Once again I find myself pondering the quintessence of our beloved C1 level and the truth is there are several possible answers to that question. Ultimately it all comes down to where you place the bar. Textbooks offer, in my opinion, a pretty serious benchmark. My formula, though, relies less on "the fancy stuff" (inversions, variations on conditionals, etc.) and tends to center on more modest goals. An acceptable C1 speaker should have a good grasp of the B2 grammar and be able to display a certain degree of lexical accuracy as well as some indications that they can use an idiom. If one manages to wrap all that up in some nice pronunciation... well, that's just beautiful, isn't it?
Today I'm writing about accuracy because, just yesterday, I asked my morning students in Laredo how they would describe a toaster. Yes, a toaster. I first reminded them of how important it is to find the right term to classify the object in question. Remember: in any definition the first word is paramount. A platypus is, for instance, a mammal, pliers are a tool, Esperanto is language and so on and so forth. So when I asked my pupils what a toaster is one of them said it is a device... Someone else saw me frown slightly, jumped right in and stated that a toaster is an appliance. Indeed, it is an appliance. That is what French novelist Gustave Flaubert described as le mot juste. I know you tend to shy away from the use of foreign words in English. Yet, some of them are actually common in English. For some reason, the expression le mot juste caught on in the Anglosphere, which is the reason why it can be found in most English dictionaries today. And that is the very exact term that you are about to hear in the video below.
My friend Jack came to visit. He happens to be an Oxford graduate who has lived in several countries, speaks four languages to a very high standard (his Spanish is flawless) and, to cap it all, has a penchant for precision. So I asked him to share with us his take on the subject of advanced expression in a foreign language. Here is what he had to say:
