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Can we ever fill in all the gaps? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 39 29 October 2013 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, this brings us back to one of my favorite points: If you look at the sheer time native speakers put into learning their language between birth and 25, it's enormous. All that listening, all those years adorably butchering grammar, all those conversations, all those tens of millions of words of books, all those essays and papers in schools, all that time spent trying to impress their friends—if you add up all the time and sweat, a monolingual native speaker has put in an enormous effort. In terms of sheer hours, they've probably invested enough to time to become a chess grandmaster, a concert violinist, or an Olympic athlete. The popular myth always says, "But yeah, children learn language so quickly! One of my friends moved to Germany, and their kid was happily chattering away in German on the playground inside of 6 months." But look at the chart: The average native 8-year-old only knows about 12,000 headwords, which is no more than a diligent adult might learn in their first year of immersion. And I guarantee that the average kid speaking German on the playground after 6 months is still making case errors and has trouble dealing with age-appropriate academic subjects. Krashen reports, for example, that the typical kid takes 3 to 5 years of school to catch up with their native peers after switching to a new language. The good news is that it's not remotely necessary to be as good as a native speaker. If all you want to do is read interesting books, watch TV series and have friendly conversations, you can get there quite quickly. The difference between "totally adequate for day-to-day purposes" and "sounds like a native speaker who attended one of the grandes écoles" is a huge gap. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4826 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 10 of 39 29 October 2013 at 6:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
Did you by any chance give "railway timetable" a chance? ("railway" seems to have gone out of use with the younger (to me) generation, but it's possibly a word she might have learned from older English courses). But if she didn't know "timetable", she'd still have been stumped. Despite the pub's proximity to the station, given how expensive train travel is in the UK, she probably can't afford to travel that way, so it doesn't mean much too her. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5389 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 11 of 39 29 October 2013 at 6:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, that's the average so that would make you above average. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| I'm With Stupid Senior Member Vietnam Joined 4171 days ago 165 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Vietnamese | Message 12 of 39 29 October 2013 at 7:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
I like how you forget some words between the age of 8 and 9. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4663 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 13 of 39 29 October 2013 at 7:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Someone could easily stump me by asking me the word for "socket wrench" in French, a term that any native would surely know. Certainly I could try to fill in this gap, empty out my toolbox and put all the words I don't know yet into Anki. But do I want to? Not particularly, and I doubt it would come in very handy in the conversations I have...(and yet I just had to look up "socket wrench" after writing that, haha!). Edited by tastyonions on 29 October 2013 at 7:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5260 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 14 of 39 29 October 2013 at 7:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
Can we ever fill in all the gaps? -No, I don't think we can without living, breathing and sleeping the target language in the TL country for a number of years. Instead of focusing on what I can't do or am unlikely to be able to do (no matter how much I may want to), I try to focus on what I can do. As emk says quite well:
You can only do so much whilst living outside the country, without a group of friends and peers to speak with, not being immersed in the language on a day to day basis. What we can do is still quite a lot considering where we all once were before we knew anything of the languages we study and speak. I don't think we give ourselves enough credit as adult learners of second languages outside the TL countries. I'll still strive to do the best I can but I will let myself off the hook for not knowing every obscure word or idiom I come across. As to language learning, I'll take "imperfect" over "zero" any day. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Einarr Tetraglot Senior Member United Kingdom einarrslanguagelog.w Joined 4611 days ago 118 posts - 269 votes Speaks: English, Bulgarian*, French, Russian Studies: Swedish | Message 15 of 39 29 October 2013 at 9:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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We can never fill in the gaps when it comes down to our mother tongue, let go any other foreign language no mater whether we've achieved native - like competence or not. That being said we should consider how there are ancient words in any language that can still be used under some circumstances, but will be understood by, say 10% of the natives. Together with that we have the new words that are emerging every single day, not to mention of dialects of a language. It's pretty much endless.
Let me give an example with Bulgarian. If a person my age (early 20's) or even my parents' age that had been brought up and lived in the capital and goes to a village we have relatives, just 80 kilometers away from the capital they'd be pretty much puzzled when shopping in the grocery store, just because if they ask for "диня" (dinya, the official word for watermelon), they would be presented with a "любеница" (liubenitza - also meaning watermelon). Identical would be the case with "пипон" (pipon) and "компири" (kompiri), respectively "пъпеш" (papesh) and "картофи" (potatoes - in their official form) Another good example would be a happening I once had at my university exam preparation courses in English. My teacher a very reputable lecturer at my university was puzzled when I asked her to give me the translation or at least a meaning of the word: "riparian", as I came across the latter the day before my course. She never heard of it and what was worse, she couldn't find it in one of the biggest dictionaries I've ever seen in my life by far (it was quite ancient so I had high hopes). Of course a quick google-search gives away the mystery of the word, meaning: " relating to or situated on the banks of a river:" Speaking of English, I still get puzzled by the Doric sometimes. The most staggering occasion was when I was at a store, buying a jacket. The girl behind the till first asked me: "U ne a ba fo da" which after several repetitions came out as "Do you need a bag for that". I didn't get any luckier than this with her second question, which was: "Du u ne d haar" which turned out to be "Do you need the hanger". And this wasn't an isolated case, just the other way around. And last, but not least, my beloved Russian which is just as vast as its country. I mean how many us studying it, and probably some of the natives would know what exactly "мымра" is without looking it up online. :) Edited by Einarr on 29 October 2013 at 9:44pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5318 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 16 of 39 29 October 2013 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
Fun fact: Germans used to call a monkey wrench Franzose, while the French used to call the same tool clé anglaise. (Both terms have been officially replaced by politically correct ones.) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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