What is PERSONAL FLUENCY?

In a previous post, we discussed how a novice student can spend time learning a language's top 1000 words (typically generated from literature), only to discover that they cannot read an article or understand a conversation. Yes, you might find a Youtube video of a polyglot who learns "the top 750 words" in German or Spanish and then has a simple conversation with a native. But, the reality is that each of us has their own "personal fluency list" and if you spend your time learning someone else's. you will put yourself way behind in gaining fluency.

Rather than using someone else's frequency list (which is almost always based on all the literary works in a language), it's much simpler to develop your own PERSONAL FLUENCY list of words and phrases. You will immediately know what yo say in your new language because it's your words and phrases.

How?

One way is to make a recording of all your conversations in your native language. We've done this many times and found the same thing over and over. Every native speaker may "understand" 10-20,000 words, but the words that come out of their mouth will be only about 3,000. You can call this a person's "working vocabulary". The interesting thing is that your friends and co-workers will have a wide amount of words that are common to each other because you share similar contexts and situations.

We also discovered that most people only use a handful of types of syntax (the word order of a language). In literature, there may be hundreds of ways to ask questions, but we found in these recorded conversations, that people only use a few. Another shocking thing that we found was that despite there being many verb tenses in English, most people tend to use the same 3-4 verb tenses over and over again in their conversations. Sure, they understand all the verb tenses, but what comes out of their mouth is just a handful of verb tenses.

So, if you really want to be fluent in a language, would you need to learn "all the verb tenses" or only the ones that you use in your native language? Would you need to learn all the names of the parts of an astronaut's suit if you are not an astronaut?

There are 3 easy methods of developing your own personal fluency list. The first way is to make a recording of small conversations with your friends. Over a week or so, you will have maybe an hour or two of recording. You could have this transcribed by someone, or you could run the audio through a free service online. Once you have the transcript, we'll show you what to do with it.

The second way of getting a PERSONAL FLUENCY list is to make a list of all the contexts you have found yourself in the past week. Were you at school? Did you take a shower? Did you eat in a restaurant? Did you fly on the Space Shuttle? We discovered that most people are in the same 8-10 contexts each week. Once you have a list of contexts or situations, take a notebook and write down all the nouns and verbs that come to mind for each one. This method will not get you the syntax or verb tenses that the first method will, but it will show you that there are probably only a handful of words in each situation that you typically use.

A third method is to take a language book and cross out any word or phrase that you have not used in the past week. LAnguage learning books and internet teachers love to make complete lists for a student to learn, but if you haven't said it in your native language in the past couple of weeks, then, what's the point of learning all the nouns for the bus station?

In our own case, we discovered from our transcript that we used an active "verbal" vocabulary of about 3400 words, around 750 NGrams (repetitious 2-4 word phrases), about 6 word orders, and only 3 verb tenses. Since the 750 Ngrams contained most of the 3400 words, we had them translated by bilinguals into various languages. (You want to avoid using an online translator program).

We did that give us?

It gave us the precise words to learn first in any language. These words, these PERSONAL FLUENCY words, are "you" and if you want to be fluent in some foreign language, it makes sense that until you can learn to say in the new language what you can say in your native language, you are going to have a difficult time learning someone's else's vocabulary.

Sure, you can read a thousand books to grasp the words and phrases that are unique to you. But, if we are talking about a rapid method of "becoming you" in a foreign language, it makes sense to start with your own unique fingerprint from your native language.

How will you pick up the rest of the language? What's the most rapid method to learn these 750 Ngrams?

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