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Have you achieved fluency since joining? | ||
Tags: Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| JasonChoi Diglot Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6358 days ago 274 posts - 298 votes  Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Latin | Message 1 of 39 12 July 2007 at 8:07am | IP Logged |
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I don't know if this was mentioned, but I'm really curious to know: Has anyone learned to be fluent in a language (or several) from the time you joined this forum up to the present day? If so, what did you learn, and how did you do it?
I'm particularly fascinated with effective language learners and I wonder if there's a lot that effective learners have in common. It's clear to me that many people have different ways in which one achieved fluency, but I think there must be at least some common beliefs, attitudes, and learning strategies. Please do share, as this thread may benefit many of us (including those who lurk). By the way, my definition of fluency is real simple: Being good enough to communicate your ideas on foreign TV shows. -Jason 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 39 12 July 2007 at 8:55am | IP Logged |
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Definitely. This site was the main reason that I decided to relearn Romanian before visiting Romania and Moldova in July 06. I lurked in June 2006 and became a member one month later after my return. By then I had decided to revive all the languages that I learnt during the seventies, with Romanian as no. 1. In 1981 I could speak it fairly well, but after 25 years of utter neglect it took me less than one month to relearn enough to do simple conversations and read simple stuff, and I have learnt much more since then.
I also had some courses in Catalan and Portuguese around 1980, and I revived these languages in the autumn of 2006 - in both cases from a situation where I could barely understand a simple written text and absolutely nothing spoken. I will try do to do the same thing with Icelandic later this month, starting from the moment the dictionary I have ordered from Reykjavik arrives. My Italian was fairly rusty last year (in fact less than fluent), but it has also been revived, and my Spanish has become a bit less anarchistic (I learnt most of it during travels in Latin America). Even French and German have undergone a bit of rebrushing since last year. For the moment I spend most of my study time on Modern Greek and Russian, learning both from almost scratch, but it will take some time before I become even basically fluent in these, and after that I intend to activate Swedish, (New) Norwegian and Dutch and relearn my good ol' passive Latin, which shouldn't be too hard to do. It is all about taking a decision, doing a couple of wordlists, read a lot, travel to relevant places - nothing really fancy, no teachers, no co-students and above all - no obligations. Edited by Iversen on 12 July 2007 at 9:06am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| JasonChoi Diglot Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6358 days ago 274 posts - 298 votes Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Latin | Message 3 of 39 12 July 2007 at 9:08am | IP Logged |
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Iverson, thank you for sharing! However, I'm still wondering: What specific methods have you used? What have you found to be the most effective for learning?
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6664 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 4 of 39 12 July 2007 at 10:09am | IP Logged |
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When I joined I didn't know anything about Italian except 'Ciao' and 'Arrivederci', now I can read newspapers and books with ease and understand conversations or watch TV. My speaking skills are not as good, but I'm conversational. I used Assimil L'Italien and Perfectionnement Italien; I did only the first half of the latter, then I decided to stop because my Italian was good enough for watching TV and reading newspapers which is more fun. I also have daily exposure to Italian: my girlfriend and some of my friends are Italian, I hear it often on the street, we've had several monolingual Italians staying at our place, etc. I didn't make much effort to learn it, maybe 200 hours or even less of active study; I more or less picked it up naturally by massive exposure.
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| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 39 12 July 2007 at 10:14am | IP Logged |
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I have written so much about word lists that everybody will probably run screaming away if I start all over explaining them again.
But just to take the basics: vocabulary is not the only part, but certainly the most time consuming part of the language learning process. My main technique for relearning forgotten languages was to make lists of halfknown words, NOT trying to learn new words. When I tried to learn Greek using this technique I couldn't because I for obvious reasons didn't have that storehouse full of forgotten words. Therefore I developed some techniques to make word lists with new words more efficient, and after that they have worked perfectly - at least for me. Besides I do intensive reading (or rather study), where I take a short passage, maybe one page, look up all unknown words and make certain that I understand all grammatical aspects of each sentence. Both word lists and intensive reading are just tools to put me in a situation where I can start reading genuine texs, and gradually I can do so almost without using a dictionary. The treshold seems to lie somewhere between 15.000 and 25.000 passive words. When I have reached that level I can normally also understand spoken sources (TV programmes) and I don't really care much about aural sources until then. Of course I do listen to spoken text even in the beginning, but mostly to learn the sounds and 'melody' of the language so that I can start thinking in it. When I can listen to an aural source without losing much of the content, I'm also ready to try out the language on some poor innocent natives - but speaking is the very last activity on my agenda. I have in several cases used a short travel to get the necessary immersion that allows me to 'activate' a language. Edited by Iversen on 12 July 2007 at 10:26am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| uman Diglot Groupie United States umanwizard.com Joined 6934 days ago 58 posts - 61 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 6 of 39 12 July 2007 at 10:18am | IP Logged |
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If I were on a TV show in front of millions of people, I would freeze up and babble something in incoprehensible Franglais, but that has more to do with stage fright than any linguistic problem. Am I "fluent"?
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| JasonChoi Diglot Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6358 days ago 274 posts - 298 votes Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Latin | Message 7 of 39 12 July 2007 at 10:28am | IP Logged |
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heh, clearly not in that context!
Anyway, I think you misunderstood me because I wasn't referring to affective issues. I was referring to fluency that is good enough for a native speaker. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| orion Senior Member United States Joined 7020 days ago 622 posts - 678 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 8 of 39 12 July 2007 at 10:35am | IP Logged |
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Fluency? No, but getting better.
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