Nice post, I'm also studying Chinese, albeit I've only studied for one year, so I am a relative neophyte but I have to say that I've thought a lot about the top

Nice post, I'm also studying Chinese, albeit I've only studied for one year, so I am a relative neophyte but I have to say that I've thought a lot about the topic he raises in this post. For one thing, I count fluency as the ability to understand culture to the extent that you can play with words and idioms to express nuanced meaning. I think the Eminem example is very well chosen. I think I could spend several years studying Chinese in China and still not achieve that goal. This realization sort of begs the question whether I'll ever be able to reach that level of fluency in a culture that I haven't grown up in. Heck, there are days when I have trouble understanding English, and I frequently mis-hear or misunderstand people in my native tongue, which doesn't bode well for my ability to ever reach fluency with a capital F.