Learning from "uneducated" speakers (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Learning from "uneducated" speakers
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Language Learning Forum : General discussion

23 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3

Tsopivo
Diglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 4471 days ago
258 posts - 411 votes

Speaks: French*, English
Studies: Esperanto

Message 17 of 23

11 December 2012 at 9:06pm | IP Logged

Of course it is not OK to lead people on and that is valid for sex or language. However, if both partners are on the same page, I do not see how it is "using" them and why you should necessarily turn to paid relationships if you are only or mostly interested in sex or language.
1 person has voted this message useful

Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6597 days ago
9753 posts - 15779 votes

4 sounds
Speaks: Russian*, English, Finnish^C1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish

Message 18 of 23

11 December 2012 at 9:28pm | IP Logged

Tsopivo wrote:

I guess it could be a problem if you are at an early stage of learning and most of what you hear in your TL is from people who do not speak it well.

That's a big problem with classes, yet many people don't avoid them...
Just an observation. I de facto avoid both before I've had tons of input.
1 person has voted this message useful

Solfrid Cristin
Heptaglot
Winner TAC 2011 & 2012
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 5334 days ago
4143 posts - 8864 votes

Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian
Studies: Russian

Message 19 of 23

11 December 2012 at 10:29pm | IP Logged

Life is full of little quirks, and there is nothing wrong about learning languages from each other.

I met my first Italian boyfriend on the beach in Cattolica, near Rimini. Since the girl I had gone to Italy with
and I had promised each other that we were to have no fooling around with Italian boys in our vacation, we
were just friends for the week we were there. When we went back to Cattolica two weeks later we made no
such promises.

My second Italian boyfriend I met through the Scuola d'Italiano in Oslo. He wanted to practice Norwegian, I
wanted to practice Italian. He later admitted that he had only said that to pick up girls. And we almost ended
up getting married.

My third Italian boyfriend I had decided to be only friends with, since I was only going to stay for a week.
Through a linguistic misunderstanding we got together anyway.

So you cannot always decide what the nature of your friendship will be like. Neither of these three became
my boyfriend because I wanted them for language training, but they were nevertheless the ones who taught
me 90% of my Italian.
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Kyle Corrie
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4829 days ago
175 posts - 464 votes

Message 20 of 23

12 December 2012 at 12:04am | IP Logged

@tarvos
To me, what you've just written seems to contradict your original "connection" post.

You seem to admit that you are drawn to the people who speak your target language and
apparently refuse to communicate in any other language. What does that tell you?

Using your attraction analogy - with women it's the same. You may say that you wouldn't
approach someone simply to have sex with them, but you do approach them because you
find something attractive about them. It may work-out or it may not.

Same with the language.

@Bao
The idea is a language exchange. It's not, "Find a native speaker and force them to
improve my target language."

It's easy enough on the internet to find a native speaker through SharedTalk or
LiveMocha who also has an interest in your own native language.

The social ineraction leaps from a mutual interest. That's how it works.

----------

People seem to be villifying the idea that someone would actually approach another with
the intent of practicing a language. Not just that though, but that if one perceives
their ability in the language to be less than that of whom they'd like to learn from -
then it's a bad thing to cut them off. Crazy.

Oh well, I guess.
1 person has voted this message useful

hrhenry
Octoglot
Senior Member
United States
languagehopper.blogs
Joined 5130 days ago
1871 posts - 3642 votes

Speaks: English*, Spanish^C2, Italian^C2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese
Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe

Message 21 of 23

12 December 2012 at 12:47am | IP Logged

Kyle Corrie wrote:

People seem to be villifying the idea that someone would actually approach another
with
the intent of practicing a language.

There's a big difference between going to a site such as Sharedtalk or Livemocha,
where
there's an established understanding that you're there to look for a language partner,
or meeting someone in person. The order of things are completely reversed.

With these language partner sites, you first find someone to practice with, and
maybe a friendship develops out of it. That's never happened to me in real
life. In real life, I meet and become friends with a person because I find them or
something they do interesting, then maybe we come to an understanding of
language practice later on.

R.
==

Edited by hrhenry on 12 December 2012 at 12:55am
2 persons have voted this message useful

Bao
Diglot
Senior Member
Germany
tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5
Joined 5766 days ago
2256 posts - 4046 votes

Speaks: German*, English
Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin

Message 22 of 23

12 December 2012 at 1:22am | IP Logged

Kyle Corrie wrote:

@Bao
The idea is a language exchange. It's not, "Find a native speaker and force them to
improve my target language."

It's easy enough on the internet to find a native speaker through SharedTalk or
LiveMocha who also has an interest in your own native language.

The social ineraction leaps from a mutual interest. That's how it works.

I haven't had a single language exchange partner so far. I've had plenty cross-cultural cross-language friendships, though. The languages somebody speaks may be a reason why interacting with them is slightly more interesting for me, and maybe the same is true the other way around, but that's only a tiny part of why I might want to talk to somebody, and become friends with them.
2 persons have voted this message useful

nimchimpsky
Diglot
Groupie
Netherlands
Joined 5611 days ago
73 posts - 108 votes

Speaks: Dutch*, English

Message 23 of 23

12 December 2012 at 7:00pm | IP Logged

beano wrote:

Mixing with the educated group seems to be promoted as a positive thing but I believe there is lots to be learned from "uneducated" speakers. They are the people most likely to never try and switch to English (or another common language) when you converse with them, either because the can't or they have no interest in doing so. It can actually be a great learning experience when you spend time with native speakers who don't slow down, use lots of popular idioms and treat you no differently to anyone else....they expect you to understand them. It's not easy, but it brings great benefits. Every possible learning source is a good one in my book.

This is not my experience with uneducated native Dutch speakers. They tend to dumb down their speech enormously. I have even seen some go as far as speaking a kind of Dutch pidgin with foreigners.

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