But I'd say confusion over language similarities is less of a struggle than trying to wrap your head around entirely foreign concepts. For example, the 7 Czech cases baffle me to no end as those concepts don't exist in either Chinese or English. However I do agree with you that language similarities can be a real pain. In the past when I've attempted Mandarin, the only times I could remember any Mandarin word was when it was similar to Cantonese. But then I'd find myself mispronouncing it because it's so close to Cantonese I end up literally speaking Cantonese lol. But while I don't speak Mandarin, my mum does and she learnt it in 3 months thanks to the similarities.
That's a good point. I studied Italian for a year in high school and three more courses in uni, but when I began French soon after, I was mixing them up every now and then. But then I've heard from immigrants who've come to Finland say that Finnish is next to impossible for them to learn if their first language is Norwegian, English, or German so they actually learn Swedish first, or if they already speak it, just try to get by with that. The reverse doesn't really work, not for me anyway, 'cause learning English hasn't been a struggle (despite my native Finnish being a troll of a language) 'cause, for one, you start to learn it at such an early age, while when I've tried to wrap my head around Russian or Bulgarian, I've been totally lost because of the vastly different vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and alphabet.
Yeah I understand, first year of university I had an arabic language course, and since I'm fluent in Algerian Arabic, I had no problem whatsoever with vocabulary, grammar and conjugation when speaking, but since Algerian Arabic is an oral language, that couldn't help me with the written part of it, I struggled a lot with the construction of words since the alaphabet is different. But I think it can be a problem with languages that have the same alphabet, too. I've studied German for 5 years at school, and after the first year, hated every second of it, because I didn't understand the syntax of sentences ( maybe I did at some point, but my 2nd and 3rd year of german we had no teacher, from time to time, substitutes who were not even certified German teachers, so when in 4th year I had a qualified teacher, she was pretty much baffled at how bad we were, but she didn't lower the level , so it was basically impossible to learn anything, expect for vocabulary, since we were so bad and most of us didn't know how to form a simple sentence).
Maybe it depends on whether you learned the second (or third or whatever) language when you were a kid or not. I learned French as a kid from my mom, and I never had to translate sentences in my mind. I understood French the same way I understood English. I never had to stop and think about what was being said. Then again, I was a kid, so I wasn't thinking (overthinking?) about language too much. Maybe that's why they say it's easier to learn languages as a kid.
I think it's important to note (and some of us have to one extent or another) that there is a dynamic difference between hearing or seeing a language and having to reproduce it. Hearing it or seeing it written down is passive access. The signifiers (words) and the syntax are given to you. You simply have to run them through you language centers. Depending in your level of fluency in a foreign language, there's very little processing to be done there. Having to reproduce it is another story. That's active access. You have to recall the signifiers, create the syntax for the signifiers that then signify your meaning. That's a much more intense process, even at a level that one would consider fluent. I think I'm a little more pedantic about the idea of having to process than others because this is what I do for a living. For example, in Spanish, to say that I translate the sentences in my head is wrong. No. I don't do that. The Spanish words and the English words each hook up to the signified concept, not to each other, just as @KaTrian makes mention. But because I work as an interpreter and translator, I don't usually have the luxury of relying on the comfort zone of my idiolect. An idiolect, for anyone unfamiliar with the term, is the particular way in which an individual person has chosen to engage a language, the particular words that person uses and the ones that person choses not to use, the structures the person uses and the ones the person tends to avoid. As an interpreter, you can only filter your work through your particular idiolect to a small degree before lack of precision in the interpretation starts to make itself known. The example I gave in a prior post about having to slow down to think about the particular verb group an upcoming verb belongs to in order to conjugate it into the correct future tense is something I demand of myself because I cannot afford to take shortcuts, professionally. Most native speakers of Spanish, in day to day speech, make use of an auxiliary verb structure that allows them to get around having to conjugate verbs into complex tenses because it's much, much easier and verbs in Spanish are notoriously irregular, even by the standards of native speakers. If I let myself make use of this easy shortcut, then the complex tenses won't ever "set" in place in my long term, easy access memory, so I don't ever use it. My hubby William often makes note that my Spanish has a professorial, snooty quality to it because of this. *shrug* So, to me, there is always a level processing going on that perhaps others don't feel.
