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Your Zero-to-NeoFluent Journey 8/14/2018
Micro-Fluency
Language experts across the board agree on the need to start with some of the most frequent words and phrases that will quickly become your old, familiar friends in your new language. Many of these are functional words, like a toolkit that will help you build everything else, words like the, a, he, she, to, at, etc. Learning to recognize and use these first friends in multiple different combinations and contexts will give you your first taste of fluency, what we call micro-fluency. You don’t need to wait until you have studied for weeks and months to finally feel like you are getting something. You should become comfortable with small amounts of language that quickly start to become automatic. As new understanding emerges, you will find yourself comfortably giving simple and appropriate answers of just a word or phrase. Longer expressions will come later.
Core Fluency
Over time, your bits of micro-fluency will grow into a more generalized basic or core fluency--the ability to understand simple, slow speech on familiar topics, and an ability to respond without serious hesitation and with growing confidence that you know what you’re talking about. You might also think of this as survival fluency because you will be able to ask for the things you need and want and will be able to make sense of enough information to fulfill those basic needs and wants. You will be able to order food, find out the time, follow simple directions around town, find bathrooms, complain about pains or frustrations, express appreciation, etc. But your skills may only allow you to talk in one to two sentences at a time. This is again a normal part of development and is part of your journey to full fluency.
General Fluency
Your core fluency will carry you forward into more specialized areas as you learn to understand and talk about real life in various contexts: home and family, health, professions, travel, the environment, religion and traditions, etc. Each of these specialized areas will be based on the same core fluency and grow into a generalized functional fluency. We’ll call this simply general fluency. Soon enough you will understand explanations about processes, stories, activities, events, reasons, and motivations. You will soon be telling your own stories, relating personal experiences, giving explanations using multiple sentences organized together, expressing basic opinions, and following multi-step instructions to achieve more complex tasks.
Full Fluency
This general fluency will continue to grow as you experience real life in a new language context, making friends, working a job, watching TV, etc. And somewhere down the road you will simply forget about the words and the language, get caught up in the experience of life, and without realizing it, seamlessly grow into full fluency. And even this level of fluency can continue to be nurtured and will continue to grow as you integrate into a new language community and culture or into a love of other literatures and traditions.
This is our goal here at NeoFluent.com are starting small, first with a few innovative memorization games, but determined to find ways to implement proven principles and methods of language learning into our site. Our ultimate goal is to grow into a one-stop shop for your Zero-to-NeoFluent journey.
