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Can we ever fill in all the gaps? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4291 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 17 of 39 29 October 2013 at 9:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I am not sure if this relates, but I had a slightly similar situation. Several months
ago I travelled by KLM Manchester to Amsterdam, with a thereafter long-haul transatlantic fligth from Schiphol lasting around 11 hours. The Manchester-Amsterdam flight no one asked for spirits, as I suppose because the flight departed at the ungodly hour of 05.50 (I did not sleep beforehand). But on the 11 hour flight, I thought some spirits (especially either whisky or cognac) after dinner (or lunch, or whatever it is called) would be nice, and I have a habit of trying my best to speak the language of the country of origin of the aeroline, and also I was re-starting learning Dutch. I did not know what in Dutch the word for "spirits" was, so I thought for several minutes and decided to use the simple phrase, "Wat voor whisky's en cognacs heeft u?" (What kind of whiskies and cognacs do you have?). It seemed to be understood and I avoided the "spirits" word that I did not know at the time, so I suppose even if one does not know a word, there is always a method of circumventing a misundestanding. I usually know that I am understood if they do not switch to English (or perhaps it helped that I was [trying to] read a copy of De Volkskrant at the time, and that I put my in-flight screen in Dutch). Edited by 1e4e6 on 29 October 2013 at 9:45pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4637 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin | Message 18 of 39 29 October 2013 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
Are you sure? I just heard "cle anglaise" recently from a show made in 2004. Unless the change came after that? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5561 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 19 of 39 30 October 2013 at 2:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
But that kid "speaks" German, while I shall be "learning" it for the rest of my life, irrespective of how many words I know. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 20 of 39 30 October 2013 at 2:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't think so. I don't think I am learning German (good example) either, but that I speak it. But that doesn't mean I have the vocabulary of a native - I just speak it at a usable level. Which is speaking, and then it doesn't do you any good to be falsely modest about your skills. No one knows everything, so speaking imperfectly is a given. The question is how intelligble it is and if it is intelligible and mistake-free enough, who cares. "spirits" is a good word to use in UK company, but "strong alcoholic drinks" would've gotten the message across just as well. Edited by tarvos on 30 October 2013 at 2:24pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4623 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 21 of 39 30 October 2013 at 2:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
Absolutely. An average person speaks far more articulately and with a wider vocabulary at the age of 50 in comparison to 20. Interviews with sportsmen and pop-stars bear this out. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time listening to music and I didn't develop a serious reading habit until my early 20s. I found myself reaching for a dictionary on a number of occasions to check the meaning of a word in my native language.
I think people often over-estimate childrens' ability with language. I've no doubt that very young children learn at a rapid rate but older children who are already fully conversant in their mother tongue will have a tougher time. I was told by a language specialist working in Education that a 10-year-old kid in an immersion environment will normally take 1-2 years to become socially fluent in a new language, but that academic fluency takes far longer, anywhere between 3 and 8 years. Edited by beano on 30 October 2013 at 2:45pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 39 30 October 2013 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
Which is pretty much my larger point: When people say "kids are amazing at learning languages", there's usually a massive double standard involved. By adult standards, quite a lot of young kids are "conversational." They're comfortable in a small subset of the language, and they can discuss their daily life and favorite topics fluently. But when they try to explain a complicated idea, their grammar will sometimes fall apart. An enthusiastic 6-year-old trying to talk about her favorite book isn't that different from an upper-intermediate adult doing the same. While adult learners are beating themselves up over gender errors, actual French speech pathologists are buying Bon Genre, Bon Nombre to help young native kids who can't quite speak at the level of their peers. Similarly, raising kids to be bilingual is harder than it looks, unless you live in a bilingual community. As often as not, you get kids with some degree of passive skill, and with active skills that never fully develop, or that fade quickly starting around age 6. Some kids love being bilingual, and they often do quite well. Other kids can't see the point, and deliberately forget their heritage language starting at a young age. So young native kids, immersed kids, heritage learners—none of these groups has magic access to big vocabularies and flowing speech of a native adult. As you can see from the graph that I posted, even native adults keep learning words until they're in their 50s and 60s. Adults and kids aren't always as different as popular wisdom would suggest. In part, a well-read native 25-year-old has an amazing grasp of their language because they've had a lot of time to learn words like "pabulum", "deracinate" and "tatterdemalion", and to have thousands of hours of conversations. What amazes me is how quickly an adult can reach a reasonable subset of that knowledge, given the right circumstances—3 to 6 months to get conversational, a year to get reasonably good, three to five years of immersion deal with almost anything life throws at them. Adults may have long-term problems with accents and small grammatical details (especially if they don't care about sounding native), but they really can do OK under the right circumstances. Edited by emk on 30 October 2013 at 4:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 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 23 of 39 30 October 2013 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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captious - bibulous - malapropism - tricorn - tenebrous - braggadocio - bruit - embonpoint - pabulum - parlay - pother - valetudinarian - cenacle - hypermnesia - legerdemain - vibrissae - cantle - estivation - myrmidon - regnant - terpsichorean - clerisy - deracinate - fuliginous - oneiromancy - tatterdemalion - williwaw - caitiff - funambulist - hypnopompic - opsimath - pule - sparge - uxoricide
For an adult with some knowledge about Latin and French plus a minimum of Greek at least half of these words will be known. But I doubt that the average native kid will know them. And I could probably have thousands of hours of conversations without hearing them, so I don't blame the kid for missing out on that part of the English vocabulary. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4829 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 24 of 39 30 October 2013 at 6:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
I had only heard of less than half, I think. I could give some sort of definition for those, although whether my explanations would satisfy Jeremy Paxman or Stephen Fry, I don't know. (You can be sure that Stephen Fry would know them all without having to look them up). @emk: I hope I'm still learning new words in my native language until long long past 60! (Seems like Iversen has indicated a few that I (might) need to learn!). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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