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Getting a language "for free" | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4826 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 17 of 19 31 August 2013 at 2:42pm | IP Logged | ||
I assumed he meant he was "home-schooled" (as the modern phrase has it; at one time, people in the UK referred to "Education Otherwise" in reference to the wording of the 1944 Education Act which permitted, while not exactly encouraging, parents to teach their children at home). I'm wondering how he became competent in the spoken aspects of his second languages though. That can't all have been achieved by just reading (unless he read a lot of texts in IPA or something). Sorry to address you in the third person Jinx: now switching to the vocative. :-) Edited by montmorency on 31 August 2013 at 2:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4442 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 18 of 19 09 September 2013 at 1:24am | IP Logged | ||
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According to the original message, a fluent speaker of a native language spends 10-13 years in school.
Not everybody is in the same boat. Many who due to circumstances like myself resettled in other countries. We have close-knit communities among ourselves. There are certain stores we would shop at and maintain a certain fluency in the mother-tongue through social interactions than formal schooling. I considered myself quite fluent in my mother-tongue both spoken & written although I only went up to a grade 4 level. By reading local news and magazines and watch movies in the language you can keep up even to a higher level than you started. If you take the expression: "Time is Money" seriously, whether you pay someone to teach you Spanish or you learn at your own pace at home, you are still spending time that you could be working somewhere earning a pay-cheque. I was recently asked to translate 8 pages of online content from English to Chinese. I normally considered my mother as the most educated in written Chinese in the family because she had gone to a university in China. On the other hand, she isn't very computer literate. With electronic dictionaries I completed the job with very few grammatical errors. Some of the wordings were changed to better sounding ones. I have another friend in the US picking up his Chinese by attending classes at a local university. We exchange correspondences in the language. He considers my written Chinese to be better. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6370 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes Speaks: English* | Message 19 of 19 19 September 2013 at 2:28am | IP Logged | ||
Learning to read is not free, but I would say the majority of your native language is learned without much conscious effort and practiced out of necessity. People learn their native languages just fine without any schooling so long as they are exposed to it. Even trying to explicitly do error correcting on children has been shown to do nothing. Edited by zerothinking on 19 September 2013 at 2:28am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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