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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4582 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 9 of 12 25 September 2014 at 1:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Q. How old were you when you first tried to learn a language?
A. I was 11 when I started learning French. (I subsequently started learning German independently at 17, Esperanto at 21 and Croatian at 28.) Q. Did you have a choice about learning this language or were you required to learn it? A. Required to learn it at school for five years. Q. Do you currently speak this language regularly? A. No, I can't speak it beyond telling people my name, how old I am, what my school uniform looks like (and other similarly useful sentences which I learned by rote as a child). Q. Do you regularly read this language for information or enjoyment? A. No, my French has never been at a level where I've been able to read anything. Q. How much of your learning experience with this language was in a foreign language classroom? A. 100% between the ages of 11 and 16. I have since tried to learn the language outside of a classroom twice at the ages of 22 and 26, but with limited results. Q. If you no longer use this language on a daily basis, can you estimate how many years you spent learning or using it? A. 6 years if you count 5 years learning at school and approximately two periods of six months learning independently. Q. Estimate how many hours of classroom instruction you had for this language? A. Two hours per week for five years (where there were probably 40 weeks of classes in a year) so about 400 hours. Q. How much time have you spent living in place where the language is spoken? A. None living there, but approximately 3 months worth of holidays there. Q. Have you used the language to learn other subjects at school? A. No. Q. Do you have personal or emotional attachments to this language? A. My fiancé is a fluent speaker who lived in France for several years and has lots of friends there. He would like to live in France again one day, so it is on my list of languages I must try learning again one day. Q. Did you enjoy studying vocab and grammar in this language? A. I enjoyed studying vocab. We didn't learn any grammar at school; we just memorised phrases. But I have enjoyed studying grammar in other languages I have learned since. Q. Do you think of yourself as a person who likes to socialize? A. No, I think of myself as a person who doesn't. Q. Were you a successful student in other school subjects? A. Yes. Q. Do you think of yourself as a person who learns a new language easily? A. It doesn't feel easy to me, but I seem to be able to do it more easily than other family members etc. Q. Do you learn by speaking and being active, or reading, or studying vocab and grammar? A. I learned German and Esperanto primarily through writing and correspondence. I am trying to learn Croatian through a combination of studying vocab/grammar and reading, and it seems like much harder work. Q. Do you think age plays any role in your language learning? A. Only in so far as I had more time to dedicate to it when I was a student. It's harder to keep it up regularly when you work full time and have other commitments. Q. Do you think only clever people can learn? A. No, I know all kinds of people who speak Esperanto to a functional level despite not having excelled at school or having what would be deemed a high IQ. However I have also met people who have got to a certain level and never been able to progress beyond it, eg. speaking Esperanto with a strong native English accent, so it seems that some people find certain aspects easier than others. Q. Do you think there might be a language gene? A. No. Q. Do you think it's possible to get to a real native-like level? A. I think so, but I think it takes a lot of dedication and would be hard without spending some time living in a country where the language is spoken. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4098 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 10 of 12 25 September 2014 at 2:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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How old were you when you first tried to learn a language?
Four, maybe? Five? I don't remember and the second hand accounts I hear have no doubt been embellished with time. Did you have a choice about learning this language or were you required to learn it? It wasn't a conscious choice, as such. I just gradually started understanding more and more. One day someone realised that I inexplicably understood things no one had bothered to actively teach me. Do you currently speak this language regularly? I speak it less regularly than I used to, but I use it all day every day for work. Do you regularly read this language for information or enjoyment? Yes. Though only for work these days, as I have limited time and other languages to improve. How much of your learning experience with this language was in a foreign language classroom? I had mandatory classes was a few times per week from age 10 to age 15. Compared to the probably 3-4 hours of television daily from age 3 to 15, the computer games from age 6, the novels from age 10, the non-fiction research books from age 12, and the two hours of daily role-playing, chatting, poetry and fiction writing, article writing, from age 12 and onwards, plus having all of my classes (but no foreign language classes) in the language from age 16... well, the "foreign language classroom" part was pretty negligible. It did teach me that "I" is always written as a capital letter, but other than that I was fighting my teacher essentially from day one. She did not like that my vocabulary was broader than hers and my parents often had to come in and argue my marks up because she was unfamiliar with the particular synonym I gave on a test. Estimate how many hours of classroom instruction you had for this language Oh dear. 360 as a foreign language, perhaps? 240 as a native language. How much time have you spent living in a place where the language is spoken? Two years, but I also spent three years in a L2-medium school. Have you used the language to learn other subjects at school? at what level (elementary, secondary, university)? Secondary (age 16-19) and university (undergraduate). Do you have personal or emotional attachments to this language? For example, do you have peers or family members who speak this language? I had emotional attachment to it at some point, when it was my primary language for just about everything except for speaking to my family and buying a cup of coffee with my friends at the end of the school day. I also had some emotional attachment when I was living, and saw myself staying, in a country where it was spoken primarily. Today, though, no. It is one of the languages I communicate with my friends in, and there are some things I find easier to do in this language, out of habit, but I am quickly changing that by forcing myself to do those things in other languages. Do/did you enjoy studying vocab and grammar in this language? I didn't dislike doing so, but I never actively had to. I was always several years ahead of what we were doing in the classroom and the gap only increased with time. Do you think of yourself as a person who likes to socialize? That depends on the language. In my two primary languages, I like to socialise just fine. I am never the life of the party, and I prefer to quietly assess a situation over throwing myself into it, but I do all right. In other languages, I think of myself as a person who would like to like to socialise. Human interaction makes me happy, but it also brings about anxiety after the fact (near-crippling at times). Are/were you a successful student in other school subjects? Yes. Do you think of