There's just something so cool about the idea of being able to chat away happily with native speakers just as if you were one of them. They would understand everything you say, and you would understand everything they say. Jokes, cultural references, and wordplay would just "click", like magic. It would feel effortless. And "effortless" is probably not a word you would use to describe your current language learning situation, is it?
Sadly, if you're not a native speaker of a language already that is, a person who was raised speaking that language since early childhood , you can't "gain" native speaker status. But you can become so good that, in many situations, people confuse you for a native speaker.
I've been fortunate to achieve this across several languages. I've been called native-like or mistaken for a native in English , French, Spanish , German, Russian and Portuguese - none of which are my mother tongue. Before you can work towards achieving native-like proficiency in a language, you need to define what a native speaker is, and how native speakers achieve "native" status in their mother tongues.
Earlier, I mentioned that a native speaker is a person who was raised speaking that language since early childhood. In most cases, children spend the earliest parts of their childhood with their parents, both of which are usually native speakers of the language the child will eventually learn.
For the first six or seven years of life, children develop language through listening to their parents and family members, and trying to use those sounds and grammar patterns to communicate back to them. In the next stage of childhood somewhere around six years of age , most children enter schooling. At this point, a child will have developed adequate, though imperfect, language skills. They may still struggle with things like pronunciation and less-common grammar patterns.
