In my few years of programming, I've toyed with everything from Ruby to C++. I've done everything from just learning basic syntax (Ruby) to completing several major (for me) projects that stretched my abilities with the language. Given this variety (and the fact that truly learning a language never stops), when can I say I know (or have learned) a language?
When Can You Say You’ve Learned a Programming Language?
programming-languages
Best Answer
At what point can you say that you've "learned" a language like English or French? I think most people would accept that you've learned a language when you can use it to communicate. You don't have to know every word or understand every idiom, but you should know most of the (rather small) subset of the language that people use in daily conversation. Having "learned" a language to that extent, you can continue to learn more as you use the language daily and expose yourself to more and more of it. By the time you die, you still won't know all there is to know about the language, but nobody will say that you never "learned" the language.
So it is, I think, with computer languages. You can say that you "know" a language like C++ or Ruby when you can write useful programs in it. If you need to quantify the degree to which you know the language, use the same terms that you'd use for a human language. Say "I know a little C++" or "I know conversational C++" or "I'm fluent in C++" to mean that you know just enough to scrape by, enough to get useful things done, or that you're an expert, respectively.