Performing Competence: I don't want to sound fluent

or The Dangers of Masking your Lack of Knowledge

In the past week, I have been interviewing different Korean teachers. Despite only learning for about 14 months, most of them tried to fit me in to the advanced textbooks. Because I sounded good. I showed one of them something I wrote, and she went on to correct things to sound more "natural" or "native". I am at least 5 years away from such concerns.

The thing about sounding "more natural", is that there is rarely a logic as to why something sounds more natural than another. It just is. It's the nature of languages. Especially when the original is technically correct. And because I don't know why one thing is "better" than another, I find such corrections useless, as I don't actually understand them enough to use them in the future. Sure, I could learn them, memorise them... Hell, when I do any writing I can pass it through ChatGPT, and it's all too happy to make it sound more like something a native Korean would say. But at my stage of learning, I genuinely think it would do me a disservice.

The Dangers of Performing Competence

In the context of language learning, there are a lot of immediately obvious dangers to sounding natural. As someone with an ear for languages, and a talent for grammar⁰, I can sound more advanced than I really am. Flattering, right? Wrong. As I see it, except for a small boost to my self-esteem, it has no advantages, because ultimately it just doesn't reflect my ability to understand.

Here are some obvious side effects to seeming more advanced than I actually am:

• People start using more complicated vocabulary because they think I can understand.
• People start talking a lot faster because they think I can follow.
• People start speaking more comfortably, falling into idioms and slang.
• I have less space to ask what they mean, because they assume I misheard not that I couldn't understand.

End result: I will understand less, and there will be less that I can do about it. However, when I allow myself to show my level of Korean, or even get comfortable being underestimated, a lot of people slow down for me and enunciate more. The taxi drivers here are the best. They talk like the classic American tourist who thinks just because they talk slower and louder people will suddenly understand English. It is actually helpful... Provided you know enough of the language.

Even if you're not a language learner, this may sound familiar. Why? Because it's the same thing that happens in university or at work meetings when we pretend to understand more than we do. People stop explaining things. After all, why would they waste time if everyone already is on the same page, right? And then we walk away from the meeting having no clue what just happened, and what we need to do next. And why? Because we wanted to seem smart? For what?

What if I Sound Stupid?

We all want people to have a good opinion of us, right? I do want people to be impressed by how smart I am. If I know something, I can't deny that I do feel the urge to show off what I know. As if that's ever earned anyone's respect...

But what if my accent makes me sound slow? What if they think I am stupid? They don't know what's going inside my head, so they'll just assume I am stupid. Now, that's a funny thought. See the irony? We are all too willing to assume that someone will think we are stupid, if we take too long to respond, or the answer doesn't come out right, and we made a grammatical error, or we didn't use some fancy word... because they can't see all that is going on in our head. And we can? We seem to be able to read their mind and know they think we are the slowest person they ever had to talk to.

Asking myself if I ever met someone who didn't speak English fluently... did I ever think they were stupid? No. At least, not if they owned up to it. I think back to a time when I chatted with a guy on a dating app who was using it to improve his conversational English. He'd ask me about idioms and other words. He claimed he wasn't good, I cared to disagree. But it took no effort to explain a thing or two, or to rephrase. It was genuinely the best conversation I had on that app. That being said, I have worked with people who misrepresented their English skills. Over 2 months into a working relationship fraught with frustration over repeated miscommunications, they finally admitted that they only understood about 30% of what I was saying... now, THAT I consider stupid. And no, I am not only talking about the English language itself being the barrier to understanding.

Getting Comfortable Showing Lack of Knowledge

To the chagrin of my tutorial partner at university, I was usually pretty good at asking why to exhaustion, until I understood. I had no shame about my tutor thinking I was slow. After all, I was there to learn. I often understood the right answer, but I would ask until I could get to the right answer, repeatedly, if it ever came to it.

As I got older, especially in the context of working in a company, where how I was viewed reflected in my performance review, I gradually got more uncomfortable asking questions. However, I am not sure if that speaks more about the culture of the companies I worked for or me. But, after 7 years in those environments, habits do change. I, too, started pretending I knew what was going on, and then would spend time searching things, hoping that I will be able to find information on everything that I didn't know, and that I would be able to understand what was going on. I was assigning myself quite the challenge. Problem was, with this method, the longer I took to do my own research, the more awkward it got to fess up and ask the clarifying questions I needed to ask. End result? I was operating on guess work. Sometimes I got it right. Sometimes I didn't. Yes, it was my best guess, but that wasn't always enough.

Learning a new language, I am getting back in touch with that ability to ask questions until I understand. Not because I think it's better, or I am comfortable doing so, but because I need to. Due to the similarity of consonants and vowels¹, even if I wanted to fall back to my old patterns, I wouldn’t even know what to look up. I can only get better if I ask.

Fluency isn't the goal. Understanding is. Language is ultimately just a tool to aid communication, and the purpose of communication is to understand and to be understood. We can wrap up something in the prettiest of packages with fancy words and perfect grammar, but if the other party doesn't understand, what's the point? I make plenty of mistakes in my native language, but I am still understood. That is the point.

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⁰ Like can you blame me? Grammar is so fun! Korean grammar especially is absolutely fascinating. There are elements of it that are beautifully mathematical. Ahem... I digress...

¹ Well, they are not that similar... to Korean people... Even so, you can't convince me they don't differ from person to person... Some people’s ㅈ sounds a lot more like a ㅊ or the more commonly known one is the ㄴ pronounced like a ㄷ. And don't get me started on ㅜ, ㅗ, ㅓ...