What is bilingual?

Knowing when to call yourself bilingual

Taking a foreign language class doesn’t make you fluent, and having never stepped inside a classroom doesn’t mean you’re not bilingual. So how do you decide when it’s okay to call yourself bilingual on a job application or resume?

You’re fluent if:

You can carry out a conversation in the designated language

You should be able to able to make small-talk and have in-depth conversations with native speakers of your second language. If you struggle to understand people who speak your second language as their first one, it will interfere with your job. Practice the language to increase your comprehension speed, and try to determine if you’re struggling with local dialects—you may need to study variations of the language to really put it to use outside a classroom.

You can follow entertainment in the designated language

Can you que up your Netflix account to a non-subtitled flick or tune in your radio to foreign radio without struggling to understand what’s going on? That’s a great clue that you’re up to date with the language, as well as the cultural references that come along with it.

You are familiar with the industry lingo you’ll need in the designated language

You’re trying to apply your language as a job skill, and that might require some extra elbow-grease. Study up on industry words you’ll need to know. In construction you might not have the extra time to figure out how to say “watch out for that beam!” In a medical office, you don’t want to struggle for comprehension while trying to remember the way to translate “heart palpitations”. Each job will have a different set of shop talk to learn; study up before you apply so you aren’t caught off-guard during the interview.

Practice first if:

You haven’t used your language recently

“Use it or lose it” is conventional wisdom for a reason. If you haven’t dusted off your Deutsche in years, don’t try to apply to a German bilingual job without making sure you skill remember it as clearly as you used to. This is true for any language; if you haven’t used it recently, practice before you jump into your job interview.

You’ve only used your language in a school setting

Classrooms are great, but they aren’t a surefire way to tell you’ve got the real-world skills. If you’ve completed foreign language education, that’s wonderful, but find someone to practice with so you can make sure your certification in Cantonese has translated into an ability to keep up with an animated, fast-paced conversation with a native speaker.

Bilingual language skills can lead to finding a job and getting promoted faster, but you have to actually be bilingual before you can benefit from it.