I'm an arachnophobe. The beauty of a country is inversely proportional to the number of gigantic ugly monster spiders that live there. By this measure, Costa Rica is ugly as sin.
Well, English is my second language. I don't need to translate word and sentences in my head to understand them. English feels familiar to me, I don't even think of it as a foreign language. I actually tend to think in English a lot too, my thoughts are always in a mixture of English and my native language, Farsi. This is kinda interesting when you think about it, since Farsi and English are so different from one another, yet I can switch between them easily whether I'm speaking aloud, thinking, or reading. It's really kinda cool when I think how far I've come in my English skills; 7 or 8 years ago, my English was mediocre at best and now it's just so natural to me, hell I'm writing stories and novels in it. That's not to say I'm 100 percent fluent, my accent and pronunciations still need some work, but still.
We have basically the same experience ! English doesnt feel like a foreign language at all. Do you feel more comfortable writing in English or Farsi ? I only write in English because I find the language easier, and also because there's this"relaxed style" of writing that I have in English, I cant have in French because french is such a formal language
I've never written a story in Farsi and I don't think I will any time soon, I don't exactly now why, I just like writing in English more
I'm not fluent in anything . . . not even English. The ease with which I can communicate depends on the language. I had a boss who could speak German and would deliberately switch from English to German just to see if I would answer in English or German. I never noticed that he switched languages and it drove the secretary crazy. Nimiipuutint is harder because the language is so different from English; sometimes I do have to think a minute to translate.
That amazes me, and pretty much confirms what other have said about not having to translate. To be so fluent that you don't even notice must be pretty amazing
Do you have any idea how valuable you would be to the U.S. government? lmao Farsi is like one of the hardest languages for an American to learn and they are constantly looking for translators. You would be like a gold mine!
Fluent is different still from native - you're certainly fluent if you can operate in the language in multiple situations that require advance language knowledge. I'm just now reading a book on trilingualism and in the introduction the professor is making a case for the theory that equal linguistic ability across all one's known languages is often unrealistic since your ability will vary depending on necessity, your environment and your education, as well as the fact that you might be more fluent in conversing about topic A in one language but for topic B you'd prefer another, because you were often exposed to those topics in those languages, which accounts for the difference in fluency even in a monolingual, where perhaps a monolingual who would otherwise be considered a native speaker might not know specialist vocabulary familiar to a medical doctor. (ETA: oh my word I just now realised most of this paragraph is one gigantic sentence! ) Anyway I'm looking forward to reading more Sometimes I've questioned if I'm truly "fluent" or bilingual when my Chinese writing ability is minimal due to a lack of Chinese education - but reading that book, it seems it's actually a pretty natural phenomenon for bi- and multilinguals that certain aspects of one or more language(s) might be lacking depending on one's upbringing.
Huh! This is an interesting point of view, I've never thought about it this way. Makes a lot of sense though
Are you serious?! Farsi IS a difficult language to learn though, the letters are completely different, the grammar rules are tougher and there are sounds in Farsi that don't exist in English making them really hard for English speakers to produce.
Hahaa reading you I see lots of stuff from my sociolinguistics, translation and linguistics classes I'm in no way a professional translator haha but when I have translations exams I notice that I tend to be not precise enough, because in everyday life people would understand the meaning even though it's not the EXACT translation , but in class we learn to be really precise( which is hard because who knows every word right ?)
It could be because I already speak English, but for some reason I've always felt as though other European languages have more sounds than English does. But I'm not sure if that's only because I'm more aware of the variety of sounds in a foreign language precisely because I don't speak it. In any case, when my husband notes down new Cantonese words I teach him, he uses the Czech alphabet to write the syllables down because he can express a larger variety of sounds to mimic Cantonese that way, whereas English is limited. But then again, I've often wondered if that would still be the case if he knew phonics, which he doesn't, despite functioning in English with near native fluency. However I've often found the variety of English syllables to be rather limited too, although admittedly the only time I've analysed English this way is when I'm trying to sound out a Cantonese word for my friend.
Just ask @Wreybies he'll tell you the same thing. I am curious if he can tell us how many people he saw wash out of the defense language institute while trying to learn Farsi.
