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Study languages you are bound to fail in | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 17 of 96 11 March 2014 at 8:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I really appreciate the vote of confidence, but I think you overestimate me :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5226 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 18 of 96 11 March 2014 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It seems to me most of the dead languages I study satisfy these conditions. Of course functional is ambiguous, but I take it you mean something like "can have a conversation in, read the news, communicate via writing." With Old English and Sanskrit, I have no intention to get to that level. I'll be happy to simply read the existing corpus. This applies a fortiori to Quenya. But with living languages, yes, I do aspire to functionality in all of them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5764 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 19 of 96 11 March 2014 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes, but I ... kind of went from the general question to the example of yourself, and tried to disprove your own statement about yourself, and that is impolite. I do believe you could do it, but from all I know, your learning seems to be closely linked to social ties with a language and its cultures. As for character learning, I don't know if there's a way to tell before trying. And for the question itself ... I can't motivate myself by thinking "if I keep up the hard work for several years, I will be able to use this!" - I have to be able to gain some intrinsic motivation from the process of learning itself, and the more I concentrate on simply learning what I can learn, the more I indeed learn, and the less I care about possibly failing to meet some goal. (Those two outcomes are probably linked.) So, yes and no. Edited by Bao on 11 March 2014 at 9:17pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 20 of 96 11 March 2014 at 9:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I have two teenagers in the house, so impolite to me is a whole different level. To quote M in James Bond: If I want sarcasms, I'll go to my children :-) 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6437 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 21 of 96 11 March 2014 at 9:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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You probably would not be dyslexic with the Chinese writing system - obviously, pinyin would be as problematic as your current languages, but dyslexia with characters appears to be a distinct and rarer phenomenon, involving a different part of the brain. So, yes, you probably actually are lucky.
I'm honestly puzzled by why you think spoken Mandarin would be so difficult. True, there aren't many cognates, but the grammar is a lot less painful than Russian's, and you've certainly proven that you can learn quite a lot of words! As for writing, characters take time, but aren't hard, per se. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4666 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 22 of 96 12 March 2014 at 1:40am | IP Logged | ||||||||
But there are more Tamils and Vietnamese in Norway, if you pick one of these, you could practice more. ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| DaisyMaisy Senior Member United States Joined 5378 days ago 115 posts - 178 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish Studies: Swedish, Finnish | Message 23 of 96 12 March 2014 at 4:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I would love to learn Welsh to a near native level, but realistically.....I will probably only dabble along, despite my interest.
Much as I love languages and want to study them all :) the practicality issue does have a big impact. I hear Spanish every day, speaking it well would (will!) be a great marketable skill in my field, and there are native speakers all around that I can talk to. So I spend the vast majority of my effort on Spanish. Not that I won't study other languages, but right now I don't see being fluent in any others (still a goal for later on down the road though). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4030 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 24 of 96 12 March 2014 at 5:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Mandarin is the Spanish/English of Chinese languages or asian tonal languages. It has only 8 or so particles while
some languages such as Thai have up to hundreds for different questions, aspect, politeness, exclamation, and modality. It has only 6 pronouns while Thai has as many as 50 based on whether one converses with a child or monk. 4 tones, yes, but only 6 vowels, no clusters in consonants, half the words end in a vowel, and no reduction or pitch or any of that. Thai is stress timed with 18 vowels and 5 tones and some consonant clusters exist. Or Hokkien, the Lithuanian of Chinese languages, tons of irregular tone changes in some lexical words and very complex regular tonal sandhi. It is not hard outside of foreignness nor is it conservative, rest assured it would be just as hard for them to learn your languages, would you not be willing to struggle a little if they have in High School? 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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