Do you think that the person must be
- born in a bilingual country / completely indifferent to native, educated speakers of the language
- able to write, speak and hear with little to no grammatical errors in almost any situations / able to take college level classes without language barrier.
- able to conduct any casual conversations with little to no grammatical errors
or worse?
English is not my first language but I’m quite confident myself. And I’m always torn between saying that I’m bilingual or just fluent.
A lot of the times, I think in English and sometimes even dream in English but I also have never spent a single day in an English speaking country in my life. It’s weird to know that I’m not a bilingual per se but to think like one. Just wanted to know if anyone had similar experience.
I’d say somewhere between 2 and 3.
The first option would also result in the weird situation that most South Africans (11 official languages), who use English in everyday life, would not count as bilingual because there’s still a bit of a difference to fully native speakers. My wife grew up with Sesotho, but started learning English from 1st grade on and all her classes in school and university have been in English. Her English is better than mine (5th grade, and all but English-classes in German), but worse than that of my USA or British friends.
While we are on the topic, you wouldn’t normally use “indifferent” like that. A better word would be “indistinguishable”.
I mean indifferent as basically the same. Stronger than indistinguishable. You can be pretty much indistinguishable and have some differences to native speakers
It was clear what you meant. But while this might be used in very rare cases like indistinguishable, it almost never is. If it’s not distinguishable, you can’t get stronger ;)
Thank you for the clarification. Guess I still have a lot to learn :)