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Urban legends about languages... | ||
Tags: Stereotypes | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Rykketid Diglot Groupie Italy Joined 4880 days ago 88 posts - 146 votes  Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: French | Message 1 of 81 14 July 2012 at 2:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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... and language learning methods... do you know any?
Here in Italy the most popular (and for me also the most annoying) one is that English is an easy language... Usually the evidence that is adduced is: "look, we have a very difficult system of conjugations, they don't" or "they have just one article (the), we have seven" or "English has a neuter gender that makes everything easier". Ok maybe those things are true but just because a language doesn't have those features it doesn't mean it doesn't have its tricky points which, in the case of English, are: the pronunciation, the spelling, some grammatical constructions and so on and so forth. Moreover, if English is really that easy, how come a lot of Italians are so bad at it and can just express basic concepts? Another legend about English is that it has much less words than Italian (when the reality is that it has actually a slightly larger dictionary). The funny thing is that usually it turns out that the person who maintains this thing has a really basic knowledge of English, and well... if your vocabulary consists of 300 words, it is quite obvious that you believe Italian has more words. The last one is about native-speakers: it is constantly repeated that native-speakers are the best teachers one can have. Personally I don't think so anymore... sometimes native-speakers are unaware of certain rules that regulate their mother tongue because they never needed to study them. Instead if a teacher isn't a native, he/she has much more empathy towards his/her students and better understands the struggles they have to face and potentially, he/she can give useful tips that he/she used in order to learn the language. Ok now it's your turn :-) (I'm also curious to know if in your country you have the same commonplaces about English). And please, don't make this thread become a discussion about whether Italian is more difficult than English or not. That's not what I want. :-) 12 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4568 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 2 of 81 14 July 2012 at 4:32pm | IP Logged | ||
It seems to me that a mix of both is best. The majority of lessons should be hold by a native speaker so you are not imitating non-perfect language. But you also need some tutoring by a former learner who knows important grammar rules and knows what's hard to learn for students. If you get instructions only from a non-native teacher, a lot depends on the language proficiency of the teacher. I came across a German class where some pupils (those with relatives in Germany) spoke better German than the instructor (both pronunciation and grammar). That's something you don't want to have. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6950 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 3 of 81 14 July 2012 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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One of the most popular language-related urban legends in Poland is that Polish is the
second most difficult language to learn (after Chinese). No idea where this comes from but it is really a popular opinion. Like in Italy, many people are convinced that native speakers are the best teachers. Language schools usually brag about the native speakers they employ. German is considered by many Poles to be difficult and ugly, Spanish is known as an easy language to learn. While learning English grammar, many people focus very much on tenses and conditionals (which are obviously important in English but probably not to such an extent). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6956 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 81 14 July 2012 at 5:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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A few off the top of my head:
The best way to learn a language is to... Greenlandic has [insert number of your choice] words for snow. English is spoken fluently by all Scandinavians and Dutch. Chinese has no grammar. English has more words than any other language. "Lagom" only exists in Swedish. X is the oldest language in the world. X is the most difficult language in the world. Adults can't achieve good pronunciation. You can only become fluent in a language if you learn it before X years of age. A Lithuanian can understand a Sanskrit speaker perfectly. Lithuainan is a dialect of Sanskrit. It's impossible to learn a language unless you're a genius or go to the country where it's spoken. If you live in a country where the language is spoken, you'll just naturally aquire it without any effort. (Thanks to Ari for the last two!) Related topic: Internet language learning myths 15 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6950 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 5 of 81 14 July 2012 at 5:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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Very interesting! (And thank you for the link.)
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| morinkhuur Triglot Groupie Germany Joined 4724 days ago 79 posts - 157 votes Speaks: German*, Latin, English Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Maghribi) | Message 6 of 81 14 July 2012 at 7:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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- German would have almost become the official language of the US
- Eskimos have X words for snow - Chinese is the hardest language in the world, German is the second-hardest - You have to be a genius to learn more than 2 languages in your lifetime - Everyone speaks English - It's a waste of time to study languages for pleasure; it only makes sense if you do it for better job opportunities - You don't have to put any effort into pronunciation, just pronounce everything as if it were German. People will understand you. (If never actually heard anyone say this out loud but everyone seems to believe it, judging from the way they speak other languages) 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jappy58 Bilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member United States Joined 4685 days ago 200 posts - 413 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Guarani*, Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Maghribi), Arabic (Written), French, English, Persian, Quechua, Portuguese Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 7 of 81 14 July 2012 at 8:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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1) Arabic dialects have no grammar
2) Quechua is a worthless language 3) [Insert colloquial Arabic word here] is incorrect to use (this is a comment made by many Arabs, even though most of the words are perfectly fine in Classical Arabic/MSA) 4) Maghrebi has nothing to do with Arabic 5) Guarani was the most widely spoken language in South America centuries ago (not a common one, but I've heard it a few times when I was growing up in Paraguay) 6) Persian is an extinct language 7) Spanish and Portuguese are dialects of one another 8) Modern Standard Arabic and the dialects have little to nothing to do with one another EDIT: Fixed a typo Edited by Jappy58 on 14 July 2012 at 8:31pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4580 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 8 of 81 14 July 2012 at 9:05pm | IP Logged | ||
Funny, my mother (who's Lithuanian) used to tell me the first one. Having lived in Germany for years, and not having picked up the language past a certain rudimentary level I can certainly vouch for the falseness of the second myth. I think a related myth is that if you spend (or your company) spends a lot of money on a language course that you'll somehow magically learn the language. All this talk of what is the hardest language really misses out on perspective: according to the Foreign Services Institute (the US group that trains US diplomats and the like) it takes about 600 hours or 22 weeks (plus an additional 400 self study hours) for an English speaker to obtain basic fluency in Spanish or German; 44 weeks for Polish or Russian and other non-Romance/non-Germanic Indo-European languages; and 88 weeks for Arabic/Chinese/Japanese (which are regarded as the hardest). I am not sure what the relative difficulty of say Polish versus English is to a Russian speaker or Japanese for a Chinese speaker or whatever. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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