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If you can’t speak a language. | ||
Tags: Loss of confidence | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Thor1987 Groupie Canada Joined 4725 days ago 65 posts - 84 votes  Studies: German | Message 1 of 10 18 February 2014 at 3:00am | IP Logged | ||
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What else can you do with it. Seriously after years of half heartily trying to learn
another language I really feel like giving up. However this obsession for me isn't something I can leave behind. I have aspergers and for me my language interest is something that makes me very happy. So what else can you do with a language besides learn to speak it. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7196 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 2 of 10 18 February 2014 at 4:22am | IP Logged | ||
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You can read and listen and talk to people here about your journey.
4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5950 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 10 18 February 2014 at 5:42am | IP Logged | ||
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You can build bridges with native speakers of your TL.
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| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4435 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 4 of 10 18 February 2014 at 6:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Based on personal experience once went to a dinner gathering with some out of town guests from China.
Everybody was talking in Mandarin except for 1 person at the table. The rest of us except the guests can speak English and normally we would have included that person in the conversation. The whole dinner he was like a mute because the rest of us found it inconvenient to be translating every other word or phrase... If you don't know a language well enough, sometimes if you are lucky that person knows your language to communicate with you. Otherwise, you may have to rely on hand gestures and hope you can be understood. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4613 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 5 of 10 18 February 2014 at 10:27am | IP Logged | ||
I think you've indentified the problem yourself. At the end of the day, languages are hard work and nobody learns one by magic. You have to do the graft. 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5590 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 6 of 10 18 February 2014 at 11:44am | IP Logged | ||
That's a funny expression. Like a grafted tree, where you put another plant on a tree, so it can grow there and bear fruits, you graft a forein language on you, so it will thrive there. The expresson reminds me of surgery too (in this case, brain surgery?) That's the spirit: The language must become inextricable part of yourself! Edited by Cabaire on 18 February 2014 at 11:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5000 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 7 of 10 18 February 2014 at 12:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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You can do a lot of things!
Speaking with natives reqires more skills than just the language knowledge. A lot depends on your personality, many introverts (and not only introverts) have hard time speaking with the natives without the natives switching to English or at all. You need confidence or to be able to fake it. You need those tiny but extremely important skills that get you in primary contact with natives and keep them interested and so on. Speaking isn't just automatically the easiest and only goal. It is a nice thing to do but it is not a primary goal for all the learners by far! What I love the most is the much wider choice of books, movies, music and so on. When you learn another language, you get not only the originals of translated works. You get tons of things that didn't get through the filters to get translated, despite being totally awesome. Before anything crosses the borders, it goes through several filters and quality is usually only one of them (and one often not that important). Marketability is much more important or the expectations of publishers and tv companies of what do their customers want (which are often different from the real situation). So, once you learn a language, you can find a lot of uses for it. It's the moment to start looking at the world through new glasses but still from your point of view. Many people, even on this forum, keep insisting that communication with other people is the main goal. Well, it is for them but not for everyone. Books and such things are a form of communication as well. If you prefer it, there is no reason to change yourself just to use your skills the way other people like. Take your interests and combine them with your new language skills and you'll get your answer. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5900 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 8 of 10 18 February 2014 at 12:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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If language study in itself makes you happy, you don't need another reason. But if difficulty speaking bothers you so much that you're considering giving it up altogether then maybe you could focus on speaking for a while, but without assessing your own progress. You can focus on it privately, without involving other people, until it stops being a drain on your motivation. Give yourself, say, 3 months where you don't worry about whether you're better at it yet. Or even longer if you're worried you might get more frustrated after 3 months if you don't get the results you want. Then see how you're doing after the end of x months. You could try something intense, like shadowing by professor Arguelles' method (he has a thread about it on the site). But of course you could focus on other things, like reading things you like. But would that make you as happy as speaking would? Rhetorical question. Only you would know which parts of language learning makes you happy and which parts you don't really care about anyway.
Liz 1 person has voted this message useful |
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