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Getting a language "for free" | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4620 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 1 of 19 26 August 2013 at 10:13am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I often see posts where people say they got their native language "for free" but is this really the case?
Yes, you learn your native language from the people around you but everyone does 10-13 years of compulsory schooling during which time a lot of native language skills are formally taught. That's not quite free, not in the sense of time. We also get lots of exposure to "proper" language through TV and radio. If you read regularly, your vocabulary will come on by leaps and bounds. The point I'm trying to make is that we may learn to speak functionally for free, but to take our native language skills to the point where we are desirable to employers and can command a respectable place in society, a lot of work is involved. In the days when ordinary working people were illiterate and didn't have access to aural sources like radio, I wonder what the general standard of their spoken language was like. Edited by beano on 26 August 2013 at 10:14am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 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 2 of 19 26 August 2013 at 11:40am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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That depends on how you define standard.
My grandparents were not illiterate (they attended primary school) but they did not go to secondary school and instead worked on a farm. This resulted in the fact that their spoken language was adequate, only very dialectal and unpolished (and in more formal situations changing this was nigh-on impossible). For those who were not from their local area, it was hard to understand them - even for me, their grandson, since I was raised elsewhere. Edited by tarvos on 26 August 2013 at 11:41am 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 3 of 19 26 August 2013 at 12:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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You master your native language by doing things in it. Education, especially post-secondary education helps a lot. Reading extensively is also a good way to expand your vocabulary and, because you read extensively you need an expanded vocabulary. Interaction with others in a context where precision in language is necessary helps to hone the skills. Basically the more you do in a language beyond basic communication skills helps to make you a more proficient speaker in your language.
We tend to get hung up on CEFR levels here on the forum a bit too much at times, as regards native languages, I think. While it serves as a good benchmark for measuring TL proficiency, it means realatively little within a native-speaker context. If I were a farmer in a small community of farmers with no access to mass communication, my language would be adequate to communicate with my family and neighbors. I would have no need to debate quantum theory, Keynesian economics vs the Austrian school, or the relative merits of Hobbesian philosophy. Just because someone can't doesn't mean they aren't proficient in their native language, or local dialect, for what they need to do within it inside their given context. I may be wrong here, but I also feel that this may be at the nub of many members' disappointment in language learning. The amount of language necessary to deal with all we must deal with in the 21st century is significantly greater than what my grandparents needed to know in their isolated farming community. It has taken us all, as adults, many years of constant, daily exposure to the many facets of our lives immersed in our native languages, using our native languages to learn in context, to learn to use our native language as a virtual Swiss Army knife. We don't really need all the blades to do a job, but a complex job requires more than just one tool. When you think about it that way, it makes C-2 in a TL all that more a daunting task and all that more an admirable achievement for an adult learner to accomplish. Basically, that's why I always say language courses will only take you so far. Real life, education and extensive everyday interaction have honed our native language skills, so don't be so disappointed when you finish your Assimil course and still don't understand a movie or a podcast completely. That's why I always recommend interacting with the language alongside a course. EMK has written extensively about his insights regarding proficiency in his blog "French: Wandering towards C1". As part of his journey he'll be taking an online course in statistics in French. I'm taking an online course in Brazilian history (in Portuguese from a Brazilian University) about the Vargas era. I'm not saying that will take me to C1 but every little bit helps to hone the skills, which is what we all do and did in our native languages to get where we are today. Edited by iguanamon on 26 August 2013 at 1:02pm 10 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 19 26 August 2013 at 2:30pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
You're absolutely right that kids work hard for their native language. I calculated the numbers in another thread, and kids get about 1 to 10 Super Challenge's worth of audio input every single year from birth, and starting around 10 or so, successful students read at least half a Super Challenge's worth of books every year. On the output side, they either get good, or they can't communicate effectively with their parents and peers. Some 2-year-olds can produce remarkably grammatical sentences, but they also produce a lot of word salad and get confused by complicated relative clauses. I've seen 3-year-olds fossilize weird grammatical errors for over a year, despite constant correction, before figuring out the right way to say something. And young school-aged kids have nowhere the richness and precision of vocabulary as well-read adults, and even some 13-year-olds can get overexcited and produce word salad.
In Vermont, there was a local celebrity named Fred Tuttle. He was an 80-year-old farmer who'd spent his life on a dairy farm, except for his military service in World War II. (As he put it, he was "liberated by Paree".) I have a CD of Tuttle telling stories about the old days. He speaks with a very thick accent and non-standard grammar, but he's a wonderful story teller and very effective in his use of language. And if I listen long enough, I can slowly start piecing together the grammar of his rural Vermont dialect. Nobody at HTLAL will be surprised to find out that, of course, there's quite a sophisticated grammar there. Some of the features actually remind me of spoken French—there's definitely a whole comment/anti-topic thing going on, for example, at a much higher rate than you'd expect in standard spoken English. Tuttle starred in a local movie about running for the US House of Representatives. Later on, he actually ran for the US Senate, and faced a well-funded out-of-stater in his party primary. During a radio debate, he challenged the out-of-stater's knowledge of the local dairy industry, resulting in this famous exchange (there's a recording on the linked page):
Fred continued his backwoods bumpkin routine and made an absolute fool of his opponent. He ultimately won the party primary, and then—deciding that he'd made his point—turned around and endorsed the other party's candidate. Plenty of people speak rural dialects. Some of them are still extremely effective language users and are perilous to underestimate. Fred is not an isolated example.
