[MUSIC]
Hi, there language learning aficionados.
This is Keith Swayne at Five Arrows again.
I've been talking in my previous videos about the difference
between proficiency and achievement or proficiency and fluency.
Today, I wanna talk about different levels of proficiency and what those look like.
When you think of yourself speaking another language,
you'll find some of these descriptions are helpful to peg the level at
which you are able to perform certain tasks in a language.
When people are learning languages, they always move through
a particular series of levels of skill and this is very helpful.
When I have people joining our classes,
I asked them to take a look at a chart on a website which I'm gonna be referring to.
You'll see my eyes looking over on other parts of my computer screen here as I look
at some of the descriptions.
But I ask students to take a look and see what describes them the best.
With a chart like the one that's on my website,
you're able to figure out exactly what level you're at.
It also helps you figure out what you need to do or
what you need to be able to do in order to speak at a new proficiency level.
So if you're a beginner in Polish,
what would it look like if you were an intermediate speaker of Polish?
And what should you be doing in order to reach that next level?
It hardly matters what you study or what kind of a program you use.
You will progress in the same order of development.
So let's take a look at a few of these.
And again, as I said, I'm referring to something else on my screen.
First, let me talk about the very first level of proficiency and
this is describing something between absolute beginners and a novice.
There's various levels of novice, but an absolute beginner is a person who doesn't
really have any ability at all in their target language and that's fine.
That's the starting point for everyone at some point including in English.
That's where you're at, but a person who studies a new
language will soon move to a novice level of proficiency.
And a high novice level speaker of a new language can use maybe 50 or
100 words in their new language, they're able to do some really basic things.
They're able to survive in the most predictable situations
by using rehearsed words and phrases.
There can't be any surprises for a novice.
And if there are any surprises, they are quickly lost.
It doesn't take very long to move from the novice level to the intermediate level.
And an intermediate student of a new language looks very
different from a novice.
An intermediate student can start a conversation and end one,
can order food from a menu, can tell time and the days of the week and the dates.
An intermediate student is able to make purchases in their target language.
Maybe get directions on foot or in a vehicle, can introduce themselves and
get some personal information about the person they're speaking with.
And they are able to distinguish between formal and informal address if
you're speaking Spanish or French, or Portuguese, or something.
You'll know there's a difference between the way that you speak to somebody that
you know well and somebody you don't.
They're able to maintain very simple face to face
conversations with lots of mistakes, that's fine.
But now, they're beginning to function this language.
That is an intermediate student.
But again, they're looking at predictable uses of the language.
What you'll find is that the time that it takes you to move from a novice to
an intermediate is doubled when you go from intermediate to advanced.
And when you move from advanced to advanced plus or to superior or
to distinguished levels of proficiency, each level takes twice as long or
more than the previous level.
So that's helpful.
So sometimes you'll say, I feel like I'm at a plateau in my target language.
That's completely normal.
It just takes longer to get to the next level of proficiency.
And keep going, you're gonna do fine.
It's impossible to keep working on your languages and not become bilingual if
you're just following a few basic rules, and that's another video to come up.
Let's talk about advanced levels of proficiency.
An advanced student, this is not a perfect speaker of the language.
And sometimes when people are calling me about advanced Spanish classes or
French classes, they'll say I don't know if I'm advanced,
because they're freaked out by the term advanced.
Advanced doesn't mean perfect.
Advanced means someone who has a pretty good idea of how the language works.
If you are an advanced student, you have probably worked through some kind of
a textbook and you know the basic structures of your language,
does it have genders like masculine and feminine.
How did the verbs work?
What's roughly the word order?
Are there any weird sounds in this language?
You got a picture, it doesn't mean that you've mastered everything or
even that all the things that you studied and
maybe tried to memorize that you can use them perfectly.
That's a different thing, but advanced means you've got a handle on it.
Your pronunciation is always intelligible.
It's not perfect.
You might be easily recognized as a native speaker of something else.
It means that you could exchange a basic message over the phone.
Generally speaking,
you can understand maybe 80% of what's going on in a simple conversation.
And the people who are speaking with you can understand 80% of what you're saying,
but there's still mistakes and there's still difficulties.
There's still challenges.
The communication works when you're at advanced level.
So when you're at an intermediate level, you can survive.
This is what we mean when we say things like I can get by in.
I can get by in Greek.
It means I can survive.
I could handle basic situations.
I can combine the words and phrases that I've learned before to get my way around,
and it's far from perfect, and sometimes it's really confusing.
That's intermediate.
Advanced means I can have a conversation and
I might not pass myself off as a native speaker.
In fact, I can't quite at that level, but I don't need a predictable situation.
If I run into somebody who speaks my target language, we can talk for
a half an hour in connected discourse.
Meaning, sentence after sentence without large pauses and hesitation.
And sure, you stop and you look for a word and you mix up your word order and you say
some things that aren't quite right and maybe make an embarrassing mistake.
That's still at an advanced level, but getting beyond an advanced level
means that you're able to perhaps work in your target language,
that you don't avoid certain features of a language.
I know when I was learning Spanish, one of the things that I did early on is I would
talk in the present tense all the time.
Everything was as if it's happening now and
then I'd add in some words like yesterday, I'm going downtown.
