Thank you for your time and care.
You may not believe it, while having dinner I realized that the complacent is the wrong choice, but I didn’t come back and correct it.
Thanks a bunch, and please do correct me all the time.
I appreciate the help of all members.
LOL - you got complacent! 
I believe you!
One huge difference between adults and children (not only in learning language - in learning everything) is that while an adult has 10x the mental capacity of a child to understand theory, they also have 10x the fear of failure and embarrassment. Many adults will say, “if I cannot do it perfectly it is too humiliating to even try. They will think I am stupid.” Quite often students will have very good language skills but just need to stop being afraid to make a mistake when speaking. Most people will be friendly and helpful, even if you say something ridiculous by accident, they will try to figure out what you meant.
Like the time I wanted to compliment the food, “muy sabrosa” = very delicious… but I said “muy peligrosa” = very dangerous. oops!
Nah, actually I didn’t touch it to find good and caring people like you and other members. 
I see eye to eye with you on this point. You can say that again.
At upper-intermediate level someone should be able to recount an event with not too many errors - if someone’s in that class and can’t do that, then they’re in the wrong class. Repeating set dialogues is obviously way, way easier.
Nobody can become fluent in a language in six months if they’re starting from no knowledge of the language. If they’re completely immersed in the language and they work hard then they can get quite good, but not fluent. Just taking six months worth of classes wouldn’t get them anywhere near fluent; language schools that claim otherwise are lying to you.
Yup, that is typical, and in some ways it’s worse because their teachers expect them to write fluently because they can speak fluently. But then they write and suddenly they’re making errors that native speakers don’t make.
I got to like this Forum. In wordreferecne Forum you can discuss all this stuff but as soon as you start to talk about anything which is not related to the subject, they will stop you and close the thread. But I don’t think this is going to happen here. Otherwise, I’m mistaken and it’s too early to judge so.
I say this because sometimes the exchanged talks over a topic between members could lead you to another discussion and for a while say about four or five posts may not be directly relevant to the posted subject, but people like to continue their talks. I don’t mean to go too far off the topic.
The bold one is correct?
Language training materials are always overly simplified. Someone who’s been exposed to a language only in a classroom context has not really been exposed to the language; it is perfectly normal to feel frustrated when you try to speak a second language (which, again, you’ve only been exposed to in a simplified version) as if it was your first, to which from day one you were exposed in all its rich complexity.
“They never teach you that in class!” doesn’t only refer to cursewords: they also never teach you a decent vocabulary. My German language books taught us the word for onion, but not for garlic; green beans, but not artichoke; cheese, but not butter; pasta, but not its myriad kinds; bread, but not any pastries. To get a wider vocabulary, you need to start reading and watching materials which are not “student-dumbed”, the problem is having the patience to do so with a very large dictionary (continuing with my example, student dictionaries won’t have such things as the names of most pastries, fishes or vegetables; they will have names for generic kinds of meat such as “pork” and “veal”, but not for specific cuts).
When someone I know gets frustrated by these limitations, I remind them that being able to speak their native language correctly took them over 10 years: you can’t expect to learn a second language perfectly in three!
FTR, I test at an extremely-advanced level for German grammar, yet my vocabulary is close to nil 
Here we call posts that go very far from the topic a “hijack”: people usually apologize for them (specially in General Questions), there is one weekly thread that’s un-hijackable (the MMP, or Monday Morning Post). Threads won’t normally get closed because of a hijack, although mods may ask the hijackers to open a different thread to discuss this separate subject.
No. The native speakers may be lousy writers, but they have full command of the language. These ESL kids really don’t speak much English at all, but are very, very good at the little bit they do know.
Of course, but I was referring specifically to the writing part. Some people think the poor writing is simply product of second-language status, but no one is born a writer, even in their first language. Writing is artificial. (While speech is naturally acquired.) Even so, you will hear educators complain over and over again about how “kids these days just don’t know how to write!” Well, duh. They don’t know how to write because they haven’t learned yet. It’s your job to teach them that.
If you pay close attention, you will find this is often the case when ANY academic subject is brought into practice. Ok, so you practiced canned dialog. That’s not a REAL dialog with idioms and coloquialism and slang and body language and so on. I doubt even Rosetta Stone has sees the success they boast. (I could recite a recipe, lab procedure, or poem by heart; yet, I am still just a parrot, right?)
Once I got to the 2.5 year stage at French (and German), I started referring to my mastery as that of a 5 year old girl’s. I can have basic conversations about things (or at least I could at the time), but in-depth analysis and clever use of the language was still beyond me.
I also had Le Petit Prince assigned as part of my French language courses in high school, but the instructor presented it every year for all levels and got deeper into the book’s philosophy with each year. He also tried having us read Huis Clos (No Exit) by Sartre, but after the 15th page of having to stop and explain complex idioms and some of Sartre’s philosophy to 2nd year French students, he changed the curriculum a bit so that it was revisited at a higher level course. We did get a lot out of studying these materials, though, as having to explain idiom and philosophy and the people writing these significant works added to instructing us in the French language’s background and worldview.
From what I understand of ESL pedagogy, it takes a minimum of seven years to become fluent in a language via immersion. This doesn’t mean that the person learning the language won’t become fluent with some aspects of the language, but that they are not going to get the majority of subtle nuances of the flow of meaning and rhythm of that particular language for several years, as it takes time to build fluency and understanding of usage. I might still be able to “translate” French or German to give you the gist of what’s going on, but I can’t give you concrete layers of meaning that someone more fluent would be readily able to tell you; even if I were “fresh” from my 4.5 years of German (3 in HS, 3 semesters in university), I was still only at the very basic baby steps of understanding nuances of meaning in that language.
I was fluent in English after one year of studying it (not perfect English by far, but enough that I could survive total immersion in an all English environment, which is exactly what I did, as I ended that year by spending several weeks in an English boarding school). My dad didnt know one word of English till his mid forties, when he had to know the language for a new job he was being offered, he told his boss he spoke it, used some stalling action, and took advantage of the the delay to completely learn English from scratch in less than six months.
Granted, English and French are not total strangers. But you can learn a language pretty quickly if the right parameters are there. For me, it was an excellent English teacher, for my dad it was business related pressure and some natural talent for learning languages.
There isnt a “time served”= fluency rule IMO.
I don’t think anything in your post contradicts my post.
My father can easily develop workaday competency in any language in 6 months. He has a freakish ability with language.
I’m sure you feel differently but for 90% of the population, there IS a “time served” component, but it relates to how much time you send immersed, not how much time you spend rehearsing restaurant conversations you read in your textbook. Consider the possibility you are exceptional.
Fluency and complete understanding are completely different things. I’m pretty fluent* in Spanish, but there are a lot of subtleties that I miss.
(*Some language mavens will say there aren’t degrees of fluency, that it’s all or nothing, but that’s bullshit, because then there aren’t even fluent English speakers amongst the native population.)
Today in a course we had a discussion on “counseling.” Other than the instructor (English) I was the only native English speaker. A very fluent Chinese speaker really tried to make the case that “counseling” meant therapy, and only therapy, and that it was inappropriate to call “employee counseling sessions” by that term. I could see myself making a similar mistake for some other terminology in Spanish or German. Book study or TV study of a language isn’t the same as living the life.
(Of course we all know that “counsel” had many different but related meanings, right?)