Could you be C1/C2 and still be a practical "beginner" in the language?

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Axon
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Re: Could you be C1/C2 and still be a practical "beginner" in the language?

Postby Axon » Sun Mar 05, 2023 9:53 pm

tastyonions wrote:Yeah but you’d still need some kind of learning resources to bring you up to the level where you’d be dining on Molière, Hugo, and Flaubert. Unless our hypothetical learner really just sits down at A0 and brute forces French literature classics with a dictionary and a grammar cheat sheet. Now that would be a terrifying level of commitment if someone were to pull that off.

:lol:


I saw someone do this with Russian once. It was astonishing how fast she learned.
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Re: Could you be C1/C2 and still be a practical "beginner" in the language?

Postby tastyonions » Sun Mar 05, 2023 10:12 pm

Wow, that’s like “take over the world” level of motivation.
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Re: Could you be C1/C2 and still be a practical "beginner" in the language?

Postby Iversen » Sun Mar 05, 2023 10:38 pm

If you just claim that someone is C1/C2 without any further ado then it must include the capability to communicate with native speakers. You could be in the situation that all your skills in a language are passive, but then you should indicate clearly that you are at the level C1/C2 for instance reading and only that.

Which might have been my situation with Latin after taking the mid level out of three official exams in the language. The courses were pure and undiluted grammar-translation method where you are supposed to learn to read the classics, but using your skills actively was not expected nor encouraged. I never really reached the level where I could have read the Eneid of Vergil just for pleasure sitting in an armchair, but I could read moderately well ... until I forgot everything because I didn't continue reading stuff. I have since then to some extent remedied the situation by home study, and now I would estimate that I float somewhere around B1-B2 both passively and actively because of my homestudies which pay tribute to both sets of skills - though in all fairness I have to say that my knowledge of Latin grammar owes a lot to those old courses in the 70s. The problem was the total lack of interest in active skills. Apart from that: I mainly study popular science texts, but once I can read those fluently AND think about the content in the target language I know that still have to add some knowledge about ordinary idioms to have ordinary conversations. And that's why I have used things like Asterix and Harry Potter as (neo)Latin study texts.

About ten years ago a guy named Anthony Lauder (the 'Polynot') said and wrote some quite sensible things about the 'connectors' you need to make a conversation run smoothly, but others have almost certainly also addressed that specific learning task.
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Re: Could you be C1/C2 and still be a practical "beginner" in the language?

Postby garyb » Sun Mar 05, 2023 10:43 pm

My Italian is probably around a low C1 (although I've never take an exam), I've read 57 books in it (thanks Goodreads) and must've racked up thousands of hours of listening, and I can speak with Italian friends for hours about all sorts of subjects, yet I'm sometimes taken by surprise in some very basic day-to-day interactions where I realise I don't quite know the right word or expression to ask for something or I don't understand what someone says to me out of context even after asking them to repeat.

I just put it down to knowledge gaps from not living in the country and only having visited a handful of times (although one of these visits did last almost four months...) so not having much practice with these situations. Or maybe I'm just exaggerating my level. I have enough of a command of the language to work around the gaps or get my point across in an understandable but not native-like way, so I wouldn't go as far as saying it means I'm still a "practical beginner" although it can feel like it at the time!
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Re: Could you be C1/C2 and still be a practical "beginner" in the language?

Postby iguanamon » Mon Mar 06, 2023 2:08 am

I think garyb explains it really well. This past summer, I traveled to Brazil for a month and spent a week combined in Puerto Rico and Panama. I also spent four hours arguing on the phone in Spanish with Avianca in Colombia about a problem with our tickets in Spanish. I can converse with native-speakers in both languages with ease in many varied situations. I may not phrase things quite as a native would in those situations, I know... and that's ok. Speaking a language at a C level does not mean perfection. My accent is good but far from perfect. I was happy that people in Brazil thought that I was living in Brazil or had lived in Brazil for a while (how else could I know so much?!).

My object is not to fool people into thinking I am one of them. I just want to show appreciation for their culture and their language. If I can pull that off, I'm happy. A lot of the time I get treated like a Brazilian or a Panamanian/Puerto Rican would be treated. This really makes me happy when it happens because it shows me that they recognize my level and skills in their language. Knowing and using the language at a high level gives me a richer experience.

