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

[SleepyBob]

Thanks!

[Freeshadow]

C2 is called native speaker Level and expected Level of profitiiency from translators and interpreters

[aceflor]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

C2 is called native speaker Level and expected Level of profitiiency from translators and interpreters

Sorry, but I have to contradict you here. Nope, C2 is not native speaker level. Native speaker is, as it says, someone who is originally from the country and learned the language as first language. Hence "native".
I speak fluent German, I do translations and have been interpreting in international meetings for the Embassy or here for the Consulate, but I am not a native speaker. I am a French native speaker, but not a German one. A native speaker has no accent for instance. I never wrote "German native speaker" in my CV, that would be a lie. I am a French native speaker and fluent in German in English.

The levels A1 to C2 are used to assess your level for a foreign language.

But C2 is a very good level, and it is called proficiency because it means that in any given situations, very complex and challenging ones, the person will be able to converse, read, write without any difficulties.

[Kumabjorn]

Being on the phone this will be brief.
Grammar; It is the language of languages, we need it to describe and explain, without knowledge of grammar the learner will be limited to certain patterns and unable to be "creative" in a foreign language.

[pholy]

My recollection of the infant language learning experiments is that babies around 12 to 15 months (maybe less) can distinguish a full range of language sounds - they can't reproduce any of them reliably yet. Some time after that they become unable to distinguish sound that are not phonemic (create distinct meanings) in their cradle language(s). Then they become able to create speech. It seems it's a matter of not hearing (noticing) the sounds of foreign languages. I would say that if you can't hear it you can't say it.
Singers get training in hearing and reproducing the sounds of foreign languages. Our choir director has english as her fourth language, and doesn't see why we shouldn't sing songs in whatever language they were written in. Our last concert had nearly half a dozen languages; that can get confusing. Not that we understand what we are singing, but we do try to get the pronunciations right.

[martienne]

Hard question to answer because it depends on how you quantify "fluent" and how you, as a reader deal with unfamiliar expressions and words that you come across while reading in a foreign language.

It also depends on your learning style and how fast you learn. Different people learn languages at different speeds and find certain aspects harder or easier - there are many aspects to language learning: Grammar, vocabulary, word order, expressions, pronununciation. Books do nothing for the latter, for example.

Lots of us here have a different mothertongue than English as you can probably guess from the Location field. We have at some point learnt English as a foreign language.

I'd say, if you got through and managed to enjoy reading about 15 books in a given foreign language, then you are probably fluent enough to be able to communicate with a native speaker without any major obstacles. How accurate your grammar and vocubular is, is another story.

Finally, French is one of the easiest languages that you, as a native English speaker could have chosen so you have every opportunity to reach your goal.
.

[Conor]

I see there is a series of bi-lingual crossword puzzle books. Has anyone here tried one? http://www.amazon.co.uk/Websters-Eng...158738&sr=1-33

[martienne]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Learn some Asian languages, like Chinese. They don't have tenses. You just add something like "yesterday" or "tomorrow", they also have a simple word that you can add to a sentence to indicate that everything happened in the past. Europeans have build up these hugely complicated grammatical structures that are not really necessary for understanding. You only start to realize that once you step outside of that circle.

How interesting! I speak (as foreign languages) English, French and Russian. I know a fair bit of a few other languages, but I would not quantify that as "fluent".

They certainly all have past and future, but it's interesting that the Easternmost one of these, Russian, has less complex tenses; they stick with just one for past, one for future.
But it's extremely complex in several other respects.

I'm a big fan of Esperanto (don't speak it, just love the idea) i.e. a language made up to have simple grammar, no exceptions and words with a Germanic, Roman or Slavic origin. We should drop English in the EU and use Esperanto instead. Fairer on everyone, nobody is at an advantage or disadvantage and no need to wast years of your life perfecting your English like many are forced to do. You can reach the same level in Esperanto on 1/5 of the time, apparently.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by martienne

How interesting! I speak (as foreign languages) English, French and Russian. I know a fair bit of a few other languages, but I would not quantify that as "fluent".

They certainly all have past and future, but it's interesting that the Easternmost one of these, Russian, has less complex tenses; they stick with just one for past, one for future.
But it's extremely complex in several other respects.

Even in English it's probably more common to show future time by using present tense plus a time marker rather than by actually using future tense. "I'm going to the store tomorrow" is present tense (am going) but expresses future time; "I will go to the store tomorrow" is future tense.

It is kind of weird that we can't do this for past time: if "I am eating pizza" means I'm eating it now, and "I am eating pizza tomorrow" means I'll be eating it tomorrow, why can't we say "I am eating pizza yesterday" to show that we ate pizza yesterday?

I'm a big fan of Esperanto (don't speak it, just love the idea) i.e. a language made up to have simple grammar, no exceptions and words with a Germanic, Roman or Slavic origin. We should drop English in the EU and use Esperanto instead. Fairer on everyone, nobody is at an advantage or disadvantage and no need to wast years of your life perfecting your English like many are forced to do. You can reach the same level in Esperanto on 1/5 of the time, apparently.

