One Simple Sign You’ve Become Fluent in a New Language

Learning a language takes time and there’s no clear sign to indicate how far you’ve come and how far off you still are.

That’s why language learning seems hard to many. There’s no clear sign telling you you’ve learned enough. No indication telling you what’s the best next step to take. It’s a process of trial and error.

This being said, I think there’s one way to find out if you’ve become fluent in a language. No matter what “fluency” means to you.

It’s whether you understand people who go from the rooster to the donkey.

The French expression “passer du coq à l’âne” (literally “to go from the rooster to the donkey”) is a very common one. That’s a habit everyone in my family has. My mom, in particular, does it in every single conversation.

What it means is to jump abruptly from one subject to another.

Let’s say you’re talking about an incoming trip and, out of nowhere, someone begins talking about the last movie that came out. That’s “going from the rooster to the donkey”, two unrelated topics.

Conversations don’t follow a straight line. They jump around. Usually, after an hour of talking to a friend, you could wonder how you ended up talking about your neighbors when the conversation started on how your partner’s job’s been going.

We do it every day in our native language. We change subjects all the time and it doesn’t even tire us out. Someone changes the subject and we follow suit as if nothing happened.

When you’re able to do that in a foreign language, that’s a sign your abilities have greatly improved. It’s a sign your brain can adapt smoothly to the situation without putting a strain on you.

There are still many topics I don’t handle well in Korean, but if my interlocutor goes from talking about his job to his last trip, I can follow without a problem.

If it happens in Chinese, however, I know I am still at a level a which I need to focus to stay on track. My brain needs time to analyze how what I’ve heard fits in the context so I can understand. If the topic changes suddenly, a sentence I could have understood may suddenly feel impossible to comprehend.

While it’s better to learn in context new things in a foreign language, it’s being able to understand without a well-developed context that proves you’ve improved a lot.

I'm afraid I don't have a precise solution for you to accomplish this. All you need is to keep learning, keep practicing, and above all, keep failing often. As John C. Maxwell said in his book Failing Forward,

"Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward." - John C. Maxwell

You can come to understand people who go from the rooster to the donkey in another language. All it takes is time. Depending on your learning schedule and how long you've been learning, that time may come tomorrow. It may come next month. Or it may come in a few years.

But it will come.

The day you notice you followed a conversation that was all over the place, you should take a step back and pat yourself. You’ve come a long way.

Sure, you certainly have a lot more to learn, but you’ve reached a stage many people never reach. It also unfortunately means you’re getting closer to the plateau, but don’t worry. It’s a nice one with a lot of opportunities to still improve.

Enjoy!

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