The CEFR is a tool to evaluate proficiency, but it's misleading if you look at it as a "ladder" with "native" at the top". Most adults aren't C2 in their own native language, despite "investing" sometimes hundreds of thousands of hours "learning" it.
This video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqj5qPF_puU] by Olly Richards sums up my feelings on the definition of fluency. Personally, I believe even as early as B2 you can call yourself a fluent speaker, because it's roughly the level where you stop struggling to express your thoughts or to understand other people's. But it also depends how you have learned. B2 can look very different depending on whether it was leared in mostly academic vs literary vs spoken contexts.
> Even purely bilingual kids that learned both languages from birth have idiosyncrasies monolingual native speakers notice, for example.
Those tend to be cultural. My native language is French, but I cannot browse /r/france without wondering wtf everyone's talking about. I'm extremely disconnected from French culture as I moved out when I was 14, so I never experienced adulthood in French and I had to learn things like what "Pôle emploi" is or some such. I'm still C2 in French,
I also do make mistakes in English, but I catch plenty of native English speakers make egregious mistakes or not know fairly basic things about their own language. Another commenter mentioned the their/they're your/you're distinction is one that natives tend to mess up more often than non-natives; anecdotally, that seems correct to me.
This video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqj5qPF_puU] by Olly Richards sums up my feelings on the definition of fluency. Personally, I believe even as early as B2 you can call yourself a fluent speaker, because it's roughly the level where you stop struggling to express your thoughts or to understand other people's. But it also depends how you have learned. B2 can look very different depending on whether it was leared in mostly academic vs literary vs spoken contexts.
> Even purely bilingual kids that learned both languages from birth have idiosyncrasies monolingual native speakers notice, for example.
Those tend to be cultural. My native language is French, but I cannot browse /r/france without wondering wtf everyone's talking about. I'm extremely disconnected from French culture as I moved out when I was 14, so I never experienced adulthood in French and I had to learn things like what "Pôle emploi" is or some such. I'm still C2 in French,
I also do make mistakes in English, but I catch plenty of native English speakers make egregious mistakes or not know fairly basic things about their own language. Another commenter mentioned the their/they're your/you're distinction is one that natives tend to mess up more often than non-natives; anecdotally, that seems correct to me.