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Congratulations! You are now functionally fluent in a second language!
You should be able to freely converse in your target language without thinking too hard. You will still make some mistakes, but they should be infrequent and not get in the way of being understood.
Some learners are happy with this level of fluency and aren't interested in investing more time into the language for higher levels. That is a completely reasonable decision to make, and each learner will need to decide for themselves how much effort to invest.
Learning a language is an endless pursuit. Each language is large enough that no human being can learn every word and cultural nuance in their lifetime. It's up to you to decide how far you want to go with it.
If you decide to keep going, you'll need to decide which specific parts of the language you want to focus on. Below, we propose two categories to help you think about the next steps of your language learning.
The Two Paths
This guide presents two approaches to continuing your language learning:
- Expand & Deepen Fluency: Improve your communication abilities.
- Striving for Native Level: Try to sound like a native.
There are many high-level foreign language speakers that do not sound native, yet speak with eloquence across a vast array of topics.
For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger is an accomplished actor, public speaker, and businessman, and even served as the Governor of California, but you would never mistake him for a native speaker.
You can be a great public speaker or writer in a foreign language without sounding like a native. Similarly, you can sound native but lack eloquence and breadth in your abilities.
It’s your decision how much you want to invest in each one of these paths.
Table of Contents
4A: Expand & Deepen Fluency:
- Master New Domains (e.g. Biology, Politics, etc.)
- Build Specific Skills (e.g. Public speaking, creative writing)
4B: Striving for Native Level:
Full Table of Contents
The Two PathsTable of ContentsStage 4A: Expand & Deepen Fluency4A 1. Master New Domains4A 2. Build Specific SkillsStandardized Tests4A 3. Effortless ListeningContextual InferenceLinguistic ContextSituational ContextHard Listening4B. Striving for Native Level4B 1. Adopting a Native Worldview4B 2. Embracing the CultureConsistently Inconsistent: “How are you?”Anthropology4B 3. Perfecting SpeechSoundsGetting HelpPhrasingFinal Notes
Stage 4A: Expand & Deepen Fluency
4A 1. Master New Domains
You've already mastered your first domain in stages 2 & 3. The first domain is the absolute hardest because you need to learn all the common vocabulary, domain-specific vocabulary, and grammar simultaneously.
Once you have this foundation, future domains will be much easier. Each new domain you learn will be easier than the last. You'll only need to learn the domain-specific vocabulary and occasionally a new piece of grammar.
There are an infinite number of domains to choose from, so it's best to identify what you are specifically interested in and tackle those first.
When deciding which domains you want to invest in, there are two approaches to consider:
- Transfer knowledge from a domain you already know in your NL.
- Learn a new domain through your TL.
1) Transfer knowledge from your NL
For domains that you already know in your NL, it's straightforward to transfer that knowledge into your TL.
Example: Cooking
If you love cooking and want to transfer that knowledge to your TL, then focus your efforts on learning relevant cooking vocabulary and consuming cooking-related content.
Other domains you may be familiar with in your NL:
- Fantasy: Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons.
- Science Fiction: Star Trek, Dune.
- Technology: Computers, programming.
- Beauty: Makeup, fashion.
- Sports: Soccer (Football), Baseball, Cricket
2) Learn new things through your TL
The ultimate goal of language acquisition is for the language to become transparent. Once you’ve acquired the language, you can stop learning the language and instead learn through the language.
The internet is full of educational content and courses. By enrolling in these courses, you can simultaneously learn a new skill while cementing your TL.
Coursera offers dozens of courses in various languages. Many TLs also have their own popular eLearning platforms. Seek these out, find courses you’re interested in, and take them for fun!
Example Learning Domains:
- Science: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Zoology, Anatomy
- Film Making: cinematography, editing
- History
- Politics
- Economics
- Workouts and Exercise
- Religion: Bible, Quran, Torah
4A 2. Build Specific Skills
The ability to understand a domain doesn't necessarily mean you can reproduce it with ease and comfort. Just because you can understand a public speech, doesn't mean you're good at public speaking. Just because you can understand a stand-up comedian, doesn't mean you can do stand-up comedy.
