How much should you know about a language to say you know the "fundamentals" of it?

Question

How much of a language should you know before saying you know the building blocks of it?
I have spent a few months on python and am confident with string handling, conditionals, loops, arrays (or tuples) and file handling. I can also use this with TKinter, the GUI plugin.
Would these be classified as the basics and if so, would this be acceptable as a 17 year old to put on university application forms?

Answer 1

It's hard to determine what the basics are, probably everybody will give a more or less slightly different answer.

My opinion: Being able to 'think in code', to translate real life problems into programming language and solve them - and the willpower and stamina to do so - are more important than pure knowledge.

Because all knowledge won't help you if the imagination is missing how to tackle a problem.

On the other hand, if some detail of knowledge is missing, you can just easily google it.

Anyway, saying you 'know the fundamentals' should also mean you have a good ability to solve at least not too hard problems.

Answer 2

I guess you could put on your university application that you know the fundamentals of Python, as these are the basics(I think you might need to learn about classes and objects, or put simply, object-oriented programming, as that's important in Python). However, I personally think that you would need to learn more to actually display your skills in Python, such as learning list comprehensions, regular expressions, and the basics of some of the modules provided.