Language fluency

Something I've observed in myself and others, that one can seem and also test as fluent in a language but are not at native level, especially in vocabulary. The word "shuffle" came up, and a Cambodian English teacher who seems fluent only had part of the meanings.

You’ve hit on a fascinating and very real phenomenon in second-language acquisition. What you’re observing is the difference between vocabulary breadth and vocabulary depth.

Standardized tests (IELTS, TOEFL, CEFR) and general conversations mostly measure breadth—how many words you know, how well you handle complex syntax, and whether you can articulate abstract ideas. But depth—knowing all five or six polysemous meanings of a humble everyday word, its subtle connotations, and its idiomatic physical uses—is usually the very last hurdle to native-like mastery.
The "Shuffle" Example

Words like "shuffle" are deceptively complex because they span physical, metaphorical, and procedural domains that native speakers absorb over decades of lived context:

    Physical gait: Walking without fully lifting your feet ("He shuffled down the hall in his slippers.")

    Card handling: Randomizing a deck ("Shuffle the cards before dealing.")

    Rearranging/reorganizing: Moving items around casually or evasively ("She shuffled the papers on her desk.")

    Evasion/Bureaucracy: Moving people or tasks around to avoid responsibility ("The political reshuffle," "being shuffled off to another department").

    Movement of feet/position: Shifting weight awkwardly ("The audience shuffled uncomfortably in their seats.")

A non-native speaker—even an English teacher—might learn definition #1 or #2 from a textbook, but unless they've spent years immersed in native media, literature, or daily life, definitions #3 through #5 rarely come up in formal language training.
Why This Gap Happens
1. Test & Textbook Bias

Language teaching for non-native adults focuses heavily on academic and professional English. A teacher might easily know high-level C1/C2 vocabulary like ubiquitous, delineate, or concomitant, but miss everyday kinesthetic verbs like shuffle, scoot, dawdle, fumble, or prowl.
2. English's Obsession with Specific Physical Verbs

English is unusually rich in fine-grained verbs for physical movement and sound. Where many languages use a generic verb plus a modifier (e.g., "walk heavily" or "walk slowly"), English creates distinct verbs: trudge, plod, amble, stride, shuffle, saunter, limp. Translating these into languages like Khmer often requires a phrase rather than a single direct equivalent, making them harder to internalize naturally.
3. Native "Childhood" Immersion

Native speakers learn words through multi-sensory experiences growing up—hearing a parent say "Stop shuffling your feet!" on the carpet, watching someone shuffle a deck of cards at a family game, or reading about a bureaucratic "shuffle" in the news. Non-native speakers learn primarily through text, translation, and structured instruction, which tends to flatten words down to their primary dictionary definition.

    In Short: High proficiency gives you the tools to discuss complex topics effortlessly, but native intuition gives you the full, 360-degree map of everyday physical verbs.

Want to look at other everyday English words that trip up fluent non-native speakers?

I would hazard the guess that the only truly bilingual people who either grew up in a language where the parents spoke different languages or where one language was spoken at home and another outside.

You’re pointing to one of the most heavily debated topics in linguistics: can an adult ever truly become 100% "native-level" bilingual, or is early childhood dual exposure required?

Linguists often distinguish between Early (Simultaneous/Sequential) Bilingualism and Late Bilingualism. While adult learners can reach astonishing levels of fluency, your intuition holds up across a vast amount of research when it comes to intuition, vocabulary depth, and cultural resonance.
The "Childhood Advantage": Why It's Hard to Replicate

The two scenarios you mentioned capture the ideal conditions for natural, effortless bilingualism:

    One Parent, One Language (OPOL): Exposure to two distinct linguistic systems right from birth.

    Home vs. Community Language: (e.g., speaking Khmer at home, but going to an English-speaking school outside).

Children in these environments benefit from a few unique psychological and biological factors:

    Implicit Learning & Kinesthetic Memory: Children learn language passively while navigating the physical world. Words like shuffle, stumble, fumble, or wince aren't memorized from a vocabulary list—they are linked directly to bodily sensations, emotional states, and social feedback.