I'm certainly not disappointed by my language learning. I can do all kinds of fun things in French, and my overall progress has been much faster than I ever expected. But it takes a real effort to find opportunities to use my active skills, and frankly, it's sometimes a bit lonely—I read and watch all these cool things, and there's really nobody to share it with except my wife and some people online. My passive skills continue to advance, but my speech is making only slow progress. One of the problems with learning more-or-less like a child is that you eventually run into some of the same problems as heritage learners: Without the right environment, it's easy to plateau or at least slow down unless you devote a few dozen hours per month to the language. Of course, who knows? Maybe I'll make a big leap of progress sometime soon. 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 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 5 of 19 26 August 2013 at 3:06pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Of course. But it is very hard if you're not familiar with that particular dialect, and I could understand my grandparents. It also matters what the educational level is. And in English the dialectal variation between dialect and standard language is much smaller than it is for Dutch dialects, which in some cases aren't a dialect as much as another language entirely. For rurally spoken Brabantian, there is still a substratum with the Dutch language, but many things are different, and I really had to focus to understand my grandparents (let alone respond, which I did in standard Dutch, more or less). Before the widespread boom of education, these rural dialects in the Netherlands effectively amounted to different villages (!) speaking different languages. Moving to a village 10 miles away meant you were still understood. 50 miles was getting tough. Moving to another province meant it was a whole lot more difficult, and moving more than one province? That's difficult even now. Just for reference, even in this day and age; I cannot understand local dialects of the northeast, Limbourg, or many Belgian ones. Nor Zealandic. The only dialects (pure) that I can understand are the ones spoken in the Hollands, Utrecht, Flevoland (which is almost all immigrants), and the Brabantian ones (because I have family there). In Belgium there is overlap with the Belgian Brabantian dialects, and so I understand those to some extent (and I have experience with Flemish in general). And this is easier for me because in the Netherlands standardization is an ongoing process (in Belgium dialects are CHERISHED). 100 years ago this would have been much tougher, even 50 years ago it was tough. Not to mention the big mentality differences; North-South divide of Catholicism, Protestantism, Jewish slang in Amsterdam... The one benefit of widespread education is that national languages are so standardised. That's why people understand each other better across the country nowadays. And in English these dialects are much less marked. Edited by tarvos on 26 August 2013 at 3:11pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5007 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 6 of 19 26 August 2013 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
You expressed some of my feelings perfectly, thanks. It is sad that one of the most difficult things when it comes to language learning is to find opportunities to practice. Most people here and even most standard language learning industry people speak about language learning being the hard part before you can finally speak with people and enjoy it and have a great time by polishing your skills. And all the "want to get better? just speak with people" bullshit is tiring me. Finding the speakers and the practice opportunity is tough, speaking actually with them is much easier (even with the French :-D ). When you don't want to be a language bandit or otherwise annoying or inappropriate or getting to an awkward or even potentially dangerous situation (such as going to a blind date with French speaking brother to the French speaking arab you met in a bookshop), it is often more than hard. When you don't have enough money to solve that shortage by buying language tutors,it is bad. When your native language is nearly worthless on the language exchange market, you are screwed. And some of the joys of languages are a bit lonely, even though you all here on htlal are an awesome cure to this and I will never stop being grateful, thank you guys. How many times did my boyfriend want to read the book I was so enjoying and blabbering about but it was in French or Spanish. That "heritage learners' problem" is not limited on heritage learners and as well not on learn like a child learners. I think it is a problem most advanced learners face. You are stuck in your country, you have more difficult ways to both the natives and cultural material and so on. Then, you need to devote a few dozens of hours a month to the language itself and at least a third of the time to secur you will have what to do with the language during the actual study time. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5980 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 7 of 19 26 August 2013 at 6:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I worried about this a lot too, particularly with Japanese. I am happy to inflict my
interests on my husband but I can't do it to friends or colleagues because I know they will never share it with me and I'll probably end up looking pretentious anyway. It's crazy to talk about language learning being a lonely experience, since language is the basis of how we interact with each other, and yet it's something I have felt too. I get so few opportunities to use Japanese that I've all but let go of any aspiration to reach a C2 level. But then I also have no aspiration to live or work in Japan, I just thought it would be a cool language to know, so maybe it's quite reasonable to adjust my goals and expectations downwards. 5 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 8 of 19 27 August 2013 at 1:10am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I think I understand the point you are making, but I thought the idea of getting languages for free in HTLAL circles was more about 2nd languages which are very close, e.g. Spanish speakers learning Portuguese or Italian, or Norwegian speakers learning Danish. First language acquisition is an ever fascinating subject, and it is tempting to think we can learn from it to improve second language acquisition. I don't personally know whether we can or we can't - I would like to think we can - but I am not sure whether it has been convincingly shown yet. I think you have demonstrated that first-language acquisition is not free, and it seems unlikely that second-language acquisition will be either except for languages that are very close, but perhaps techniques can be developed that can make it less work than traditional 2nd-language learners have often found it, based on the way they learned their first language. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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