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Unread Jan 3rd, 2007, 02:07 am
simplyesl simplyesl is offline
SimplyESL
 
Join Date: Jul 13th, 2006
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Default Re: Defining a native speaker

I think it would be combination of 1 and 2. Even if you are really fluent in many (or more than 1) I think there would be one language that the speaker would "translate" from. For example; I can speak understand Chinese, however, I still translate it into English in my brain before/after I have heard/said anything. No matter how good someone is at a language, if they are still translating words/sentences from the language into their base language, then I will only go as far as to define them as Near Native Speaker. Harsh, I know, but that's just what i think.
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