What It Actually Means to Be Fluent

Many aspire to reach fluency; few achieve it and even fewer learn what it actually means. Those who obsess with becoming fluent are the least likely to reach fluency; they’re the most likely to seek perfection and answers to their questions; this holds them back from becoming fluency.

To be fluent means to persist for years despite frustration and slow progress.

To be fluent means to accept mistakes and seek to improve infinitely.

To be fluent means to not know the end and to find peace in this.

To be fluent means relearn, repractice, refine and repeat.

To be fluent means to become a speaker of that language and continue to be learner - as all native and foreign speakers are.

To be fluent means to struggle with spoken and written precision because of a desire to better today than yesterday.

To be fluent means to create a learning process and commit to interminable improvement.

To be fluent means to simply be and for that to be enough.

While there are many milestones along the path to fluency to signify that we are there, we don’t see them until no longer look for them. This is when they appear. They appear when they no longer matter, and that is fluency.

Fluency is becoming so entranced in the language that learning happens naturally - that speaking and writing happens naturally. It is to be come lost in this process until we find our own path - our own relationship with the language as one its speakers.

We become one of its speakers who can communicate with ease but choose to struggle because that is where growth lives - that is where carve our path of fluency.