Kiran Leonard
So are you basically fluent now then or what?
What does fluency look like? When you say it out loud, it seems fixed — to be fluent — but the more you think on it, and the more you try to be fluent in something, the murkier it becomes. Fluency is strange because it’s about acquiring a skill you already achieved once without even having to try. The question always makes you focus on what you don’t know instead of what you do. Well, not really fluent, you answer. It’s not like how I speak English. How I know English. But I mean I can have conversations and that.
Well could you have this conversation we’re having now?
A strange question. It makes you reimagine the whole exchange in another context. Naturally it doesn’t seem right to you. It’s uncomfortable to claim fluency, as if it meant you brazenly ruling out the prospect of not understanding something: not just a word, but the layers behind them as well. Words have different vertices, you interpret them according to tone, context, memory. Where do their aspects go in other languages; are they still the same?
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written for plates article Alphabetical Processions Laid Him on the Green
think about listening to a song in a language that is not your own, one that you've listened to throughout your childhood, and the strange feeling that must arise as an adult if you become fluent in the language the song is sung in ----- how does your interpretation of it change?
an example of a song where this could happen is Buena Vista Social Club's uplifting "El Cuarto del Tula", which in reality is about a girl who falls asleep in her bedroom with a candle on and her whole room goes up in flames. [J]