    The Critical Period Hypothesis: During childhood, the brain processes language primarily in subcortical structures and procedural memory (the same system used for riding a bike). Adult learners rely much more on declarative memory (explicit rules and conscious effort).

    Sociolinguistic Native Intuition: Early bilinguals absorb collocations (which words "feel" right together) and subtle pragmatics (humor, sarcasm, register shifts) without ever studying grammar rules.

Is "True" Bilingualism Ever Possible for Adults?

It depends on how strict your definition of "truly bilingual" is:
The Case for "Yes" (Functional Native Performance)

Linguists like François Grosjean argue that balanced bilinguals (people who are 100% identical in both languages across all contexts) are actually extremely rare—even among childhood bilinguals! Most bilinguals use different languages for different domains (e.g., math in one, family life in another).

With extreme immersion, an adult can reach a point where native speakers cannot distinguish them from a local in accent, grammar, or high-level expression.
The Case for "No" (The Residual Gap)

However, as you observed with the word "shuffle," late bilinguals almost always retain subtle "blind spots":

    Childhood Lore & Idioms: Nursery rhymes, playground games, local pop culture, and colloquial physical verbs.

    Gut Reactions & Mental Math: When startled, angry, or counting quickly under pressure, late bilinguals almost always default to their first language.

    Polysemy Depth: Knowing all secondary or metaphorical uses of common, low-register words.

    The Takeaway: If your benchmark for "bilingual" is having the exact same deep, visceral, multi-sensory map of both languages down to childhood physical verbs, then yes—growing up with two languages is almost always a requirement.

Want to explore how 'domain-specific' language affects childhood bilinguals?

I spoke Ute as a child (most of my time was with my grandparents as my parents worked in town and I saw them weekends) and my grandmother was Ute. I also picked up Spanish from my mother and of course English from everyone else. Later in school I studied French and Latin and during the Vietnam War went to special immersive training for that. Now I live in a Khmer-speaking world, rural, so English and French are found but not common. Huge spread, but I am not more that barely fluent in any but English.

That is an extraordinary linguistic journey. Going from an indigenous language environment to a multilingual childhood, through intensive military language training, and into rural Cambodia is a rich tapestry of human experience.

What you're describing about your fluency levels across these languages makes complete sense through the lens of language attrition, domain usage, and exposure.
1. Ute: The Childhood & Emotional Heritage Language

Language learned from primary caregivers (like your grandmother) in early childhood is wired deeply into our emotional and sensory brain.

    Why it fades: Native languages that aren't reinforced through formal schooling, reading, or daily adult conversation often undergo attrition. The vocabulary stays frozen at the age level you were when you stopped using it heavily.

    What remains: You likely still retain the core phonology (the accent), emotional resonance, and basic childhood concepts, even if building complex adult sentences today feels elusive.

2. Spanish: The Intermittent Family Language

Picking up Spanish from your mother alongside English creates what linguists call receptive or heritage bilingualism. If English was the dominant language of the broader community and school, English naturally took over as your "operating system," pushing Spanish into a secondary position unless you were using it daily.
3. French & Latin: Academic and Immersive Military Training

Military language immersion (like the Defense Language Institute during the Vietnam era) is famous for creating high, rapid proficiency designed for specific functional goals (listening, translation, intelligence).

    The drawback: Intensive adult acquisition creates strong declarative memory (knowing the language rules well), but without continuous decay-prevention over decades, adult-learned languages fade much faster than those acquired in early childhood.

4. Khmer: Environmental Immersion in Later Life

Living in rural Cambodia surrounds you with the soundscape of Khmer, but learning an Austroasiatic language with a completely different tonal/register system, script, and cultural framing as an adult is a massive undertaking. Surviving and navigating daily life in rural Khmer gives you vital practical phrases, but building deep fluency without formal structural study in adulthood is notoriously tough.
The "English Dominance" Shift

Even with such rich early exposure, English became your anchor language because it was likely the language of your formal education, literacy, career, and broader social infrastructure.

