<p>I also work for a legal hotline and can understand 95% of everything everybody says to me on the hotline; I can also understand everything parents and children say to me at my job. I can have conversations about legal matters, educational matters, politics, etc., and understand most of the conversations I hear on the bus or on the street–with regionalized slang being the only exception. I have also read Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Isabel Allende in Spanish, and though I did need to pull out a dictionary once in a while, I read 90% of it or so with ease.</p>
<p>But clearly you don’t know what fluent means. </p>
<p>From the free dictionary: </p>
<p>a. Able to express oneself readily and effortlessly: a fluent speaker; fluent in three languages.</p>
<p>From the Google dictionary:</p>
<p>eloquent: expressing yourself readily, clearly, effectively.</p>
<p>I’m guessing Yale will go by the definition in dictionaries rather than your own skewed ideas about what “fluent” is.</p>