A test that might well be considered to be advanced is the sort of question you get on a well-known game show where the contestant has to guess the answers given by a panel of 100 speakers.

Example. Kiel vi rimarkus ke iu tro trinkis?

If I put that question in English and the respondent uses expression like 'unsteady gait', 'slurred speech' 'flushed face', 'incoherent ramblings' 'staggers' in his answers, I would certainly rate his knowledge of English as advanced.

And no doubt if you put the question in French there would be certain verbs and adjectives you would expect from a native (or really competent).

So rather than an advanced test, this is more bordering on a pseudo-native level of command of the language?

Is there a word that can be used other than advanced? Native fluency? The problem here is that Esperanto native speakers may be able to easily answer your questions as fast as they would if they were native speakers of any other, but there may be problematic reliability issues on how correct their Esperanto is due to parents level etc.

Anyway, this seems to transcend being just an advanced test and rather looking for evidence that a speaker is at native fluency. Correct use of vocabulary and pronunciation may have to be tested separately, so that a student is marked in multiple areas rather than receiving a single lump-sum style mark.

(EDIT: I was just thinking about the murky question of correctness regarding native speakers - EO and English in a way share the same growth pains. There are many native English speakers who speak like dis and dey can't do good in an Inglish test ta save deir loives, witch may horra youz, increasingly so in the business community too (yay for socialism!), but no one would ever go "oh they're just not fluent!". In the same way, Esperanto shares similar growing pains as a culture of imperfect speakers grow contrary to what some may think best for the language. In any event, Esperanto faces the same problems as any other language - how do we A) test without making it MORE difficult (as far as Uni students are concerned), B) test in a way that's true to the language as it's spoken etc, and C) come to terms with the fact that perfection and fluency in the Esperanto world may not quite equal each other... Very interesting!)

Translation of passages is an excellent test, but of course that would only be found in a 'national' exam, rather than an international one taken by speakers of all languages.

I have also noticed, that with a few exceptions, native speakers of Esperanto tend to make more grammatical errors than skilled non-native speakers. When I started with Esperanto I assumed that native speakers would speak perfectly... and then I met some parents that were raising their kids as native speakers, and I realized, that the parents didn't speak perfectly themselves (with regard to accent or grammar), so you could hardly expect the kid to grow up speaking perfectly without some degree of outside work. Reminds me somewhat of friends I had growing up who spoke a language other than English at home. Many of them told me that although they spoke "fluently", their speech wasn't always very grammatical (it was quite colloquial instead), and they didn't have good reading and writing skills in that language, since they hadn't attended schools speaking that language. This was true even for kids who went to a Saturday morning school to study their home language (Chinese school, Persian school, etc).

I've found that true too Erinja - very often, children of immigrants can't speak their parent's language very correctly, but they can speak it well, e.g. fluidly and flexibly. The lack of the 7 days a week living in the country of target language schooling etc seems to be very important to acquiring a language naturally, something we as native speakers living in a country where our language is predominately spoken may take for granted!

Mind you, that doesn't mean their family language skills are bad - you may just have an accent or childish speech pattern, which is better than I can say for many adult speakers of many languages at times!

Of course, another factor tends to be how the language in question is spoken. The Celtic languages in the British isles tend to have heavy anglicisation due to the nature of their revival with an English speaking populace, so less perfect language skills with those languages may be more acceptable or normal. EO is spoken almost entirely by learners in the same way, but in this case it's being learnt not by just English speakers but every man and his dog across the world, thus in a way, native EO speakers are both the best and worst examples of "perfect" Esperanto at the same time, due to both an example of fluidity and false expecations placed on them.

See this blog entry's comments, specifically user Kunar's conversation

I think you are right Ceiger.

The differentation of different levels and the criteria for language competence have to be different in the case of Esperanto to those used for the national languages.

Whilst the Common European Framework criteria may make sense in their application to French and German and Spanish and English etc., the order in which mastery of the language is achieved in different areas, will be unusual for Esperanto.

Grammactical mastery achieves its highest level for most learners at an early stage.

What might be classed as C level result in a grammar test for the national languages won't be a C level for Esperanto. Nor will passive comprehension of a text.

However, on the other hand, knowing the semantic fields covered by certain 'radikoj' might well be advanced for Esperanto, as might be the comprehension of rapid speech.

Peculiarly, for Esperanto, the wordbuilding system may permit a beginner to express his thoughts quite precisely with regard to certain matters with a relatively limited root-stock.

But knowing a large number of roots and their usage, as well as being able to label very ordinary objects from everyday life - which are not frequent referred to in Esperantist conversations - would indicate a high level of competence.

Any competetent learner of French might be expected to know the words in French for 'vacuum-cleaner, 'dishwasher' 'washing up liquid', 'overtaking lane' 'cigarette butt' 'grapefuit' 'lapel' etc., and knowing the expessions for such everyday objects may well go hand in hand with high degree of fluency in the spoken language.

But you will readily find fluent Esperantists who are hesitant in naming things from everyday life.