Um... Ok, so I graduated from DLI in 1989. Russian was still, hands down, top dog language. There were two Russian schools on the campus, "down the hill" and "over the hill". I attended "over the hill", which was in front of Foxtrot Company. Russian was the only language to have more than one school on campus. The next most attended language was Mandarin. Most of the students I knew and socialized with were either Russian or Mandarin students. Farsi was there, but Desert Storm had yet to even happen, so it still wasn't a big presence. I can tell you that Mandarin had a washout rate that was like a cliff. There came a point where students just all fell off. Most of my friends who had difficulty with Mandarin felt the pinch in learning the logograms. Mandarin is amazingly analytic as regards its structure and syntax, but the writing system bares no resemblance to an alphabet or a syllabary. It functions in a completely different way, and though they learned Pinyin* and used that too, they had to to know the logograms as well. A friend (who sadly knew she was about to wash out) tried to explain to me how it worked, the radicals that make up the logograms, and all I could think was how thankful that all I had had to learn was the Cyrillic alphabet, which seemed like child's play in comparison. So, I'm not really sure what the Farsi washout rate really was. Russian and Mandarin seemed like they lost students in waves, but there were so many students for both languages to start with that by the point of graduation it was impossible not to note the difference. My particular Russian graduating class had a 60% attrition. By the end, the percentage of students graduating who had arrived at DLI already bilingual or polyglot was hugely increased over the starting percentage. It was obvious to all of us, about halfway through the school, that people who already functioned with more than once code had a distinct advantage at acquiring yet another code, compared to those who arrived with only their native language. And it didn't really matter what your "other languages" were, just that you had one. *They didn't call it Pinyin at DLI. They called it transliteration or just translit, which is a generic term from linguistics for that kind of thing. We had it for Russian too and called it the same thing, translit.
Fluency and language competences are outlined in the CEFR to give some idea of what fluency could mean and how to measure it. There isn't such a thing as 100 % fluency, I'm sure. In some situations we can speak more confidently than in others. To build on what you said, I couldn't talk about highly specific medical stuff in any of the languages I speak, although the chances are I'd have a better vocabulary in English thanks to all those medical shows we're constantly fed on TV than in Finnish (I think in order to pull that off in Finnish, I'd just add an "i" after every English word, and voilà, I'd sound like I know my shit). There can be situations where you realize the people around you do speak your language, but the vocabulary they use is so specialized, they might as well have come from another planet.
To the OP...I can't speak any language other than English to a level that I'd call fluent, but what knowledge I do have of French and German comes as naturally as if I was speaking English, i.e., I think up the sentence in the target language rather than thinking in English and translating it. And now, at the age of 68, I'm learning Italian...
I'm not huge on learning other languages but, for one, I've never really had much of a choice. About half of my time online (and sometimes at home) is spent speaking to English and Russian speakers. Also, I can type in either language - on any keyboard, using the language bar - but atm, I'm more familiar with Old Church Slavonic and Russian script than I am with Latin or English script. I may study them more in the future but, for mow, I'm totally clueless.
Although it is tiresome for an English speaker 'dealing with' Scandinavians. They think they own English. Everybody speaks it from age seven or some younger age, for fun really, even the Danish do it. But to the discerning eye their 'English' language is a wave, an onslaught of 'totally amazing' and such words from advertising, occasionally an American accent, very grubby, though that is more Baltic preference. Dutch, on the other hand, have an innate comprehension of Anglo-Saxon mores and pov, speak OUR language beautifully [See FRISIAN, or FRESIAN] like brothers.
I am a native Austrian who now lives in the UK. Since a whole lot of years, English has started feeling more "real" for me than my native German - which I don't even like anymore as a language. Sure it is the language my family and most of my friends speak, but that does not mean that I like the way sentences come out. It is mostly cumbersome It is really a bit complicated, because there are times when I think/dream/speak in English without even thinking about another language anymore. And then there are times when I speak in German and can only think of the English way to say something - and that really is a pain when I suddenly have to stop and search for the proper words without finding them. And then I have to insert some English in a German sentence which mostly is not fitting . But that does not mean that my grammar/vocabulary is perfect (as any teacher would probably be horrified)