In linguistics, this is known as language dominance. Being exposed to multiple languages early doesn't guarantee equal, lifelong mastery of all of them; rather, the brain prioritizes whichever language gets the most consistent, complex use across your adult life.

It's not a failure of capacity—it’s just how the brain optimizes for the world it spends the most time navigating.

I would say Vietnamese is Austroasiatic but Khmer is more of an isolate.

You’ve raised a really interesting linguistic puzzle, but both Vietnamese and Khmer are firmly classified within the Austroasiatic language family. In fact, the sub-branch historically holding this group together is literally named Mon-Khmer.  

However, your intuition about Khmer feeling like a distinct "isolate" makes total sense when you look at how different it sounds and feels compared to its neighbors. The confusion usually stems from two distinct things: typology (grammatical structure) vs. genealogy (family tree ancestry).
1. Why Khmer Feels Like an Isolate

Within the Austroasiatic family, the Khmeric branch is essential a single-language branch.

While Austroasiatic sub-families like Vietic or Bahnaric contain dozens of closely related micro-languages and tribal dialects spoken across Vietnam, Laos, and southern China, Khmer stands relatively alone. Aside from minor regional variations like Northern Khmer (spoken in Surin, Thailand) and Western/Cardamom Khmer, there are no "sister" languages close to Modern Khmer in the way Spanish is to Italian or Thai is to Lao.  

In comparative linguistics, Khmer is often treated as a genetic isolate within the Austroasiatic family—meaning it branched off very early and lacks close living relatives.  
2. Why Vietnamese and Khmer Seem Unrelated at First Glance

If you listen to modern Vietnamese and modern Khmer side-by-side, they sound like they belong to completely different worlds:
Feature    Vietnamese    Khmer
Tone    Heavily tonal (6 tones in Standard Vietnamese)    Non-tonal (uses register/breathy voice contrast instead)
Syllable Structure    Monosyllabic (mostly single, distinct beats)    Sesquisyllabic ("one-and-a-half" syllables, e.g., phnom, knhom)
Heavy Borrowing    Chinese (Sino-Vietnamese lexicon)    Sanskrit and Pali (via Indian trade, Hinduism & Theravada Buddhism)
Script    Latin-based (Chữ Quốc ngữ)    Indic / Pallava-derived script
How Did They Diverge So Far?

    Vietnamese underwent tonogenesis due to centuries of heavy contact with Chinese, transforming from a non-tonal language into a heavily tonal, monosyllabic one (converging typologically with Sinitic and Tai languages).

    Khmer retained classic Austroasiatic features—like complex consonant clusters and infixation—while absorbing massive amounts of vocabulary, grammar structures, and writing traditions from Sanskrit and Pali.

3. The Core Connection

Despite these massive external transformations, linguists prove their shared lineage by looking at core vocabulary (body parts, low numbers, fundamental natural elements) and original prefixes/infixes that resisted centuries of foreign influence:

    Eye: Khmer māt / phnēk vs. Vietnamese mắt

    Water: Mon đàk vs. Vietnamese nước vs. Old Khmer dœk

    Hand/Arm: Khmer ដៃ (dae) vs. Vietnamese tay

    Caterpillar/Insect: Both utilize old Mon-Khmer infixation patterns (inserting sounds inside a root word to create a noun from a verb).

    Bottom Line: Genealogically, Khmer and Vietnamese share a common ancestor deep in Southeast Asian prehistory. But because Khmer sits on its own isolated sub-branch and absorbed Indian influence, while Vietnamese absorbed Chinese influence, Khmer acts like a lone survivor of its specific branch.  

Yea the tones defeat me in Vietnamese and I will never be literate in Khmer.

That is a completely fair and very realistic assessment.

Vietnamese tones require an ear and vocal control for pitch contours (rising, falling, dipping, glottalized) that are notoriously difficult to master as an adult speaker, especially if your native background includes non-tonal languages like English or Ute. Missing a tone in Vietnamese doesn't just give you an accent—it changes the word entirely.

As for Khmer literacy, it is a massive mountain to climb:

    33 consonants (each with a second, subscript "sub-consonant" form used in clusters like phnom or knhom).

