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Do you speak the TL you learned at school | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 25 of 53 15 August 2012 at 6:30pm | IP Logged |
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The only language where I'm truly, truly grateful to formal education is Latin. I had a very strict prof, who's also a polyglot and explained things from a general Indo-European and/or modern Romance perspective. My Latin has been a solid foundation for the modern Romance languages I'm now learning.
Years ago, classes helped me get fluent in English, supplemented by a lot of independent study. Unfortunately this formula hasn't really worked for German, in which I've had classes for almost 10 years :( That's despite the fact that I really love the language and it wasn't forced on me. Now that I think of it, perhaps the problem is that I was really fascinated by the similarities between German and English, but no attention was ever given to that. In fact, most of my German teachers had very limited English skills. Nearly all were also quite strict btw, above average I would say. As they didn't have the Epic Knowledge like that of the aforementioned Latin prof, they only managed to kill my enthusiasm. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| BaronBill Triglot Senior Member United States HowToLanguages.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4691 days ago 335 posts - 594 votes Speaks: English*, French, German Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Persian | Message 26 of 53 15 August 2012 at 6:37pm | IP Logged |
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I had the good fortune to grow up in Louisiana with a reasonably large French influence. I took 12 years of French from Kindergarten up through 12th grade. Fortunately, I did get a lot of outside class practice with other French speakers and I have been at a comfortable C1/C2 level in French since High School (which was almost 20 years ago at this point).
In summary, yes, I do speak the only language I've ever had classes in but I think my circumstances were a bit different than most. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5228 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 27 of 53 15 August 2012 at 7:38pm | IP Logged |
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I suffered 2 years of 'bad' English teaching at high school (one year was simply a waste of time, and the last one I had personal confrontation issues on top of that), and my last two years of German were in the 'new' 'communicative approach' style which I loathe so badly. Other than that, I have all but absolute praise for my non-college teachers and the job they did, for I feel not a single minute of the time I spent at their classes was wasted on me.
Results? Yes, I do speak English, (apparently at C2 level, though that's my admittedly weakest spot), and yes, I do speak 'some' German. My oldest friend (some 30 years of it now!), who is a full-time English teacher at primary school, told me last week that I'm just 'good at languages'. I replied that I'm not, that I simply know what I need to do, and I just happen to do it sometimes, and he retorted 'well, call it whatever you want'. But that's precisely my point, I may be more intelligent or hard-working than average, but not that exceptionally either. During my student phase, I never did *anything* about my languages besides paying attention and doing my homework (and not always!). Was the teaching determinant? Honestly, I don't think so. I was taught English and German at 4 different schools where I would be first of my class, hands down, except for the last year of German (when I dropped out). However, very few of my co-students got anywhere, really, let alone in more than one language. I have to say my former teachers were excellent professionals of the kind it's increasingly rare to bump into, but they have indeed very little more (just a few others and me) success to show for it than the other more mediocre types I've met in later years. Maybe less complete failures, I hope. As I see it, doing what I was supposed to do (doing as told by good teachers) as a good student gave me the best possible base, and so I could simply apply what I knew without any major hiccups on my own in the real world. As one would imagine, years of practice (reading books, watching movies, keeping a dictionary at hand, nothing nearly as 'exotic' as the stuff we usually discuss here), and maybe a tad of perfectionism, did the rest, but that's just a nice side effect of using another tool you were provided with at school. As a certified teacher of English for 'adults', and as a Spanish 'backpacker teacher' of sorts, the only 'special' thing I tried to do was compensating the defects I retrospectively saw in my student phase, mainly lack of early native input and practice (which wasn't bad teaching but rather availability constrains at the time), and what did I get in return? Nothing especially 'super-successful' either. A few good results, some spectacularly bad, and mostly passable ones... However, I could have predicted all of them again, with little margin of error, based on my student's expectations and attitudes after a little while. That's why, after all, I think I may be a good teacher while I don't feel particularly bad for not having spectacular results (just who has them?), and why I don't feel frustrated about my apparent lack of advance in other languages and many areas. If I'm not working on it, who am I to blame? Not the most popular take on issues, I know, but hey... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6274 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 28 of 53 15 August 2012 at 8:04pm | IP Logged |
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Yes. To varying degrees, all three of them. School did not put me off languages and even helped to turn me onto them, although that is clearly not everyone's experience.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rasta87 Diglot Newbie Colombia Joined 5513 days ago 13 posts - 21 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Persian, French | Message 29 of 53 15 August 2012 at 9:27pm | IP Logged |
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I think the Australian experience is a lot like the British probably. At primary school
(ages 5 to 12) we had Japanes as our unique and compulsory language option. In high school (ages 13 to 17/18) there was Japanese, French and Indonesian and it was compulsory to choose one for the first few years. I chose to continue with Japanese purely because I'd already been studying it but in reality I had no interest in it whatsoever. The class was as an earlier post said. Rude students throwaing things around the class and talking loudly. Of course I succesfully avoided learning anything in the class at all and today after a total of at least 7 years of japanese study I remember no more than "hello" and "my name is". I think the biggest problem with high school language learning is motivation. I regret not making a better go of it now, but at the time I just didn't care, didn't see the point. I had no particular interest in Japanese culture and saw no reason that I'd be going there in the future. I have a feeling that with the self study materials available now, it would almost be more effective for schools to provide resources (textbooks, workbooks, audio, video etc) and a supervised space (language lab) and let students study at there own pace. If it is to be compulsory to learn a language there needs to be significant incentives for each level achieved along with a real requirement to acheive a certain level in an internationally recognised test in order to graduate. At my exchange university many degrees require students to pass the IELTS or TOEIC at a certain level before they can graduate. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6911 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 30 of 53 15 August 2012 at 10:08pm | IP Logged |
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Whenever I'm asked how many languages I speak, I always say "Swedish and English".
