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Rubbish at languages | ||
Tags: Talent | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4619 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 1 of 22 18 June 2014 at 4:57pm | IP Logged |
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Is there really such as thing as a person who is "no good at languages"? I just read a blog article written by an American woman living in Germany who is clearly very intelligent and also highly-literate in her mother tongue. Yet she insisted that she found her early days in Germany very difficult due to her being "terrible at languages"
Yet don't we all find a new skill difficult when attempting it for the first time? Languages do have a steep learning curve so perhaps many people conveniently label themselves as having "no talent" before they've had time to give it a serious shot? As it turns out, the author did start to make significant progress once she was put into situations where using the language was necessary. No real surprise here. Practise may not always make perfect but will certainly lead to improvement. I've always believed that genuine language talent exists, just as some people pick up a golf club for the first time and seem to have a natural feel for the game. There may also be people with learning difficulties who genuinely struggle with new languages, but even they could make relative progress with exposure and effort. But for the vast majority of folk in between the extremes, including the "average joe", surely everyone is capable....if they want it. Edited by beano on 18 June 2014 at 4:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4906 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 2 of 22 18 June 2014 at 6:04pm | IP Logged |
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I'm rubbish at learning languages. I think that's one thing that attracts me to studying them. In the same way, I'm scared of heights, so in college I joined the rock climbing club, and I've gone paragliding twice.
On the other hand, you're probably right about the steep learning curve causing people to think they have no talent. People can learn to drive a car or learn to play a simple song on guitar in a couple weeks. So people buy a language book and get to chapter 3 and think they have no aptitude. Or they take a class and quit going after a few weeks. They don't see any progress in a short time and assume they can't do it. But learning a language is a long-term project. Edited by Jeffers on 18 June 2014 at 6:04pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| jpmtl Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 3999 days ago 44 posts - 115 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 3 of 22 18 June 2014 at 8:00pm | IP Logged |
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It's a meme that people hear, and repeat.
- "We only use 10% of our brain". - "I'm terrible at languages." 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Light Newbie Canada Joined 4422 days ago 30 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 4 of 22 18 June 2014 at 8:41pm | IP Logged |
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I'm terrible at computer languages. I have tried learning them in the past. I have been able to pick up HTML and CSS relatively easily, but when it comes to programming you can just stick a fork in me.
English was always one of my best subjects until I got up to high school where they expected me to write essays and stuff. I can write an essay if I put my mind to it but I was always a perfectionist and it hindered me in school with anything that took a skill I hadn't quite cracked. French, I had my days with it in elementary school learning songs and numbers and so forth. Middle school, I had low attendance and was totally not learning anything. If I had to go to the bathroom I would butcher the grammar and pronunciation when getting permission to leave the class. Once I made high school I began learning, it wasn't as hard as it seemed, but I still didn't have great attendance so I was lucky enough to have to do it over again. That time around, grammar was easy. But there wasn't a whole lot to go off vocabulary wise from what was being taught, and I wasn't interested enough to study on my own. Fast-forward, I still wouldn't say that I am terrible at languages -- just that I'm a bad language learner. I think a lot of people who are beginning suffer from just that. They are not equipped to learn a language when they are in charge of their own learning. This isn't limited to finding the right material, but knowing what works for them, to keeping on a schedule, etc. I think we all start out as bad language learners. Some have better aptitudes when it comes to all of these things, and some of us don't, but we only become better at language learning through trial and error, or success as you might have it. I'm still bad at language learning but I've long had an aptitude for the languages themselves. I'm improving, and it's just making the process of learning easier. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4305 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 5 of 22 18 June 2014 at 9:45pm | IP Logged |
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Well yeah they do exist. In a class environment it's all the more obvious if someone is a
relatively poor learner or not. Is it a serious question, whether or not some people are natively poorer at learning languages than others? Or is it just a rhetorical question about why people limit their own horizons? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5225 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 6 of 22 18 June 2014 at 9:47pm | IP Logged |
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I have no vocation for languages. I don't have any for music either, but those two fields are where I get most of my enjoyment in life.
But, as to the original question, depends how you define rubbish. My guess is, like most things, if you plot skill with language sampling a populaton you'll get a bell curve, with some exceptionally talented, some exceptionally untalented, and most in the bulbous middle. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4580 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 7 of 22 19 June 2014 at 1:36am | IP Logged |
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I didn't used to think that there was a such a thing as people who are unable to learn a
language. Then I met people who had been learning Esperanto for decades and still couldn't speak it properly, so I changed my mind ;) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4029 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 8 of 22 19 June 2014 at 3:18am | IP Logged |
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For me:
-You have to want to actually learn the language and it will be far easier. If you are doing it just to get a grade, it will be impossible, doing it to communicate is in the middle I guess. -You can't let your head convince yourself that it is too difficult. I used the analogy a while back of a guy who smoked a pack every day and some other stuff happened. -Has the said person tried thinking in the language? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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