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Language learning skills? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4311 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 9 of 19 05 December 2014 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Wonderful post! But I'd like to add: on the other side of the coin, a big ego /
competitive spirit can also help! If you tend to think of yourself as someone above average, an individual, cut out for difficult tasks like language learning, then this is no bad thing. It's a quality which puts you in gear to self-improve - to match the inflated self-image you have of yourself. It seems to me that every high achiever must have had some grain of narcissism in them, even if their attitude to their task is highly reverential and, towards themselves, self-effacing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Xenops Senior Member United States thexenops.deviantart Joined 3828 days ago 112 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 10 of 19 07 December 2014 at 7:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Going along with what Retinend said, I think self-security is important for learning to speak a language (not so much, say, learning to read Ancient Greek): you will have a happier time talking to natives if you know that you have inner value and that language mistakes are not going to lower your value.
As for a recipe for self-security, I can't say; some people definitely have security from the get-go, and some people build it up as they make life choices. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| epictetus Groupie Canada Joined 3885 days ago 54 posts - 87 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 11 of 19 07 December 2014 at 9:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Right after the Golden Rule, I find that humility has a tried and true pedigree throughout human history. A truly universal skill that should help anyone, any time, for the rest of their lives. Well said, iguanamon. "Time management" and "productivity" are really just products of more fundamental virtues such as discipline and patience. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| solocricket Tetraglot Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3679 days ago 68 posts - 106 votes Speaks: English*, French, Italian, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Icelandic, Korean, Polish | Message 12 of 19 17 December 2014 at 1:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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In terms of "cold" skills, I've found that after my first couple of languages, I
certainly have a mindset towards listening and reading gobbledegook and trying to piece it together and make some sense of it, rather than depending heavily only on courses or SRS sentences. I work in the legal field, so I think being used to puzzling things out is quite helpful at work. Also, when someone has learned a language, they know it can be done, so that confidence probably translates to greater success in subsequent languages. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5062 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 13 of 19 17 December 2014 at 11:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
When it comes to large numbers of languages, I think this becomes important. While I'm quick to point out the limitations of my skills and my respect for the great polyglots, language teachers, and HTLALers who do things I can't do, there is some part of me that looks at Arguelles or Mezzofanti and says, "I think I could do even more than that if I really tried." And I think that mindset is very helpful for even coming close to what those people have done. Another essential trait for polyglots, I think, is the tendency towards being an autodidact. You can learn a lot of great things through the normal channels of human society, but if you want to do something crazy like learn 30+ languages, you sort of have to be the kind of person who'd spend upwards of 15,000 hours making that happen on your own initiative. As for mastering one or a few foreign languages, a more practical pursuit that lots of non-crazies aspire to do, it's probably much more important to have language learning "aptitude," which is some sort of composite of memory, auditory processing, sequence processing intelligence, etc. You can predict someone's learning outcomes fairly well by measuring their aptitude using a test, plus a measure of their motivation. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 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 14 of 19 18 December 2014 at 2:37am | IP Logged | ||||||||
The golden rule is overrated and simplified. I almost lost a friend over it as we were both trying to take our friendship to a new level by behaving the way we wanted the other to behave. As our wishes/expectations were not the same, we ended up upsetting each other a lot and it took us incredibly long to make sense of all that. The real challenge is doing/saying/remembering things that feel pointless and unimportant to you but matter to the other person. And understanding that other people's thought process works differently from your own. This applies to communicating with L2 speakers too. Edited by Serpent on 18 December 2014 at 2:42am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Tyrion101 Senior Member United States Joined 3916 days ago 153 posts - 174 votes Speaks: French | Message 15 of 19 24 December 2014 at 7:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks for all the replies, I was curious, because I've been to several places where the signage was in different languages (Wales, Scotland, Ireland), and I picked up a fair number of words simply by reading the bilingual signs and paying attention to word order, and was wondering if that meant I might have something. I do realize that the vast majority of people in these places do not speak their native tongues very much or at all. Which is another reason I asked about this. I do not wish to learn every language, my rule is it must be living and spoken by someone somewhere, and spoken enough that I might actually get to use it someday.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4102 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 16 of 19 24 December 2014 at 8:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
This is a fun exercise (I love it, and I do it all the time in Breton), but from what I've seen it doesn't lead to much beyond feeling smug about understanding bilingual signs. Through playing the game with me, my husband has learned the common geographical words and the noun-adjective word order. Sometimes he sees a sign and knows what something means (or asks me to translate a single word and so that he might put everything together)... but it doesn't mean that he's remotely close to speaking Breton. For one thing, signs don't generally include verbs, so he doesn't know a single verb or its position in your average sentence... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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