Anyone out there working on learning a new language, either as a hobby or for some other purpose? I thought it'd be nice to have a thread where we can talk about what we're studying and how it's going. Language learning has been a hobby of mine for a long time. I took French in high school and Mandarin, Finnish, and American Sign Language in college. I've picked up bits of Japanese and Spanish throughout the years. Despite all that, I remain tragically monolingual by my own definition. (That is, I can't carry on a decent conversation in anything but English.) My main focus at the moment is Korean. My husband is Korean-American but I shied away from learning Korean for years, since I thought it was going to be too hard. Self-fulfilling prophecies, anyone? But I changed my mind about two years ago, when we attended his cousin's wedding which was entirely in Korean, and I felt pathetic that I couldn't understand a word. Anyway, I've been working at it ever since, and... yep... it's hard. I love it, but man, I wish I could pick it up faster. I think I'm making decent progress but I always hear about people who achieve fluency super fast and I'm jealous. So, what are you studying and why? How's it going?
I continue to study Spanish, even though I consider myself quite fluent and am a certified federal interpreter. Spanish is a language spoken over a very broad geographic range, and by a huge number of people. This makes for a great degree of regional diversity. There are some flavors of Spanish that I still find quite difficult to follow, like Rioplatense Spanish, which is Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Imagine if English still had regions where people regularly used thou, thee, thy, thine, and all the old verb conjugations that went with that pronoun. Now imagine that not only do you have that in play, but there are two complete and seperate versions of thou, thee, thy, thine, both versions with their own conjugations. Now imagine, that when and why people use those two different versions of the second person singular informal pronoun and their corresponding conjugations, changes from one valley to the next! I come from a tú only region. Some regions are vos only. But those regions that use both, use them to create a three-tiered system of politeness, where vos is the most casual, tú is less casual, and usted is formal. In those regions that do that, the one thing that ties them all together is that no one agrees on where the lines between using the different forms are.
I'll stick with two languages and won't ever try another language ever again. Because it's too hard! That said I desperately wish to get a better accent before going to England this summer. I can hold a conversation without any problem, but I rather not sound like I butchering the language while doing it. @LostThePlot on the other hand - give him all the tips you can when it comes to learning a new language. He's really gonna need it!
The most important advice I can give you is this: if you have a native speaker at hand every day, then use the opportunity. Living in the language enviroment and taking part in people's everyday communication is far more efficient than learning from a book. Actually living with a native speaker is obviously even better. It's a blessing like nothing else.
I thought Korean was going to be my easiest language yet for this reason. Turns out my husband makes a terrible tutor. He's a receptive bilingual, e.g. his mom speaks to him in Korean and he answers back in English sort of deal. He's always maintained that his Korean is great, he just refuses to speak it for some mysterious reason. So I thought he'd still be able to help me like a native. But I've revealed his hidden weaknesses! He can't understand me half the time because of my non-native accent (versus his mom who has no problems understanding me), and when I try to ask him grammar questions he just shrugs. Useless! But since I've been learning, he's actually started speaking Korean a little bit, which he's never done the whole time I've known him. So it's good for both of us, even if it doesn't necessarily speed things up. One time recently I corrected him, which is something I never thought would happen. Wasn't just me thinking I knew better, either; it was a case of "Shouldn't it be XYZ?" and him going "...shit."
Irish (Gaelige or Gaelic...which my phone turned into "Garlic"). I plan on living in England for the rest of my life, but I want to study the archaeology of the U.K. and Irish seems like it might be beneficial to learn. I'm also going back over the French I know and trying to improve on that. French is the only language I've studied that was remotely easy for me, and I've studied French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Irish. I even took four semesters of Spanish and know nothing.
Of course, if Korean is not his best language, then the situation is different. He may be sad that he isn't all that proficient in the language of his ancestors, in which case it's not a good idea to embarrass him. Or the other way around – he might have found it annoying in the childhood that his parents forced him to speak Korean. In that case there's no point embarrassing him either.
I'm sure they are very rare. They are probably much talked about, which is why it may seem there are many of them. I have met a man who said, casually-like, that when he studies a new language, one thing he does is memorize a dictionary. He made it sound like easy. I can't imagine memorizing thousands of words out of context. Then again, he doesn't know all that many languages, so I remain somewhat skeptical about his method. At any rate, different people learn languages in different ways. I suppose it's easier to find the best method for you when you know if you are visual, auditory or kinesthetic.
My view is skewed from too much time on language subreddits, where people tend to casually boast about how fast they made progress in a target language. My own fault, for going to Reddit... I have methods that are effective for me, but not necessarily fast. For example, listening comprehension is my weakest skill (even in English it's not great). I've found that repetitive listening, where I play the same clip or conversation on repeat several times, is a good way to finally get things to stick. But it's pretty boring and it's a large investment of time just to nail a few phrases. Sigh.
Nah, I think it's the hardest for most people. It requires a faster processing speed than speaking, reading, or writing.
Yeah, agreed. Reading, writing and speaking let you take your time with them, at least a split second while you make sure you got it right. But listening is all down to the other person, and especially if they don't know you don't speak their language great, they will just speak it like a native and rattle it off. And of course the way real people speak a language in the real world doesn't always bear much resemblance to what you learn. So yeah, the listening is the real challenge. With Lemie, even when I know what phrase she said and can write it out (with silly Swedish vowels and all) I still really struggle hearing the spaces between words.
It's really interesting. This is literally the first time in my life that I hear anyone say that listening is the most difficult part of language learning. I've always had people tell me how you first learn to understand and only after that you learn to talk. It has also come up countless times in various contexts, real life and fiction, how someone understands (a lot of) this or that language but (almost) can't speak it. I've always felt totally weird trying to explain to people how I find speaking easier than listening. Has this something to do with one's inclination to write??