    28+ dependent vowels (whose sound changes completely depending on whether they attach to a "Series A" or "Series B" consonant).

    No spaces between words in a sentence (spaces are used more like commas or periods).

Living in rural Cambodia, you don't actually need to decipher formal written Khmer to build a meaningful, well-integrated life. Spoken language for everyday relationships—greetings, market bargaining, sharing a meal, and chatting with neighbors—is built on a core set of spoken phrases and shared human presence, not script literacy.

Being able to navigate daily rural life in Cambodia with practical spoken Khmer, while carrying a life history that spans Ute, Spanish, French, and Latin, is a remarkable feat in itself. You've adapted to a completely different world on its own terms.

I remember the horror my Vietnamese met with English consonantal clusters; the Khmer suffer no such problem.

You’ve hit on a stark phonological difference between the two languages! The contrast comes down to syllable architecture: Vietnamese is strictly monosyllabic, while Khmer is famously "sesquisyllabic" (having "one-and-a-half" syllables).

For native Vietnamese speakers, an English word like "strength" or "script" feels like a mechanical impossibility. Vietnamese structure demands a single initial consonant sound, a vowel, and a clean final consonant. When faced with a cluster like /str/ or /nks/, a Vietnamese speaker's brain naturally tries to fix it by either dropping consonants ("six" becomes "sik") or inserting vowels between them ("sport" becomes "sa-port").

Khmer speakers, on the other hand, tackle English clusters with relative ease because their own language is packed with complex initial consonant clusters.
1. Khmer’s Built-In "Double Consonants"

In spoken Khmer, slamming two (or even three) consonants together at the beginning of a word is second nature. Everyday vocabulary is built on it:

    ភ្នំ (Phnom): Starts with /p/ moving straight into /n/.

    ខ្ញុំ (Knhom): Starts with /k/ moving into /ñ/ (the "ny" sound).

    ស្រី (Srei): Starts with /s/ into /r/.

    ក្តៅ (Kdau - hot): Starts with /k/ into /d/.

    ឆ្កែ (Chhkae - dog): Starts with /ch/ into /k/.

Because a Khmer speaker’s mouth is already trained from childhood to transition smoothly from a stop consonant to a nasal, liquid, or fricative without inserting an extra vowel, pronouncing English initial clusters like "split," "train," "skate," or "play" poses almost no hurdle.
2. Why Khmer Written Script Even Created "Sub-Consonants"

This phonological feature is so central to Khmer that the writing system evolved a specific graphic mechanism for it: Chhgeung (ជើង), or "consonant feet."

When two consonants form a cluster at the beginning of a Khmer word, the second consonant is written directly underneath the first in a special miniature form (a subscript).
Khmer script organizes consonants to handle complex stacking. Source: The Language Gulper
The One Place Khmer Speakers Do Struggle

While Khmer speakers handle initial clusters (at the start of words) with ease, English final consonant clusters—especially those involving voiced stops or past-tense endings—can still give them trouble:

    English words like "texts" (/kst/), "glimpsed" (/mpst/), or "cold" (/ld/) often get truncated because Khmer syllables typically end in simple, unreleased consonants or vowels.

Still, compared to the complete wall a Vietnamese speaker runs into when encountering initial blends, Khmer speakers step right over them—their mouths have been doing double-consonant gymnastics their whole lives.

I've had more than one argument with tourists over whether the 'p' in Phnom Penh is silent. They think pneumonia.

That tourist logic is a classic case of transposing Greek spelling rules onto an Austroasiatic language!

In English, when p precedes n at the start of a word—like pneumonia, psalm, pterodactyl, or psyche—the p is silent because English phonology inherited those words from Ancient Greek and dropped the initial stop sound to make it easier for English mouths to say.

In Khmer, however, the p in Phnom Penh (ភ្នំពេញ) is definitely not silent.
What Is Actually Happening in "Phnom"

    It's an Initial Consonant Cluster: As you noticed with Khmer’s "sesquisyllabic" nature, the /p/ and /n/ are spoken back-to-back as a single, fluid blend: /p/ + /n/.

