Obviously learning a couple of words in another language doesn’t really make you bilingual, or being able to say a few phrases. But there’s also clearly some point before full fluency where you can be considered bilingual, but how is it determined (formally or informally)? Is it purely vibes based, you’ll know when you see it kind of thing?
I’m vaguely familiar with the CEFR levels measuring how much of a language you speak, but if there’s a cutoff point for counting as bilingual in there somewhere I don’t know where.
As someone who never quite reached this level myself, I feel like it’s when you start being able to think in the second language inside your head.
I only got to the point where I had flashes of this happen for specific topics that didn’t translate well. For everything else I kept thinking in English, even if I then needed to convert it back mentally after.