These skills are beyond linguistic fluency, and they need to be trained in the same way you would develop those skills in your native language.
For example, if you want to be a good public speaker in your TL, then you can practice by:
- Reading and listening to the speeches of famous public speakers.
- Shadowing those speakers and memorizing their speeches.
- Taking a course on public speaking in your TL.
- Writing and practicing your own speeches in your TL.
- Hiring a public speaking coach in your TL that will give you feedback.
If you already have these skills in your native language, then most of the skills will transfer, but you’ll need to adapt them to the TL’s culture. What’s funny in your NL probably won’t be funny in your TL.
Here are some examples of skills you may want to develop in your TL:
- Public speaking
- Stand-up comedy and telling jokes
- Flirting
- Formal writing
- Literary writing
- Legal writing
- Professional writing and speaking
- Teaching
- Negotiation
Building on specific skills also gives you the opportunity to build your own unique persona in your TL.
So far, you’ve been an actor, copying the persona of your language parent. Now is your chance to decide who you want to be in your TL. All the little quirks and idiosyncrasies in your speaking, writing, and body language are the essence of your persona. This essence shines through any domain and makes you more authentic.
Standardized Tests
At some point, most learners will want to take a standardized test like the CEFR to prove their language level for a job, university, or just to themselves.
If you aren’t in a hurry, then the Refold method is sufficient preparation for the tests. Just wait until you feel extremely comfortable understanding and speaking, and the test should be easy.
However, if you are on a short timeline and need to pass these tests quickly, it’s best to explicitly study for them using standard study materials. Many of these tests expect you to know vocabulary that you probably won’t encounter in your regular immersion. Explicitly studying for the test will help you fill in any gaps in your knowledge.
4A 3. Effortless Listening
So far, you’ve been listening on easy mode:
- Listening with headphones.
- Listening to high-quality audio, without noise.
- Listening to professionals that enunciate their speech.
- Paying full attention to the content.
Listening in the real world is much more difficult. People mumble, stutter, and whisper. The world around you is noisy and prevents you from hearing every word. Your attention will be fractured by the distractions around you: other conversations, cars, wind, etc.
To gain effortless listening, you need to:
- Become so comfortable with the language that you can understand it without any conscious effort.
- Experience similar conversations repeatedly, so you can almost predict what someone will say.
- Practice in noisy environments to train your brain to filter out the noise and focus on the signal.
Contextual Inference
Matt vs Japan has a great video titled “Why you still can’t understand your target language?” In the section at this timestamp, he describes a phenomenon we call “Contextual Inference.”
This term describes your brain's ability to “fill in the blanks” from context. If you meet someone for the first time in a noisy environment and hear “____ ____ name?”, you can guess that they asked, “what’s your name?”.
Usually, your brain does this so fast that you don’t even realize it’s happening. This ability comes from thousands of hours of listening and exposure to the same situations over and over again.
In the example above, you can predict that your new friend said “what’s your name?” because that’s one of the most common questions for someone to ask when you first meet them. However, you only know that because you’ve heard that phrase and been in that situation thousands of times.
Linguistic Context
Since your listening ability is already very strong, passive and background listening are much more useful now. So listen as much as you can! The more time you spend with the language, the easier it becomes to guess from context. Eventually, you’ll reach a point where you can “finish someone’s sentence”.
Situational Context
If you haven’t already, it’s time to get out there and start talking to real people as much as you can. You’ll need to repeat conversations hundreds of times so that your brain can predict what people are going to say.
No matter how advanced you get, you’ll occasionally misinterpret what someone says. That’s normal and natural and happens in your NL too.
