Picture this: you step off a plane in a new country. The air feels different — the rhythm of footsteps, the music of voices, the smells drifting from open-air cafés. You walk into one, scan the menu, and when the server arrives, you answer without hesitation. Words flow from your mouth as naturally as water from a spring.

You order coffee with ease, joke lightly about the weather, maybe even share a small story about your trip. The server smiles, responds, and the exchange feels seamless.

That’s the dream most people carry when they imagine fluency.

It is the vision sold by apps and courses: fluency as a door you unlock once, after which the world opens effortlessly. It is the vision we chase when we practice late at night, when we feel embarrassed after mistakes, when we envy those who glide between tongues without stumbling.

But here’s the truth: that dream is a mirage. Fluency is not a finish line. It is not a prize at the end of a race. And most importantly, it does not look the same for everyone.

To see fluency clearly, we must first dismantle the myths we inherited.

Myth 1: Native-Like Mastery Is the Only Goal

The most persistent myth is that fluency means sounding like a “native speaker.”

That phrase assumes there is such a thing as a single “native standard.” It assumes that your accent or phrasing is a flaw to be corrected. It assumes fluency is imitation, not communication.

When I first studied Arabic, this myth weighed heavily on me. I measured every word against an imagined “perfect speaker.” I worried about my accent, rhythm, and authenticity. No matter how much progress I made, I always felt short of the ideal.

Many of my students have carried the same burden. One told me, “I know the words, but I can’t make myself sound like them.” Another stopped speaking altogether after a teacher corrected every small slip, reminding her she didn’t sound “native.”

The irony is that “native” is not one thing. English alone has dozens of major varieties. London English is not Lagos English. Buenos Aires Spanish is not Madrid Spanish. Even within one city, class, age, and subculture create different voices.

Linguist Vivian Cook reframed this with the concept of *multi-competence*. A bilingual is not a failed monolingual. They are a different kind of language user. An accent or a nonstandard phrase is not a flaw — it is a visible trace of this expanded competence.

Research confirms this. Studies on intelligibility show that clarity and adaptability matter far more than “native-likeness.” Jennifer Jenkins’ work on English as a Lingua Franca highlights that non-native speakers often communicate with other non-natives, building their own norms.

So why does the myth persist? History. Colonial powers once elevated prestige varieties — British RP, Parisian French, Castilian Spanish — as “proper.” Those echoes remain. But language belongs not to prestige but to people.

To believe fluency = native-likeness is to erase variation, and to deny yourself the right to sound like *you* in another tongue.

An Excerpt From Chapter One: What We Think Fluency Is (And What It Isn’t)