> a very long way from a native speaker
uh....this guy's English is really excellent. it may be distinguishable from a native speaker by occasional poor phrasing or misuse of words, but it's really, really good. i think your criticism is overblown.
uh....this guy's English is really excellent. it may be distinguishable from a native speaker by occasional poor phrasing or misuse of words, but it's really, really good. i think your criticism is overblown.
These tense changes happen when I change the structure of the comment in my head in the real time, and don't revisit the beginning of the sentence to align things back.
When I read them for the second time after I send, I spot the errors, but don't always correct them since they are online and intended people possibly read the comment already.
Maybe I should write a little slower while commenting, and read again before sending.
There is no shame in not being 100% fluent. I'm multi-semi-lingual, in that I can read a newspaper, shop at a store, etc. in several languages. But I am only fluent in English. When I speak something else, my friends will frequently correct me. I appreciate it, because that is the only way to improve.
Your notions about language proficiency are wildly out of whack. The speaker you're talking about is clearly articulating their ideas, coherently and without (one presumes) halting or grasping. That's fluency.
You might be interested in http://www.govtilr.org/Skills/ILRscale5.htm as an example of the scales used when defining levels of competency.
For me, my experience is two years as an English teacher and my opinion based on that experience is that someone who can convey complex ideas clearly and without effort is fluent. If you define that to be intermediate, what's left for "fluent" to mean?
http://www.govtilr.org/Skills/ILRscale2.htm
Based on the criteria given, I would estimate that his English writing ability is ~2+. Without hearing him speak, I can't properly assess. Perhaps a 3.
None of this is a criticism or a put down. Achieving this degree of competency in a second or third language takes a great deal of work over a long time, and is something to be proud of. But true fluency happens at level 4 and above.
(My father was a professional linguist and diplomat, and I spent much of my pre-adult life living in different non-English-speaking countries. I say this just so you know where I am coming from. I also want to spread awareness of what the various professional standards of fluency are.)
As for subjective rankings, I'm more familiar with CEFR, under which I see no obvious reason not to rank this person C1 or C2, which is what one would expect for someone with more than 800-1000 hours of study.
CEFR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...
I'm sure you are aware of people that have spent decades+ in an English-speaking environment, yet still speak in a stilted manner. Time alone isn't enough- you need active correction. A few folks are able to self-correct via listening, but almost everyone does best with regular instruction by qualified teachers.
Thank you for the CEFR link.
Part of the problem with English in particular (I am sure you are aware of this, I am just stating it for other readers) is that the number of ESL speakers exceeds the native population. This rather unusual case means that many learners are receiving instruction from English speakers who themselves are not fluent, compounding the error. From a strictly academic standpoint, it is fascinating tracing the growth of all the different flavors of English (some mutually unintelligible) but it does present certain practical difficulties in communication!
Again, the standard you're applying is unreasonable. English doesn't have any One True dialect - it's spoken natively in various ways, some of which sound stilted to you. I went to college with a guy from Malaysia whose speech you'd likely find highly stilted (or I did, anyway), yet English was his first language - the only language he used with his parents, the only language he ever used in school, etc. That is what it is - a person can be fluent or native and still sound stilted to you. You may well sound stilted to them!
This is why the rankings you linked don't use such language - they talk about whether someone can use complex grammatical structures clearly and without effort, and so forth, and when judging someone's fluency that's the sort of standard to apply. Saying they sound stilted just says that their English doesn't sound the way you expect correct English to sound, which is neither here nor there.
It has very good vocabulary, but a whole lot of verb tense and subject-verb disagreement errors, and use of the wrong parts of speech in ways which are (especially combined with the excellent vocabulary) very emblematic of a non-native English speaker who either learned late or learned early but had much of their use of English with other non-native speakers.
Now, it's very good for someone with either of those backgrounds (and much better than my command of any language that isn't English), but the upthread comment that it is very far from that of a native speaker is spot on.
It's not. He didn't even use the right tense in the first clause. It should be: I've been exposed to English since I was 4 years old, and started to learn it at 7.
His English is certainly perfectly understandable, but also 'a very long way from a native speaker'.