So, no, I don't think you can be at a high level in the language if you can't interact in the language with native-speakers. I would say that someone who can read, and listen to, native materials with ease, may not be able to communicate with native-speakers with as much ease, though it wouldn't take them much time to be able to begin to do so, given an immersive situation.

So, cut yourselves some slack. Even immigrants to the US who have lived and worked for decades in the United States don't always express themselves in English as well as native-speakers of English.

If you have learned a language outside of TL countries, you may be C level but not know how to get your car repaired in TL as a native would know, or how to get a pair of glasses made at the optician's; or how to explain to the shoe salesman exactly what kind of fit you like and need; or how to argue with an airline that wants to cancel your ticket instead of to accommodate you on the next available flight. It doesn't mean that you aren't at C level, it may mean that you just don't have the vocabulary or phrasing because you have never had to do these things in TL before. Again, C level is not perfection. The CEFR C levels do not expect perfection. I know native English-speakers who can't effectively communicate with car mechanics in English about what's wrong with their car and how they want it fixed. Does this mean they are somehow less than proficient in their own native language? No! It doesn't. Neither does it mean that an L2 speaker would be less proficient in their L2.
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Re: Could you be C1/C2 and still be a practical "beginner" in the language?

Postby mattmo » Wed Mar 29, 2023 4:57 pm

I've heard the stories of people scoring highest band 9 in IELTS but then struggling to hear what native speakers are talking about when they moved to an English-speaking country such as England.

What do you guys think about this?
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Re: Could you be C1/C2 and still be a practical "beginner" in the language?

Postby Le Baron » Wed Mar 29, 2023 9:24 pm

mattmo wrote:I've heard the stories of people scoring highest band 9 in IELTS but then struggling to hear what native speakers are talking about when they moved to an English-speaking country such as England.

What do you guys think about this?

It's something true of any language learned in a certain way. There are people living in the TL country going for certificates for whatever reason and they tend to be already integrated and functional by the time this is achieved anyway. The cases where people are following structured courses in a non-immersion environment will vary. I have to say that to avoid an avalanche of unrepresentative counter-examples which only prove the general rule. C1/C2, the holy grail, last level of Super Mario Bros, when you're studying it in a non-immersion context, is just different. Not worthless, different. You can do well on "the oral exam" and still freeze up and fail ordering tea and cake in situ, it's just how it is.

Would you let someone fly you on holiday in an Airbus if they said: 'I've read all the manuals and got top marks on flight simulator'? I wouldn't.
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Re: Could you be C1/C2 and still be a practical "beginner" in the language?

Postby Lisa » Wed Mar 29, 2023 10:07 pm

I think one can pass a test in a language and yet not be able to comfortably speak in a natural context. In my opinion, that would mean the C1 is not an accurate measure of that person's actual abilities. How much a test reflects ability is probably on some kind of curve.
As a naturally good test taker, I know I can pass tests such that my results do not reflect my abilities (I got a B1 in dialang french reading before I even started studying!) While clever test design can attempt to thwart people like me (a good human can always tell, I think, but standardization doesn't like relying on humans), still, test results are still just an indication of how well you did on some test on a particular day. For a comparison example, a person with a high IQ score is a person who is good at taking IQ tests, got a good nights sleep and was highly motivated; they might not actually be quite that smart.
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Re: Could you be C1/C2 and still be a practical "beginner" in the language?

Postby Le Baron » Wed Mar 29, 2023 10:41 pm

Lisa wrote:IWhile clever test design can attempt to thwart people like me (a good human can always tell, I think, but standardization doesn't like relying on humans),

This (and the rest) is a great point. It's not for nothing that there is 'exam training' and that it is geared as closely as possible toward what is likely to be on the tests. So that the entire thing can to some level only be about X-language in the world of CEFR or whatever the testing system is.

The thing you said about tests and people who are good at navigating them is, for want of a better word, a problem for both tests, people like that, and others who might look at at the result of such a person and say to themselves that all they need to do is ask that person what they read/did etc and reproduce the result. Which is actually quite a lot of what happens in language-learning discussion.

I'm certainly not hyper-critical of what the CEFR courses, exams try to do, but it's certainly not foolproof. I think they admit this themselves.
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Re: Could you be C1/C2 and still be a practical "beginner" in the language?

Postby leosmith » Thu Mar 30, 2023 2:50 am

FRAnglais1919 wrote:you may know the language well (i.e. its grammar/vocabulary/pronunciation) without being able to use it effectively
no
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