yourself as a person who learns a new language easily? No. I don't think of myself at all in terms of the ease with which I learn languages. I suspect that I'm woefully average, and if others seem slower than me to pick things up it's a question of method or motivation. Do you rather learn by speaking and being active, or reading, or studying vocab and grammar? By reading or listening. Do you think age plays any role in your language learning? To a minor degree. If an average child and an average pensioner, neither having any language-learning experience, are both thrown into a total immersion situation I suspect that the child is more likely to come out of it with a very good accent and a very good grasp of the language, but I'd attribute a lot of the child's progress to being more open and quicker to accept new things, less set in his/her ways, and probably more motivated to fit in and build for the future. Do you think only clever people can learn? People with a high IQ? Definitely not. I've met some very unintelligent people who speak a second language well enough. I also doubt almost every single Scandinavian has "a high IQ". Do you think there might be a language gene? I seem to recall that there is something being called the "language gene" and experiments have been done by genetically modifying rodents to see if they learn quicker with the human language gene. I also seem to recall that having one of your set damaged tends to lead to learning difficulties in humans. If you mean, do I think that some people are language-learning prodigies because they have an unusual gene that makes them special, however, then no, absolutely not. Do you think it's possible to get to a REAL native-like level? or at least a native- like pronounciation? I have convinced enough people that I am a native, back when I spoke, rather than wrote, regularly, that it would be ridiculous to say no. I have also been "fooled" enough times that it'd be ridiculous to think that I was some special case. It simply takes much more effort than is useful for most people and much more training and exposure than most adults end up getting. I estimate that I had at least 10,000 hours of passive exposure to my L2 just from TV alone, along with about 4,000 hours of written composition, on top of classes and daily reading, before I started speaking the language every day and even thinking about wanting to sound remotely native (so as to not stand out). Then I spent 4,500 hours in an L2-medium learning environment, listening, speaking, listening, speaking, on top of media, reading, communicating with friends outside of school, etc, before getting to the point where I moved abroad for university and native-speakers started believing me to be one of them. On top of that, I did a self-study course for improving my accent to get a very consistent "educated" accent without regional influence, before starting doing job interviews. I don't even want to think about how long it would take for me to get to that point in my L3 with the same minimal effort. I'll obviously have to do something different this time. 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 11 of 12 26 September 2014 at 12:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
My family only got TV after I had started in school, but before I started having English classes there. So I must have been listening to English from I was 7-8 years old, and maybe also German. Both languages were obligatory, but I didn't mind. And yes, I still use both languages on a daily basis. I started Latin, Italian and Spanish a couple of years later, and again as private homestudy. The question about "a foreign language classroom?" is somewhat ambiguous - do you mean teaching exclusively in a foreign language? In that case I didn't experienced it before I was around 14 years old - my teacher of French in the 'gymnasium' tried for 2½ years, and then he gave up and taught us the necessary things in the last ½ year. Since then I have been sceptical about the 'natural' method.
Well, I still use all the languages I have mentioned. And I still learn new things even in English.
I had English classes for some 9 or 10 years, German considerably less, maybe 4 or 5 years, French 3 years and Latin 1 year before university (or was it just a semester? - I have forgotten those details).
I don't think in sentimental terms about my languages. My mother and sister are reasonably strong in English, somewhat less so in German and at least my sister can also speak some French. But how could it be different when they mostly watch Danish TV (where a lot of the content is in English)? I like grammar more than socializing, but I can do both if necessary. I managed rather well in school in most subjects - although mostly in those classes where the teachers would stop interfering with my study activities. Like in mathematics in the 'gymnasium' where I actually struck a deal with my teacher that he would advise me about his intentions before he asked me a question. As for language learning I don't pick languages up like bubble gum under your shoes - I have to work for them.
I prefer studying first and then trying out things in practice. Age is mostly a relevant factor for children and very old people with dementia. In between people may a have less 'sticky' immediate memory, but I know more about languages now - also about study methods - than I did as a youngster, and that can probably counterbalance the loss. The big problem is that I have a fulltime job, and obviously I could progress faster during my study years where I could spend almost all my time on learning languages. The relation between IQ and language learning capability has been researched, and it isn't particularly close. There are definitely some kind of mental apparatur in humans that makes language learning possible (plus the FoxP2 gene, which has something to do with the physical side of it). But we have almost all had enough skills to learn at least one language, and I don't think that the differences between individual learners can be traced to just one gene. It must at least be a combination of many genes, and there are also many different profiles among succesful learners so it can't even be one specific 'supercombination' of genes that produces Krebses and Mezzofanties. I'm fairly sure that it is possible to get a pretty accent and learn the grammar and vocabulary of a language to a nativelike level - but probably not without staying in a relevant country, and even then you must be willing to continually work at the task - which most immigrants don't seem to be doing. As for the pronunciation one-to-one counseling might be useful - like the courses some actors take to learn another dialect of the native language. Group courses? Well, We have had reports about good effects of courses based on chorusing, but to me that sounds like torture. Besides I don't want to emigrate and spend money on teachers so I have accepted that my accent will remain non-native even in English. After all I hear lots of different dialects, and if I suck up something from all these sources the resultat will almost inevitably be a mixture of them all plus Danish. Edited by Iversen on 26 September 2014 at 1:00am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| guiguixx1 Octoglot Senior Member Belgium guillaumelp.wordpres Joined 4091 days ago 163 posts - 207 votes Speaks: French*, English, Dutch, Portuguese, Esperanto, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 12 of 12 27 September 2014 at 8:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Thank you all for your experiences. I have handed in my work, and really took pleasure
in writing my essay ^^ (when it's about language learning, it's never boring :) ) 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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