Quote:
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
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That sounds fair to me. If you translate when you speak, you will be using English 'thought-patterns' to present Chinese sentences. In the case of Chinese, ever noticed how some students get the grammar correct but still somehow don't sound natural?