For the most part, I think you shouldn’t really worry too much about how well you speak a foreign language. You should just enjoy it. But I understand and I’d like to measure my abilities as well to give myself a challenge to do more. Here are a couple of ways that you can measure your ability or how well you speak a foreign language.
First of all, you can listen and retell. You listen to stories or read stories and then try to retell them without any help. This will give you an indication of how well you’ve learned the language, what level your vocabulary is especially if you do this out loud, you will see how spontaneously you can come up with a vocabulary and put the sentences together to retell the story and show how well you can speak the language.
Another way to measure your foreign language skills is to play word games or other games where you have to come up with or recognize vocabulary words and that can be a very fun way to measure your skills and to continue to challenge yourself.
A third way and probably the most formal way is to take a formalized test, something along the lines of the CEFR which is the Common European Framework for Reference which is a guideline that a number of different testing services use to measure foreign language ability. Some of these include the Goethe Institut, the [Olean Frances 02:04], the Michigan test, the Cambridge test, TOEFL, and others.
But I think that the most important way to measure your language skill is to see how comfortable you are speaking to another person. Fluency in my way of defining it is just that how comfortable are you and how readily do the words flow and the ideas flow from your thoughts into words. After all, what you really are looking for is to be able to speak comfortably with another person. To the extent which you can do that, that will determine the abilities that you have to satisfy an employer or to find a restaurant or to do any function that you’d like to do in a foreign language.
The more comfortable you are then the better you’re going to speak and the more interest the other person has is going to listen. So whether you’re going to sell or whether you’re going to just to find out information, probably seeing how comfortable you are with the language is one of the most important ways you can judge your language abilities.
Roger Easlick has a passion for language and would like to share that with you. For more information, visit www.CrushALanguage.com.
