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Popular misconceptions about languages? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| Mirc Diglot Newbie Romania Joined 6078 days ago 14 posts - 28 votes Speaks: Romanian*, English Studies: German, French | Message 9 of 100 13 November 2009 at 5:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
I get that so much that I stopped caring loooooong ago. A few days ago I went to a Turkish restaurant in Germany. There the owner heard me saying "da" on the phone, from which point he proceeded to talk to me in a very broken Slavic language that I couldn't identify (thanks to his terrible accent, not my ignorance about languages :p). I tried to explain to him in German and English that I didn't understand a word of what he was saying, but he didn't seem to care. He then kept asking me in a broken German something like "wohir komms du?", to which I kept answering "Rumänien, Rumänien", and every time I said that he switched back to this Slavic language that he somehow associated with me. After 5 minutes of such conversation, he asked me again in broken German something like "wie sag Rumänisch gute abend?", to which I answered "Buna Seara!". He freaked out, went away mumbling to himself "Spanien, Spanien", and probably still believes to this day that I was just making fun of him. Heh! A similar experience - I played a concert in Texas, in front of a jury of a music contest. The president of the jury announced "So we are going to hear now Mr [myname] from Romania. Let's welcome him". He waits until I come on stage, and then with a big smile on his face he looks at me and says "Dobre dan!!" (meaning "good day" in some South-Slavic languages). I decided to play dumb, and I asked him something like "come again?". He repeated that, completely amazed by the fact that I wasn't extremely happy to hear how he took the time to learn something in "my language", and how I didn't seem to understand what he was saying. Whatever, these things happen. As I said, it's been a long time since I stopped caring. It's not fair to expect everyone to be as interested in the history and geography of languages as the posters here on this forum. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juan M. Senior Member Colombia Joined 5899 days ago 460 posts - 597 votes  | Message 10 of 100 14 November 2009 at 7:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
That one's first foreign language is the hardest to learn and that afterwards learning additional languages becomes noticeably easier is (in my experience at least) completely true. When I picked up German at 30 years of age with no foreign language-learning experience (I learned English naturally at school from a very young age) I struggled greatly with it. It took me a lot of effort to master the basics, but when I started Russian just six months later I assimilated it with little difficulty, even though the latter is objectively much tougher for an English speaker. I then went on to study several other languages further removed from my own, and none of them have been harder for me than my first one. It's not only that I have learned how one particular system of grammar works and then applied it elsewhere, but that I have learned how to learn languages. Edited by Juan M. on 14 November 2009 at 7:54pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5967 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 100 14 November 2009 at 10:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It might be true, as you have written. I was thinking more of my own experience with the first foreign language compared to the second. Of course, my experience is personal and not universal, so I understand that other learners will have other thoughts.
German seemed far more difficult to me than Spanish, but I did learn it much faster, working on my own. I hope your experience becomes mine--that gives me some good encouragement for future language study! Time will tell . . . 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7015 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 100 15 November 2009 at 12:17am | IP Logged | |||||
I agree.
Exactly. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5967 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 100 15 November 2009 at 1:26am | IP Logged | |||||
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OK, I stand corrected. Perhaps there was simply a too-long time gap between my first and second foreign languages, and my own language-learning experience may well have been very different if that had not been the case. At any rate, I should not overgeneralize my own experiences, and I hope that the next language is easier!
I'm still learning how to learn languages. Maybe I am the one with the misconception--entirely possible. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5909 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 14 of 100 15 November 2009 at 2:18am | IP Logged | |||||
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That all Scandinavians speak German. We don't. Those of us who studied it in school might be able to pull out a "darf ich one of those haben?" in a pinch, but most people aren't conversational in German at ALL.
Also, that all Germans speak impeccable English. Some of them do, but not all of them. Same thing here. I remember meeting someone in Germany who was maybe 35 years old, who spoke no English at all.
I remember a British comedian making fun of some Hungarian politician a few years back, using a last name ending in -ski (not the person's real name), assuming that sort of name was the obvious and most common thing in Hungary. I wish people would do the bare minimum of research before they start making fun of things relating to other countries, it just makes them look ignorant. Now that we have Wikipedia and Google, there are really no excuses. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| pookiebear79 Groupie United States Joined 6030 days ago 76 posts - 142 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Swedish, Italian | Message 15 of 100 17 November 2009 at 2:42am | IP Logged | |||||
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It's annoying when people think Dutch is the same thing as German. When I first started studying Dutch I would have to explain to people that no, it's not the language spoken in Germany. I realize that English 'Dutch' and the German word for the German language, 'Deutsch' are similar, but that's really no excuse. And what really cracks me up when somebody feels the need to "explain" it all (as if talking to a child)by launching into a discussion about how words from older Germanic languages/dialects looked similar and give examples of how it developed over the last several hundred years or whatever...I don't think that factors into it, really. (Despite the person feeling the need to give an unsolicited history lesson on the evolution of Germanic languages and how the names for the languages/people have evolved.)
Because, let's face it, the vast majority of people who don't know Dutch is what is spoken in the Netherlands, (let alone that it's also Flemish in Belgium, which would further confuse the issue) not German, are not likely to be confused because they've spent so much time studying the history of Germanic languages that their scholarly knowledge of linguistics is overloading their head, but due to a lack of geographical/cultural knowledge on their part. One of the reasons this has been bothering me is the annoying students on the Michel Thomas Dutch courses. Yes, this is a weird example/reason, but it is related. The students' mistakes (specifically pronunciation) don't seem to be because their native English is interfering or the sounds are hard, but because they think they should be talking as in German (instead of what the teacher just pronounced for them.) So they keep trying to pronounce words as if they were talking some awful thing that is neither Dutch nor German. In other words, they sound like people whose bad high school German is interfering, because there are many words they keep saying like it's supposed to be German, not Dutch, and they seem unable to overcome this. If they were native speakers of German that would make sense, but they're English. OK, this is getting a bit off track, but the annoying thing is that English is also close to Dutch...so if the learners were having interference/difficulty because or their native language being English, it would make sense, but instead it seems to feed into some people's inability to understand that Dutch and German are related, *not* the same thing. (It's sort of like how some people assume If you know one then you can easily speak to the other without confusion.)They're not THAT close. I can understand some written German due to my knowledge of Dutch (not because English is my native language, though, because the vocabulary is more transparent with Dutch than English in my experience,) but that hardly makes them anywhere near 'mutually intelligible.' I guess that last paragraph illustrates another misconception. I often see it stated, "If you know x language, then you've got related y language too." While you may have an easier and much quicker time learning the related language and certainly can understand much of it right away due to the similar vocabulary, they are still not the same language, and still have different spelling, pronunciation, grammar peculiarities, etc. An Italian may understand some of what someone says to them in Spanish, but that hardly means the person speaking Spanish also "knows" Italian because they can be somewhat understood by an Italian speaker. In other words, I think it's a misconception (an arrogant one, often) that understanding a related language to one you have already learned/studied means you actually "know" the second language (i.e. that you can speak that language,) and in some people's cases I suspect they end up pronouncing one too much like the other because 'after all, they're so closely related.' 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 16 of 100 17 November 2009 at 2:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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...unless they're thinking of Low German when they say that Dutch and German are the same. :-P
2 persons have voted this message useful |
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