I started learning English when I was 9, I've been surrounded by the language through popular media and anglophone music at home, I've watched movies in the original language (with Swedish subtitles). Despite all this input I still didn't feel confident enough SPEAKING the language, even in high school (when I was 16). I got a little bit better, I even had to use it at work now and then when I was 20, I went to UK for 10 days (my friend did most of the talking), I took some English conversation course four years later... I think I spoke more English during those lessons (twice a week for four months), than my previous years in total. It felt good. I haven't travelled much. I've been to Ireland four times for 1-2 weeks (in fact without having to speak that much), UK twice (a couple of days) and Germany (2-3 days at a time). I think I've been abroad for more than one month (but less than two months) in total. I can think in English. I read and write more in English than my native Swedish, every day of the year for over a decade now. I speak English with foreigners nearly every day at work, at least once a week (I work at a library). Do I have a native accent? No (although people have thought I am American, Canadian and Irish). Do I make grammar mistakes? Probably a lot of them. Am I fluent? Who knows. What does all this mean? Can you imagine how many hours of English I had done before feeling remotely confident? I can't really say what was the major change. Maybe the conversation course, maybe life in general around that time, maybe the language just had to ripen. By the way, I didn't HAVE TO become good at English (it would just feel bad not to reach a conversational level, plus the fact that I had a huge interest in languages) and I definitely didn't think it was "difficult". It just never "felt right" to speak it. I can't write a post like this any other language, but I can speak low level Spanish and German if I have to, and maybe (that's a big maybe) Portuguese if I'm allowed a few days of LR. God knows where I got the power to keep a 20-minute conversation in Esperanto some years ago. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| ZombieKing Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4529 days ago 247 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* | Message 31 of 53 16 August 2012 at 1:31am | IP Logged |
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I was forced to learn French from grade 4 to grade 8. I learned nothing!
I have friends who learned French from grade 4 to grade 12 (from grade 9-12 it's optional) and they speak no French at all. They got excellent marks though! Which is quite sad considering they actually like French and French is one of Canada's official languages. Edited by ZombieKing on 16 August 2012 at 1:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Mae Trilingual Octoglot Pro Member Germany Joined 4993 days ago 299 posts - 499 votes Speaks: German*, SpanishC2*, Swiss-German*, FrenchC2, EnglishC2, ItalianB2, Dutch, Portuguese Studies: Russian, Swedish Personal Language Map | Message 32 of 53 16 August 2012 at 1:51am | IP Logged |
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I speak all the languages I learned at school, except Guarani (due to lack of
practise). But not because I was so interested then. I must say that in the regular classes I didn't make great progress. In French it was because our teacher was an arse**** and some classmates were just so bored that they disrupted the class regularly. In English and Spanish I didn't make progress because my level was above the average of our class. I was exempt from English and Spanish, and just had to hand in some writings, or to give a talk from time to time. One of the reasons why pupils don't do their best in such classes is - I believe - because the class is too big, and because level, interest and motivation are different from kid to kid. In the smaller classes in facultative language courses at school (such as Italian and Russian) we did better. The classes were highly motivated to learn something, to make progress and to start speaking the language ASAP. Those who didn't mean it, were dropping out in the very beginning, so at the end of the courses there were just the hardcore language nerds having their tests. All this may be a good explanation why we didn't so good at school. But the main point may be because we had to. As soon as the pressure disappeared, I learned languages faster than before, it made more fun and the results were not bad... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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