Hard Listening
Here are 5 ways to increase the difficulty of your listening:
- If you haven’t already, take off the headphones. You’ll need to get used to listening with interference from other audio sources.
- Listen to audio at low volumes.
- Listen to audio in noisy settings: when riding the bus, or in a noisy restaurant.
- Listen to low-quality audio: talking on the phone, voice messages, and video chat.
- If you want to, you can create your own noisy audio using the program Audacity. The best filters to introduce noise are:
- Distortion Effect
- Noise Generator
- Echo Effect
- Overlaying two pieces of audio and trying to listen to just one of them
4B. Striving for Native Level
Bridging the gap between fluent and native-like is a lifelong process. It's extremely difficult to truly seem native as a second-language speaker.
Each native speaker has spent their whole life immersed in their native language and culture. Trying to fully replicate that as a second-language speaker will take decades.
It's not just a matter of accent, it's a matter of cultural history and norms. To reach "native level", you need to understand how natives were raised and how they interact with each other throughout their lives.
- What cultural events did they experience that shaped their perspective?
- What were they taught in school about their society and how it fits into the rest of the world?
- How do they interact with each other?
You may be familiar with the concept of “Method Acting” where an actor completely embodies their character on and off set. Striving for native level is like method acting. You’ll completely and deeply adopt the persona of a native speaker in the ways you speak, act, and interact with others.
4B 1. Adopting a Native Worldview
Our worldview is shaped by the society we grew up in. The values we were taught, the way we were educated, and the world events we experienced.
A Chinese person and an American born on the same day will have completely different life experiences. They will watch different TV, they will learn different things in school, and will place importance on different world events.
The gaps in your knowledge of a native worldview are not due to a lack of vocabulary. It’s a lack of shared cultural experience. Adopting a native worldview means imagining how your life would be if you had been born in a different country.
Examples of native speaker experiences:
- Pop Culture
- What TV shows were popular with native speakers growing up in your age group?
- What books did native speakers read growing up?
- History
- Which current events were most impactful to natives of your target language?
- Which historical events did their society focus on and which did they ignore?
- Education
- What classes were they required to take?
- What did their textbooks teach them?
- What morals and values were they taught?
Acquiring a lifetime of experiences takes a long time, and not many people want to do that. At a minimum, we'd recommend that you talk to natives about their lives and their upbringing. Be curious about their lives. It makes for great conversation and will help you see the world through their eyes.
4B 2. Embracing the Culture
Each society has unspoken rules (aka social norms) of how to act with each other in different situations. What's considered polite in one culture may be considered rude in another.
For example:
- What is the appropriate response when someone bumps into you on the street?
- How often is it appropriate to talk about yourself and your accomplishments?
- What is the right thing to say to someone whose family member just passed away?
- What is the right distance to stand from someone when talking?
Consistently Inconsistent: “How are you?”
Around the world, different cultures treat the question “How are you?” completely differently. In some cultures, you're expected to give a pre-packaged answer. In others, it’s an invitation to tell the person all about your life. In fact, the app Tandem wrote an entire article about this exact phenomenon.
If you want to act like a native, you’ll need to deconstruct your cultural biases and adopt the biases of your TL’s society.
Anthropology
At this point, we are no longer language learners. We are anthropologists. We are studying the patterns of behavior in a foreign society and trying to emulate that behavior.
The easiest way to notice and adopt these cultural norms is to move to your target language country and embed yourself in a group of friends. You’ll be able to observe their behavior, copy them, and rely on them to correct your behavior.
You can also explicitly study cultural norms by reading books on anthropology and cultural etiquette. If you'd like to speed up the process, you can hire an expert service like "Minding Manners" that teaches international etiquette for business and diplomacy.
4B 3. Perfecting Speech
Sounds
Some people have a talent for imitation and accents: think of professional impersonators and singers with perfect pitch. They still have to work at their craft, but they have a talent for hearing things that others don’t and an ability to reproduce them.