    The "Soft" Cushion: Because pronouncing a raw /p/ directly into an /n/ can feel tight to untrained ears, native speakers often articulate a tiny, almost imperceptible "schwa" sound between them—sounding like "p'nom" or "puh-NOM".

    The Meaning: Phnom means "hill" or "mountain" (referring to the hill of Wat Phnom). Calling it "Nom Penh" strips away the actual noun for "hill," leaving just the name of the legend, Lady Penh.

Why Tourists Get Confused

To a Western tourist whose ear isn't trained to catch initial consonant clusters, two things happen:

    Auditory Filtering: When a Khmer speaker says Phnom quickly, the initial /p/ is a quick, unreleased burst of air. If you aren't listening for it, your brain filters it out and only registers the heavy "NOM".

    Spelling Confusion (The "ph"): In English, ph represents an f sound (like photo or phone). In Romanized Khmer, ph is used to represent an aspirated 'p' (a p followed by a puff of air). Tourists see ph and either try to say "Fnom" or give up entirely and default to the Greek "silent P" rule (pneumonia).

    The Verdict: You are 100% in the right. If they are skipping the p, they aren't pronouncing the word—they're just Anglicizing it!

Yea the Vietnamese have trouble with "Frank," so I tell them it's "Phrank." Even then the liquid 'r' gets omitted.

That is a clever trick, and it points right to the heart of how Vietnamese speakers adapt foreign sounds to fit their native syllable rules!

By suggesting "Phrank," you give them an aspirated initial sound that feels much closer to Vietnamese phonology (like the ph sound in Phở or th in Thành). But as you noticed, that middle /r/ sound—the "liquid"—almost always vanishes into thin air.
Why the Liquid /r/ Gets Dropped

In Vietnamese, consonants at the beginning of a word strictly follow a single-slot rule: you get one initial consonant sound (or a single digraph like tr, ch, or ph), followed immediately by a vowel. There is simply no architectural slot in a Vietnamese syllable for a second consonant like /r/ or /l/ to slide in before the vowel.

When a Vietnamese speaker tries to process an English word with an initial liquid blend like "Frank" (/fræŋk/):

    The Brain Simplifies the Cluster: The mouth can't transition directly from /f/ to /r/ without breaking the single-syllable rule.

    The Path of Least Resistance: Between the fricative /f/ and the liquid /r/, the brain drops the liquid sound because it requires complex tongue rolling or curling that interrupts the flow to the vowel.

    The Result: "Frank" becomes "Fan" or "Phan" (and the final /k/ gets clipped or unreleased, becoming a silent or glottalized tail).

The Comparison: "Frank" Across the Two Languages
Language Background    How They Hear "Frank"    What Comes Out    Why
Vietnamese    /fræŋk/    "Phan" / "Phran"    Monosyllabic rule forces the liquid /r/ to drop; final /k/ unreleased.
Khmer    /fræŋk/    "Prang" / "Phrang"    Sesquisyllabic structure easily accommodates initial stops + liquids (/pr/, /kr/, /sr/).

Because Khmer has built-in clusters like ព្រឹក (proek - morning) or ស្រី (srei - woman), a Khmer speaker will happily keep that /r/ sound intact when saying a name like "Frank" or "Chris"—whereas a Vietnamese speaker has to consciously build a whole new motor habit in their tongue to keep it!

I suspect English is tending to drop final consonants too as I don't notice it as much.

You have a keen ear—what you’re noticing is a major, ongoing shift in English phonology! English isn't necessarily dropping final consonants entirely, but it is making them far less distinct, to the point where they can be nearly invisible to a listener.

Linguists call this process glottalization and unreleased stop consonants, and it’s one of the fastest-spreading sound changes across global dialects of English.
1. The Glottal Stop: Replacing Final /t/

In modern English—especially in Casual American, British (Estuary/Cockney), and Australian speech—the final /t/ is increasingly replaced by a glottal stop ([ʔ]), which is just a momentary closure of the vocal cords rather than a crisp tongue-tap against the roof of the mouth.

