I'm for sorting "do we change the site's name" out for good

We've already sorted out the site's desired name to a degree in another post (which could be the location for the suggestions), but we could do another if the other post is too far into rigor mortis

Any thoughts @Flimzy, @Gilles, @PhMgBr?

So Duolingo reduces your fluency level.... wow

@fi12 it needs great questions, but with activity... meaning that if there are no upvotes, and no answer in a short time, it's unlikely to get to the HNQ....

time matters

@Quill I don't think now is a good time for changing the site's name...

but that's just MHO.

There's never going to be a good time besides Private Beta, and that's gone

yep

We might as well get it out of the way before the site gets too much bigger

PPCG stalled their naming decision so much, and they got to the point where they'd graduated and no longer had the option

but now we are, as we say, at the bottom of the wave... we have to concentrate our effort of climbing the next one, otherwise we'll be thrown out under water

meaning producing content

meh, more users means more content means more chance for good content

as long as we get a strong/involved userbase and good moderators, that'll be fine

more user will only come if there's good content

@Quill I don't have a strong feeling. What I gather from the two posts on the matter so far is that few people have a strong feeling.

Yeah... I don't really care to change it, but there are some who do

@Quill Did you read this somewhere?

No, I had 20% on French and then I logged in today and it was 19%

one lesson and it went back up to 20%, but yeah, I'm certain it changed

heh

I am now 6% fluent in French, after my first lesson.

on the difficulty of measuring a fluency in a language

Forget the difficulty of measuring it... how about defining it?

I don't know how they do it, but it should not be a linear scale

I don't mind JLPT's scale, although it seems a little steep in the middle

Technically, one can be fluent in a language, without understanding it at all.

Fluency is the ability to speak... fluidly.

With enough practice, one can say a lot of things and sound like a native, without understanding a word of what they say.

@Quill Japanese Language Proficiency Test?

Yeah

This is quite common, actually, in certain professions... (opera singers, actors, etc)

Yeah, like how children mimic foreign song lyrics with accuracy

@Quill I only did the Level 4... and it was already some step. A friend did the 1st and told me that's above the average Japanese native speaker. So apart from the big steps in each level, I don't see much how it scales...

Proficiency is a much better term for what most people think they mean when they say "fluency"

But proficiency is more complicated

As language proficiency is made up of at least 4 distinct skills. Commonly recognized are: reading, writing, speaking, and listening comprehension. But there are others, and even within those four, there are other sub-proficiencies.

@Flimzy and without going to such extreme, when I compared my wife proficiency in the local language with mine, she uses more appropriate vocabulary, better grammatics, but I sound more fluent...

@bilbo_pingouin Indeed. So her vocabulary may be stronger than yours, but your pronunciation stronger than hers.

yep

And even looking at something like that.. vocabulary... how would you rank vocabulary proficiency?

Even that can't be meaningfully done.

and I have less inhibit to say something wrongly

At one level, there's vocabulary recognition (how many words would you recognize if you saw/heard them?)

And then there's reproduction (how many could you use in a sentence)?

which as some influence on fluency, without relying on any skill at all

Aside from those distinct skills, there's also the question of how you compare two people with different sets of vocabulary.

He knows how to talk about cars, she knows how to talk about art work. Who has the "better" vocabulary?

Indeed. A certain amount of alcohol will often improve fluency without improving knowledge of the language :)

at a low level, I remember a test for our kids, when they were asking how the language dev was going... we had a formular with a list of words and were asked whether they could say those words... and there were "cats" on the list but not "dogs". Is it really better to know cats and not dogs than the other way around?

@bilbo_pingouin For a test, that's probably reasonable... Why waste time testing both "cat" and "dog", when you could use only one as a proxy for "can they name common household animals", and spend the other time asking if they can say "anathema"?

But if the actual lesson made the omission of "dog", that would probably be problematic.

I don't know how they generally treat that... we have a specific case that our kids learn 3 languages at once, so it's normal for them to get a little bit behind on apparent language development. So the fact that they knew "dog" and not "cat" was completely discarted in our case

Well, it may depend on the purpose of the test. But most tests are intended to get a general feel for whether a student mastered the full gamut of information presented during the course work. It's not usually feasible to test 100% of that knowledge, so representative samples are selected and tested.

In such a case, testing for both 'cat' and 'dog' might be seen as redundant.

All that being tangential to the question of whether traditional testing is the best way to gauge a student's proficiency in the first place :)

yeah, I remember when I was first presented with the A1-C2 levels, they explained that you should get 80% of the aims for each step to claim it. Based on the fact that even native speakers generally did not know all the vocabulary, expression and less frequently used grammar rules in their own language

but often tests focus on more singular blocks... like learn the preteritum for a set of 30 verbs in English. That's measurable.

how does that relate to fluency, proficiency or overall mastery is, to me, an open question

@Quill Go for it

@Quill yes/no polls aren't a good idea: people should have room to justify their answers

But with a negative scoring question, it isn't going to happen. A site name change isn't a neutral thing, it requires a significant majority in favor of switching

it's a pity, because I don't think “language learning” is a good name to attract experts

The negative scoring question is a rude, borderline duplicate of a positively voted question

I like the idea of "Yes, because" and "No, because" style answers

But yes/no to what? A change at all? Or a change to a specific thing?

That must be absolutely clear before yes/no is appropriate.

I'm gonna write up a draft post later and Gist it for some feedback before I post it