Friday, 27 January 2012

A little exercise in fluency...




I am reading Francois Grosjean's 2010 book called "Bilingual: Life and Reality" and he distinguishes between language fluency and language use in order to get a better picture of a particular bilingual's language "competence". I thought I would try doing this for myself (which is accurate at this moment in time!) I often get asked how many languages I speak, and I often answer "it depends what you mean by 'speak'"? Anyway, the answer is six, but as you can see from the chart above, I hardly use three of them, and their fluency is therefore quite low. But all of these change, depending on where I am, so this is only ever going to be a snapshot of my language use and fluency at a particular point in my life.
My Hungarian would move up or down and left to right depending on how much I go to Hungary and how much I interact with Hungarians, (and how much Hungarian radio I listen to!)
My English and German are right up there at the moment, as I speak them both daily now, but this has also been very different in the past.

Anyway, this is just a fun exercise and I encourage others to try it for themselves!

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