The Beginning and Fluency
The beginning to the story of mastering my first foreign language.
Six months ago, my wife and I moved to the wonderful nation of Turkey. I’ll spare you the details here about why we moved. If you are interested, you can read (and listen) to our story at our other website.
Linguistics have always been interesting to me. If I had to go back and study a different subject in college, I would study linguistics. So learning a foreign languages has been on my list of things I’ve wanted to do. Or let me say that knowing a foreign language. I do have a natural proclivity towards language learning, I know that this process wasn’t going to be easy.
The goal of this blog is to track my progress and the lessons I learn over the next months and years with trying to master the Turkish language.
Fluency
Every journey needs a destination. When people talk about learning a language the goal is usually fluency; which often means “speaking like a native”.
However a better definition of fluency is:
Fluency is being able to accomplish, with minimal difficulty, everything that you want to do.
Even uneducated natives speakers are able to have in-depth conversations about everything from medicine and politics to philosophy and technology. But if you are never going to have deep conversations about religion or medicine, there is a whole lot of vocabulary that you never need to learn.
If learning these things aren’t essential to living the life that you want to live in the language, they aren’t included in your definition of fluency — even if they would be in mine.
This is the goal that I’m shooting for; to be able to live my normal life comfortably in Turkish.
And even if it’s a lesser goal than the dictionary’s definition of fluency — it’s still an ambitious goal.