I'm not really a fan of Esperanto, although I did learn a bit in HS. But I think that there are a couple of problems with it.

The first is that it is based on a false premise - that it is important to have an artificial language so that no one is at a "disadvantage" when speaking with a native speaker. The reality, though (and this may not have been the case when the language was developed in 1870-80) is that most people who've learned English as a second language have learned it to speak with people who have also learned it as a second language. That is, people in Sweden learn English so that they can speak to the Greek hotelier while on vacation in that country, and not particularly because they have a need to speak to Americans or British.

The idea of the "disadvantage" doesn't really hold up to scrutiny anyway. If I'm on vacation in Brussels and speak English to the French speaking waitress or hotel operator, there is no advantage of disadvantage in the conversation - I'm not going to get a cheaper room or a free dessert because I might speak English better. There is no competition going on where that would be a meaningful term: we are both just trying to communicate, and me asking if they have a room with a double bed is no different in English than it would be in Esperanto. (And of course to the extent I don't speak French, I'm at a disadvantage because I can't understand what the staff is saying among themselves).

The same lack of advantage/disadvantage would be true if I met someone at a coffee shop who didn't speak English and wanted to communicate with her - there is no competition, just an attempt to communicate.

Although none of this really matters - the actual reality is that English is already the world's lingua franca, and no one is going to really go for the idea of adopting a *second* lingua franca, particularly when English seems to be working quite well as such. (Although this, too, was not true in 1880, where you still needed to know German for science, English for business, French for international affairs, and where the one common second language had not yet been decided on.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Even in English it's probably more common to show future time by using present tense plus a time marker rather than by actually using future tense. "I'm going to the store tomorrow" is present tense (am going) but expresses future time; "I will go to the store tomorrow" is future tense.

I'm not sure, but I think the former is a common contraction of "I am going to (go to the store) tomorrow", where (go to the store) can be replaced by any action. I'm not sure that the contraction is grammatically correct, but it's a lot less clumsy and it's unambiguous, so most use it.

[Ansileran]

So many questions here...

On the number of books, well, there is no set number. If you want to reach and maintain full fluency, you should read and never stop reading in said language. Because once you stop... I remember my oboe teacher saying "for each day you don't practice, you loose one day of practice". It's the same with languages: for each day you don't practice, you loose what you gained on a day of practice.

For books in French, it depends what you want to read and your level of proficiency. Books for teenagers use grammatical structures and words that are easier to understand but they also use a lot of slang, which can make them harder for foreigners. They are not as useful to progress... but it's still a good start. For classics, I like Zola, especially the first volumes of the "Rougon-Macquart" series which are much shorter than the well-known ones. Short stories by Mérimée and Maupassant can be great and not too hard to read.

I'm curious about French books sold in Canada. Are they "proper" French or Canadian French (no offense intended, I call "proper" French the French spoken in Metropolitan France, same as "proper" English is British English to me, not American English) ? Because it's quite different. I remember seeing a Canadian movie last year and only needing subtitles when they were speaking... French ^^

Grammar isn't essential to get a basic level, that's what I keep telling my students. If you say "Je aller cinema hier" ("I go movie theater yesterday") people will still understand what you mean. It's not correct but it gets the meaning across. I would feel compelled to correct the sentence though ^^. If you want to speak properly, there are a few tenses you absolutely need :
- "présent" (present) of course: "je vais au cinéma" (I'm going to the movie theater)
- "passé composé" (past tense / preterite used for actions) to tell what you did in the past (yesterday for example): "hier, j'ai été au cinéma" (yesterday, I went to the movie theater)
- "imparfait" (past tense used for descriptions) to indicate a past setting: "hier, pendant que j'étais au cinéma..." (yesterday, while I was at the movie theater)
- "futur (simple)" (futur): "demain, j'irai au cinéma" (tomorrow, I'll go to the movie theater)

Those are only "indicatif" mode. To speak properly, you also need "conditionnel" (both "présent" and "passé" standard forme) and "subjonctif" ("présent" and "passé composé", don't bother with "imparfait" or "plus-que-parfait" unless you really want to master French conjugaison).

The literary tense have their uses, they just aren't usually explained by teachers (and many teachers don't know them ). It's something about linguistic precision and culture which makes it almost unbearable to read a book written in French using the present tense: a book tells a story. To be able to tell the story, it needs to have already happened so it should be written using past tense. The point of view however isn't in the present but in the moment the story happens so "passé composé" is also awkward. This is the reason why we use "passé simple" + "imparfait". But then we need other tenses to tell about things that happened in the past from the story's point of view: "passé antérieur" and "plus-que-parfait". And of course the corresponding "subjonctif" and "conditionnel"... Also don't forget future told from a past point of view: "futur antérieur".