For the rest of us, we need to deliberately practice hearing and imitating. As with every other part of the language learning process, we need to notice before we can imitate. If you can’t hear a sound, accent, or word, then it’s nearly impossible to imitate.
Be honest with yourself for a second: when listening to native speakers of your TL, can you tell two accents apart from each other? If you can’t tell accents apart, then your listening is not advanced enough to imitate the accent properly.
With vocabulary, we prime our brains to notice by studying words in Anki. For sounds, we need to use different tools.
Before we jump into studying sounds, it’s important to note that there are multiple layers of sounds:
- Root Sounds
- Words
- Phrases
- Sentences
- Root Sound Level
Each language has a different set of sounds that are possible. Two sounds in different languages may seem similar to the untrained ear, but are actually very different.
In Stage 1, we recommended studying the sounds of your TL. Now is a good time to revisit this study. You have thousands of hours of exposure to the language and will be able to make more sense of sound study.
It’s also useful to study the International Phonetic Alphabet and the array of root sounds that are possible in your TL. This can help you notice sounds that appear similar but are actually different.
Practice making each of these sounds to ensure that you’re pronouncing the root sounds correctly.
If you’re studying Japanese, the Kotu.io pitch accent trainer is a great tool for learning how to hear different pitches in Japanese.
- Word level
Just because you can make a sound in isolation does not mean you will be able to do it in a word. Single-word chorusing is a great way to test if you can accurately hear and reproduce a word the way a native would.
If you’re not familiar with chorusing (aka Flow-verlapping), check out this video from the Mimic Method. It allows you to visually see where your pronunciation is different from a native.
- Phrase Level
Many word pairings cause shifts in the sounds of the individual words. If you’ve seen Matt’s video “Why you still can’t understand your target language”, he gives various examples such as “Don’t you want to” becoming “donchyawanna”.
These sound shifts are present throughout language and vary constantly. When you notice one of these shifts in your immersion, you can extract the audio and use chorusing to align your pronunciation to that of a native.
- Sentence Level
At a sentence level, we need to learn to hear the flow: the rhythm, prosody, and intonation. Getting the right flow of the language is what makes you sound truly native.
This is where Shadowing comes in. As we discussed in Stage 3, shadowing is helpful for improving your flow. In contrast to chorusing, shadowing is done continuously and in real time. This forces you to let go of the individual pieces of pronunciation, and focus on the sentence level flow of the language.
To work on flow, we recommend these activities (in increasing order of difficulty):
- Chorusing full sentences: repeat sentences until they sound natural.
- Corrected reading: reading aloud with a native speaker correcting you. They’ll need to correct you not just on pronunciation, but on the nuance and feeling you give off.
- Shadowing with a transcript
- Shadowing without a transcript
- Imitation
Getting Help
When an actor wants to perfect an accent for a movie, they hire an accent/dialect coach to work with. These coaches will help you notice things that sound off and help you focus your efforts on the specific accent challenges you suffer from.
Native speakers are also helpful for telling you when your flow “feels off”, but they usually won’t be able to pinpoint why. Invite your native speaker friends to give you this type of feedback.
Phrasing
The other major obstacle to sounding native is how you phrase your thoughts. It’s very easy to fall back into your NL and say things in a way that doesn’t sound natural in your TL.
There are usually multiple ways to say the same thing in your TL. The one that might make the most sense to you might feel wrong in your TL.
For example:
If an English learner said “I reversed the car”, it would be grammatically correct and everyone would understand, but it would be more natural to say:
- I backed up the car.
- I put the car in reverse.
- I drove the car in reverse.
Be on the lookout for these types of phrases and make sure to copy what native speakers say.
Final Notes
Language learning is a life-long pursuit. You’re not just learning a skill, you’re creating a whole new identity. It’s up to each learner to decide how much of their life to commit to the language and what they want to achieve.
Regardless of what you choose, be proud of what you’ve accomplished at every stage of the process.