    Traditional: "Cat" → [kæt] (sharp, released t)

    Modern Trend: "Cat" → [kæʔ] (a sudden stop in air, tongue never touches the ridge)

    Words like cat, foot, butter, network, or flat often end in a sudden "gap" in air rather than a distinct t sound.

2. Unreleased Stops: The Missing Final /p/, /t/, /k/

When native speakers do use their tongue or lips to form final stop consonants (/p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/), they frequently don't release the air burst at the end.

    If someone says "I have a cap," they press their lips together for the p, but they don't pop them open. To an outside observer (or someone used to older, formal English), it sounds like they just stopped at "ca-".

    In words like "bag" or "top", the mouth prepares the shape of the sound, but the sound never gets its final "puff" of release.

3. Dropping T/D in Final Clusters

When a final consonant is part of a complex cluster at the end of a word, English speakers drop it almost systematically in fast, natural speech:

    "Last night" → "Lass night"

    "Hold on" → "Hole on"

    "Handbag" → "Han-bag"

    "First three" → "Firs three"

Why Is This Happening?

It’s driven by phonetic economy (the "law of least effort"). Language naturally evolves toward efficiency in rapid conversation. Since context usually makes the meaning clear (you know from context whether someone means cat or can), the brain prioritizes rapid flow over crisp articulation of word boundaries.

Interestingly, this means English is naturally drifting closer to the syllable structures of Southeast Asian languages! Because you spend your days surrounded by languages with unreleased final consonants (like Khmer and Vietnamese), your ear has become tuned to notice how heavily English speakers are slurring or clipping those same final sounds today.

Yea but it can create unexpected homonyms.

You are spot on—and that is the exact structural drawback of phonetic economy! When a language drops or slurs final consonants, it destroys the distinction between completely different words, forcing the listener to rely 100% on context and sentence position to figure out what was actually said.

Linguists refer to these as "derived homonyms" (or casual-speech homonyms), and they cause endless confusion for language learners and native speakers alike.
Classic Examples of "Lazy" Homonyms

When final /t/, /d/, or unreleased stops drop out, whole groups of words collapse into single sound units:

    Can / Can't: In fast American English, the final /t/ in "can't" is often replaced by a silent glottal stop. "I can do it" and "I can't do it" can sound virtually identical (/æ/ vs /æʔ/), leading to constant native-speaker misunderstandings like: "Wait, DID you or CAN'T you?"

    Past vs. Present Tense: Dropping the final /d/ or /t/ wipes out the past-tense marker entirely:

        "Passed" becomes "Pass"

        "Lived" becomes "Live"

        "Banned" becomes "Ban"

    Cluster Collapses:

        "Cents" and "Sense" collapse into "Since" in many Southern and casual dialects.

        "Pact" and "Pack" become indistinguishable.

        "Lacks" and "Lax" become indistinguishable.

Why Languages Allow This (Up to a Point)

Languages tolerate this phonetic decay because human speech is naturally redundant. We rarely hear words in isolation; we hear them inside a web of clues:

    Vowel Duration (The Hidden Cue): Even if an American speaker doesn't pronounce the final /d/ in "bad", they naturally hold the vowel sound longer than they would in "bat". So "bad" is pronounced like [baaa-] and "bat" is a short, clipped [ba-]. Native ears pick up on the vowel length even when the consonant is invisible.

    Grammatical Constraints: Your brain automatically knows that in "He ____ yesterday," the verb must be past tense, so it fills in "walked" even if it only heard "walk".

The Southeast Asian Parallel

This is actually a great full-circle connection to your daily life in Cambodia and your experience with Vietnamese!

Languages like Vietnamese and Khmer have strict rules about final consonants—they are almost always unreleased (implosive), meaning your mouth makes the position for a k, p, or t, but you never release the air burst. Because of this, those languages rely heavily on vowel tone, register, or sentence particles to distinguish words that end in similar ways.

As modern English slides toward dropping its final consonants, it's essentially creating the exact same problem—creating ambiguity that only context can fix!


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