and then either German or French and either Swedish, Norwegian or Finnish later on in addition).

Knowing the basics of grammar in your own language - the rules, the structure of the language, the relationships between different parts of sentences, etc - is really helpful when learning other languages, in my experience.

[wyndslash]

reading books in the languages that i'm studying is a daunting task sadly, immersion is perhaps the most effective way. but that takes money. so i'm hunting for a penpal.

or if i could get a german-japanese friend, that'd be great too

as it is, i'm using Lang-8 on the web.

[DMB]

Originally Posted by Soldim

I tried Hugo -- limited is not word that seems to apply to his vocabulary -- however, mine....

Ha! Ha! The first full-length French book I ever read was Les Misérables. I was inspired to read it after seeing the film that starred Jean Gabin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWF4FucGtIY

I waded through the book in about a fortnight, spending several hours a day on it and making great use of a dictionary.

[DMB]

I once spent an hour trying to teach a French girl how to pronounce the English month name "August". It was a failure. She could get the "au" or the "ust", but never both together. When I first began to use everyday French I had horrible difficulties pronouncing words that contained "roi". I used to frequent a café called "Les Trois Rois". It always seemed to come out as "Les tra ra" or "Les twa wa". And then there was the problem of combining different "u" sounds with "r"s as in "une livre de prunes rouges". They would always be either "prunes ruges" or "prounes rouges".

[MrWarper]

Just a quick go... too many points to address, too little time to do it.

First I'm coding a little program to easily produce 2- or 3-column parallel texts for language learning. If anyone's interested just drop me a note.

Now languages... in many countries, language 'grammar' is not taught at all so it can't be learnt as such. In those where it is, most natives quickly forget it just like they forget most of what they're taught at school -- because they don't see any practical value to it. I happened to see how it strengthened my language knowledge and skills from the get-go (my first 'grammar' memories -- I was maybe 5) so I never resented it. Needless to say, a great deal of it was immensely practical when I started learning foreign languages so I consider it essential if only because it's such a big time saver. Same goes for phonetics which I wasn't taught at the time but in retrospective I can tell you it's just as useful as grammar for foreign language learning. Unfortunately it's not evident to most people how useful such things are.
In the same vein, nowadays a lot of foreign language teaching is done by natives (only reason they're hired, apparently) with the thinnest of knowledges, albeit with only a semblance of formal training which unfortunately actually involves none to just very little of the above. I know because I am one such certified teacher, except that I wasn't native. In comparison, extremely little of what I know I've learned during my 'formal' training -- since you can't effectively teach what you don't know inside out, that clearly accounts for the currently 'sucky', poor state of FL teaching.
@ficbot: vocal cords are speech support structures 'only'; granted you can't speak without them, but you don't use them to make most of the differences between sounds -- that you do with your tongue, jaw, lips, etc. so maybe (I don't think so but won't argue here) human speech really gets calcified after a while, but it's not because of the vocal cords, if anything it would be about untrained mouth movements or maybe neural patterns.

For those interested, there's an awesome forum about language learning called 'how to learn any language' where I've been posting for a couple of years now.

[DMB]

Originally Posted by MrWarper

For those interested, there's an awesome forum about language learning called 'how to learn any language' where I've been posting for a couple of years now.

Thanks for the link. It looks interesting.

[SleepyBob]

What is C1/C2 certified that people keep talking about?

[aceflor]

Originally Posted by SleepyBob

What is C1/C2 certified that people keep talking about?

They are the European Norms used to assess the level of knowledge for a language. They were put together by the Council of Europe. Here the Wikipedia with more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_..._for_Languages

Those codes are broadly referred to in Europe, and any language school, language learning literature or even private tutors will use them.

Here the short definition for each level:

A Basic User:
A1 Breakthrough or beginner
A2 Waystage or elementary

B Independent User:
B1 Threshold or intermediate
B2 Vantage or upper intermediate

C Proficient User
C1 Effective Operational Proficiency or advanced
C2 Mastery or proficiency

After that.... well, you're on your own !