So, you must be fluent by now?

During the opening lesson of my rookie Goethe-Institut summer school course in 2003, I was amazed I could instantly understand "Der Fisch schwimmt," "Der Ball rollt," and "Der Apfel sinkt" (if you drop it in a bowl of water).

This was the first little pearl on a string of triumphs marking my journey toward fluency. How many beads does it take to craft an artifact?

Here are a few of the milestones that followed my immersion euphoria that summer. You tell me where I became fluent. Or am I there yet?

1. Realizing why, while shopping, store employees didn't leave me alone after I shook my head. (In Germany they don't ask, "Can I help you?" but rather, "Are you doing alright?" / "Kommen Sie zu Recht?")

2. Identifying a love song on the radio.

3. Grasping snippets of a passerby's conversation on a busy sidewalk.

4. Failing to tune out background conversations at will.

5. Successfully concealing my foreign accent from a curious stranger seated next to me on a train.

6. Identifying potential nuclear waste repositories as the topic of a radio program.

7. Holding my own in a argument.

8. Word play - on purpose.

9. Passing my statistics exam.

Goals up ahead:

1. Laughing at stand-up comedy in Frisian dialect.

2. Being a statistics tutor.

3. Simultaneous translation of the tour through the archaeological excavation under the Cologne Cathedral.

Fluent sounds so final. Once you are fluent, you can't improve. But even in your native language you are never done learning, not least of all because the language itself is steadily changing.

It is like my high school calculus teacher Ms. Perkins explained: you can jump half way to a wall until the cows come home.