Hard to say to be honest. I think some of it comes from how exactly you are trying to learn a language; if you're learning it primarily as a spoken thing and it's all out loud then I'm sure it's easier to pick it up that way. And then some of it probably does come from your natural inclinations about reading or speaking or writing. I think as writers maybe we have an easier time with written language than most, in the same way that writers probably have a larger vocabulary than most because we take note of words and write down more words. Maybe that helps with pattern recognition in other languages. I remember going through the Swedish pronunciation guide and noting on page 2 that vowels followed by double consonants are typically short even though that wasn't covered until rather later. But then again it could be the other way around; people inclined with a certain kind of learning process are more likely to be writers. I definitely think that writers tend to be more nerdy about written words too, with an interest in etymology and idiom and such. It's really interesting to me to look at Swedish words and find connections to English that way, which you wouldn't really do when speaking/listening. Things like seeing the connection between 'kanoodle' and the Swedish 'knulla' (said ker-null-a - it means *ahem* fornicate) are interesting to me and stick in my head much better. There's also one thing that bears mention for me specifically - I have ADHD so I have a definite weakness for focusing on what other people are saying unless they are really fascinating or someone I care a lot about. I tend to talk over and interrupt a lot in English and I think that carries over a bit when I should be really actively listening. So maybe that's part of the problem.
No "ker" in that word, honey. No ker at all. I'll pronounce if for you in a minute. And I'm fascinating as fuck, so don't pull that excuse on me Though do find it interesting that you interrupt people in English since you totally despised being interrupted. Is that the male ego?
Yeah, to me learning a foreign language pretty much equals learning to speak. Reading, writing and listening are side effects of that. I have never been able to study a language from a book only, without an opportunity to listen to the pronunciation. That is, as I just remembered, with the exception of Esperanto that has no native speakers.
The whole "first you learn to understand, then you learn to talk" thing is based on the way infants acquire language. Most people who can understand a language but not speak it learned it in childhood. Language acquisition as an adult hasn't been as thoroughly studied, but there's enough evidence for us to know it doesn't happen the same way. I suspect a lot of people who report that they understand more than they can speak are just experiencing that common memory phenomenon where it's easier to remember the meaning of a word you hear than it is to produce it without any prompting. (e.g. if you studied French but aren't fluent, it might be easier to answer the question "What does jardin mean?" than to answer "How do you say garden in French?") So in general, receptive language understanding is easier on your memory than producing language, but listening to native speakers at full speed is still its own special challenge.
Nowadays I'm not learning any language systematically, I just read books or comics to maintain my less-than-stellar skills (this with French and Swedish). I met a Swedish colleague last week and she was nice enough to converse with me in Swedish every now and then. Understanding isn't a problem, but talking sure is. With French I struggle way, way more. Again, I can read and write, but speaking and understanding what I hear is so much harder. I admit, sometimes I watch let's plays in French just to get used to the way the language sounds... It's not easy to learn a new language, let alone become fluent at it. Basically you'd have to live in an environment where the language is spoken around you so you're exposed to it and where you have to constantly use it to get by. Because I use English and Finnish on a daily basis, my skills don't rust, but with Swedish and French it's a lot harder.
Finding music in your target language can be helpful. Obviously, it won't force you to use the language, but you will be hearing it and your brain will getter better used to it. Of course, it's not as good as actually being in the language environment, but it's better than nothing. And you get to enjoy the music. I have been listening to Romanian pop music for 20 years now and I actually understand quite a lot by now. A few times I have even been able to figure out the meaning of a word by the context in which it keeps occurring. Most importantly, I now completely understand Romanian phonetics, so if I had to study Romanian one day, I would have almost no difficulties with the pronunciation.
I'm learning Italian, but I've been lazy as all hell of late. I have some vocabulary, but my grammar is in a sorry state; I can only construct the most rudimentary of sentences. Those verbs are killing me. Non capisco i verbi. I know a disproportionate amount of cussing, also. I've previously dabbled in French, and have a smattering. I had a brief flirtation with Esperanto, but I didn't much care for it.
I've heard that it's easier to learn a language through listening if you live in a place where the language is primarily spoken, but if you're in an area where it isn't then it can be more difficult. When I was a kid, I was learning Italian very quickly because I lived in Italy, but once we moved to the U.S. it was harder to retain that language. Now that I'm an adult, I acquire language in an entirely different way. I'm a lot better at reading languages I'm learning than speaking them and I'm hit-or-miss on if I can understand something that's spoken to me. I can read Spanish to a basic degree, I can read most French I come across, and I can read German at a medium level. Now, unless the person speaking the languages is incredibly slow and speaks a dialect I'm learning, I can't do diddly verbally. Cuss words are some of the first things you learn in Italy, at least according to my parents. When we lived in Italy (in an Italian neighborhood), my parents learned a lot of Italian and a lot of cussing. The neighbors were entirely helpful with that matter. [The neighbors were great though they insisted our ducks and rabbits for eating; it cracked them up that they were just pets.]
Heh, Esperanto! I've only heard it spoken once, and it weirded me out. I could just tell it wasn't a natural language. (No offense any Esperanto fans reading this! ) Grammar is what kills me the most in Korean. It is pervasively different from English. On the rare occasion I encounter a grammar point that's constructed the same as in English I'm like OH THANK GOD. The last language I got really into was Mandarin, where the grammar is quite similar to English in a lot of ways. I didn't know how good I had it. Don't miss the writing system, though. Urgh.
