When I decided to take a break from studying languages, I reluctantly accepted the fact that I would remain monolingual for the rest of my life. I believed if I wasn't actively studying and practicing, there would be no way for me to become fluent in another language. I would never be bilingual.

When I had a conversation with a girl I live with about the subject, an international student from South Korea, my perspective on bilingualism and language fluency shifted.

It began when I told her she was lucky that she spoke more than one language. She spoke Korean and English. That meant she was bilingual. I wished I was bilingual.

She said to me, "You're bilingual. You speak Korean, and Japanese."

I chuckled to myself for a moment, thinking about all the times she'd say something to me in Korean and I'd have to tell her, "I don't know that word. I don't know what that means." If I couldn't understand everything that was said to me, then I wasn't fluent. But to be bilingual, I would need to be fluent in two languages. Right?

I told her, "No. I'm not bilingual because I'm not fluent."

She then asked me to define fluency. What does it mean to be fluent in a language? I always thought of fluency as the ability to speak and understand a language without difficulty. I went so far as to say it even meant you could live in a country where the language is spoken and not have difficulty communicating.

"What about the news? Shouldn't you be able to understand the news?" she said.

"Yeah, I guess that makes sense," I said. Understanding the news meant you could understand a language without difficulty.

"If that's the case, then I'm not fluent in Korean or English. I have a hard time understanding the news," she said.

That didn't make sense. That meant she was fluent in no language. But she's bilingual. Korean was her native language, and I'd heard her speak to her family in Korean over the phone. She spent a lot of her life speaking English as well. We were having a conversation in English, and we could understand each other. She's lived in America for many years. How could she not be fluent in both languages?

I had this idea that bilingualism equals fluency in two languages and vice versa, that they go hand in hand, but her comments made me try to look at the situation from a different approach. It has to do more with communicative abilities rather than perfected fluency.

I even thought about a friend of mine who speaks Vietnamese with her family, but English with most other people. One time a girl made a comment about her being bilingual, saying she must be so good at speaking Vietnamese because she's spoken it her whole life, but my friend shook her head, wide-eyed, and said no, she wasn't good at speaking Vietnamese at all. We all studied Japanese together, and my friend even said she was better at speaking Japanese than she was at speaking Vietnamese.

To non-Vietnamese speakers, my friend appears fluent in Vietnamese even if she doesn't consider herself fluent at all. Even if her skills in English and Vietnamese differ, she's bilingual because she can communicate with people in both languages.

If you can effectively communicate with people in two languages, that should be enough for you to be considered bilingual, but not everyone is going to agree with that because everyone views bilingualism, and how fluent you have to be in two languages in order to be considered bilingual, differently. Conversational fluency may be considered good enough for some people but not good enough to others. The whole idea is too complex to pin down an exact definition.

I reflected back on the girl I live with and her comment about understanding the news, and I thought, "What does it matter if you can understand the news? That doesn't define a person's fluency in a language. There are too many other factors. I don't even watch the news."

What we needed was to stop looking down on our own abilities and realize the skills we had were enough. They make us who we are.