Fluency, after all, isn’t the ability to know every word and grammatical pattern in a language; it’s the ability to communicate your thoughts without stopping every time you run into a problem. If you can successfully tell your friend about that baseball game—We were … watching the Dodgers—then you’ve just practiced fluency. You’ve gotten better at using the words you know to express yourself. If you can do this for every thought in your head, then you’re done. You’ve won the language game; you’re fluent. This is a learned skill, and it’s a skill you can practice using a simplified version of
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