Obviously learning a couple of words in another language doesn’t really make you bilingual, or being able to say a few phrases. But there’s also clearly some point before full fluency where you can be considered bilingual, but how is it determined (formally or informally)? Is it purely vibes based, you’ll know when you see it kind of thing?
I’m vaguely familiar with the CEFR levels measuring how much of a language you speak, but if there’s a cutoff point for counting as bilingual in there somewhere I don’t know where.
At what point when accumulating grains of sand do they become a heap?
I think I am basically 95% bilingual, my native language is not English, but it was thought in school from first grade (age 5 or 6) all the way to high school (17 years old), and then in post-highschool education, I also had 2 mandatory English courses. The thing is having learned so early is I was too young to realize when I could start entertaining a conversation in English without thinking because it was almost always like that for me.
I do think though that when you can think in your 2nd language without having to mentally translate in your head to your native language is when you’ve reached a level of fluency that is good enough to be called bilingual. I would probably say, if you can understand jokes and plays on words in your second language, that’s probably a good indicator that you are fluent
I felt I was bilingual when I started thinking in spanish. I’m not completely fluent but I speak well and can understand most things with context if I don’t know the words.
One practical way to informally assess your bilingual level:
You are bilingual when you have a friend who can only speak your second language.
When you can speak and think in the new language without translating to your native language in your head, maybe? That can actually happen pretty fast. You don’t have to become anywhere near fluent.
This is not a word that has a strict definition nor is certified by any agency or standard. As you can see by this thread, there may be a variety of personal opinions about what should count. But it’s like asking at what point in learning to ride a bike do you become a bicyclist? Is it enough to just know how to ride? It’s a semantic question, which, if you’re not familiar with that term, just means that it all depends on what you want to call something and is not a question of any objective criteria.