Two years ago, I am talking with my friends and I'm doing this and that.
So I was avoiding certain structures and I know that a lot of my advanced students in
Spanish will avoid the subjunctive, because it's so different from English.
When you get to a superior level in your target language,
then you don't avoid certain grammatical features.
Another thing that differs between advanced and superior.
Sometimes even when you're an advanced level in language,
I know that this has happened to me.
You start a sentence and you get halfway through it and you think, no,
I can't finish this sentence.
No matter what I do, I don't know how I'm gonna find a way around this.
At a superior level, you can finish any sentence you start.
Sometimes in an advanced level, you can't finish it in anyway that you thought of.
And you have to step back and say, okay, how will I say this in some other way?
Can I paraphrase this?
Can I find some other way around?
Can I draw a picture on a napkin to get the job done?
That's called circumlocution.
Talking my way around what I was trying to say directly, but
a superior student can complete any sentence.
They can participate in a conversation between native speakers.
Sometimes when we're speaking with native speakers,
they adjust the way that they talk.
Because they recognize that we're not really all the way there yet and
they'll slow it down a little bit, and
keep their word choices a little bit simple or simpler.
But when you are at a superior level,
the people you're talking with don't adjust their language at all.
Some people who speak your target language don't know how to talk to foreigners and
that makes it really difficult for you if you're at an intermediate level, and
sometimes even if you're in an advanced level.
But at a superior level, you might not catch everything.
But you're okay talking with native speakers in the way that
they usually talk.
You're able to understand the information over the phone.
You're able to take notes when you're listening to somebody talking
the language.
You're able to communicate clearly with a group of people,
even on professional subjects.
There's some technical subjects other than just sort of the day to day stuff.
You're able to get through common blunders and mistakes.
That's super helpful.
Learning how to handle the problem if you can't finish a sentence or
if you don't know how to say something and
you've really blown it knowing how to handle that.
A superior student is able to understand conversations between native speakers and
can serve as an interpreter for people who don't speak that target language.
Again, it might not be quite perfect.
But at a superior level, your knowledge of your native language and
your target language is good enough that you can handle exchanges for
other people and you're able to carry out job responsibilities.
You could actually work in your target language.
There's another level yet,
which is the distinguished level of language proficiency.
This is a person who practically never makes mistakes in the target language,
is always understood by native speakers when they're talking with them.
A distinguished speaker is able to understand jokes and puns.
That's a tricky thing, when you can understand jokes and puns spontaneously
without preparation, without reading them in advance or something.
And somebody's making a joke or wordplay and you can follow it.
A distinguished person is able to convey exact meanings on various subjects,
including professional things and talking about feelings and opinions and
that sort of thing.
It's one thing to be able to explain anything that happens in your life in
tangible, physical objects.
But when you start talking about your feelings and emotions and your opinions
about politics or the way your business should run, that's a higher level yet.
That's more what we would call distinguished proficiency.
There is a significant understanding of target language culture and
that's one thing that is really important to your development in
proficiency in your target language.
A distinguished speaker is also able to adjust their speech to
accommodate whatever situation they're in.
So for example, if you are involved in explaining a legal position before
a judge, you talk differently than the way that you talk with
your buddies when you're having a coffee in the coffee shop.
There is a different register.
Register is a reference to a level of formality.
A distinguished speaker recognizes that and adjusts.
A native level speaker is,
this is the holy grail of language students and we all hope to get there.
The real truth is that as adults,
most of us will not become native level proficient in a foreign language.
Although some of us get pretty close, depending on how early we started and
our motivation level and the amount of time that we put into it.
And of course, if you take my classes,
you have a better chance than whatever else you're doing.
But native level proficiency means that you are treated
like a native by outside speakers.
You're in a conversation and you're one of the gang.
They don't adjust things to treat you as a foreigner.
You feel more or less at home in your target language as you do in English and
sometimes you feel you're at home more when you're speaking your second language
than your first language.
You're really an insider at this point.
Another test, this is a tricky one.
If you can do mental math in your target language, if you can sit there and
do calculations in your head in your target language.
Wow, you've really accomplished something, because that is not a simple task and
most language students can't do that.
When you are a native speaker,
that's when you would say that you are completely bilingual and bicultural.
You function in this language just like your own language.
In real life for most of us as language students we're somewhere
else on the proficiency scale other than native level.
If you grew up with two languages, if you're the the child of a missionary or
if you were a diplomat's kid in another country and
grew up with a couple of languages, then it's very possible that you might be very,
very native like in in two or more languages.
But if you're a person like me who grew up in a mono lingual home and
spoke only English in your home and then started to pick up languages.
Especially as an adult as I did,
then you're probably somewhere else in the proficiency scale.
And of course, your proficiency in various languages will be different.
In some languages, you'll have a high level of proficiency.
And in other languages, it will be lower.
But it's very helpful for describing your language skill.
And when you're talking with somebody else and they tell you that they speak another
language fluently, you don't know what that means.
So using a proficiency scale is very helpful andat the bottom of the screen,
I'll put a reference to the chart on my website that describes proficiency levels.
I hope this was helpful for you and I look forward to talking to you again.
Thanks, bye, bye.