It’s been said you aren’t fluent in a language until you can think in that language. Others say that if you have a dream in your second language, that means you are fluent. Or that perhaps one day you find yourself remembering the foreign word, but forgetting the English word when conversing with someone – then you are fluent. So at what point of learning are you fluent?

Let’s first go over the biological reasons . . .

The human brain is one big rat’s nest of jumbled neurons that fire off during thought processes. A particular thought process would look like a tree of neurons, where a bunch of information comes in from the branches and funnels down into the trunk – a single solid high-level thought. As you get better at something, this ‘tree of neurons’ gets more and more efficient at what it does, with thicker stronger branches capable of linking more and more information together. Every new word you learn is a new leaf for that tree. Let’s call this the English Language Tree.

Then one day you begin to learn a new language. This is like a new small branch growing at the base of the huge English Tree trunk. It’s really tiny, it doesn’t do much, and doesn’t link to much of anything. As such, it’s natural for your brain to not use it. But if you keep studying, keep learning, and continue to force your mind to use that tiny branch, it’ll grow and branch out like the first language tree of yours did. At some point branches on this new tree will become as strong and efficient as the original language tree, and even sometimes sharing branches from the original English tree (shared grammatical/knowledge concepts). And your mind will no longer resist avoiding the ‘least efficient path’.

This is when you start to think in your second language, dream in your second language, and accidentally speak Thai to your Chinese friends on rare occasion (oops). It’s not going to just magically happen one day of course, but will come on very gradually as the new Thai Tree slowly grows. You can’t just plant a sapling today and expect it to shade you tomorrow.

Now put your technical cap on, please.

It’s still not quite entirely understood how the brain works, but MRI research has shown that those who speak Thai have a specialized center in the brain specifically for processing tones. Those who do not speak a tonal language do not have this specialized area. It is thought that this region forms as you learn the tonal language, ie you aren’t born with it. This means that as you learn Thai, your brain neurons are figuring things out by rewiring themselves into a specialized ‘interpret tones’ circuit. I would assume this learning process is more efficient when you’re younger, when more neurons are available to take on the task, and the rat’s nest of the English Tree isn’t blocking new circuits of the Thai Tree from quickly forming. It’s difficult to grow a new tree under the shade of a large tree . . .

Speaking from my own experience, I had my first Thai dream after studying for about two years. But I still didn’t think in Thai. I always had to create a thought in English first before translating it over. Yet I noticed that this process got faster and faster over time, requiring less and less effort. It wasn’t until four years after beginning Thai did I find myself occasionally thinking in Thai – I was almost starting to believe it would never happen! At first it was just basic stuff, then I realized any words and phrases I had been using for many years were slowly swapping over to automatic translation mode. I had grown a Thai Tree!

But alas, the Thai dreams are still a rare experience for me . . . even after learning for seven years . . .

ps – I’m a specialist in artificial intelligence/robotics . . . apologies if I got too technical! lol