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What makes you restart a lang? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| wv girl Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5239 days ago 174 posts - 330 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 9 of 15 05 September 2012 at 11:53am | IP Logged | ||
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I restarted Spanish when they started cutting back on French positions in my area! I first joined an adult Spanish
class in 1992, to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the "discovery" of the New World. A full-time job, working on a master's degree, and continuing my French didn't leave a lot of extra time, so it went by the wayside after the basics, maybe up to the preterite. Well, right after my first year as a French teacher, several positions in the county were replaced by Spanish only when the teachers retired. Instead of having my pick of jobs, I found myself having to return to school AGAIN for job security. It's not that I didn't like Spanish ... I just didn't want any more formal education in languages, as I like learning on my own. Now that the "official" classes have been finished, I find that reading and listening to Spanish, the work I'm doing for the 1/2 Super Challenge, makes it stimulating again, without the pressure of doing an assignment. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 10 of 15 05 September 2012 at 1:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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My story is that I was very active learning languages while I studied first Modern and Comparative Literature, then French in the 70s (up to January 1982), but then I realized that all the attractive jobs had already been taken by the evil and greedy 68'er generation so I dropped language learning completely and turned to economics and computing.
In 2006 I was going to visit Romania and Moldova and checked the internet for information. Then I hit upon HTLAL and that was like serving a whisky or beer to a former drunkard. I had been fairly good at Romanian, but lost it due to as total lack of exposure, so for this language it was enough to reuse an old Teach yourself and do some reading - then I could at least communicate about simple things. Later I used wordlists and reread the grammar and even found some internet sources with spoken Romanian, and I reached the basic fluency level. One curious detail: the first time I had a real test was when a hotel in Romania refused my booking - I then called the hotel and got things sorted out in Romanian. Later in 1986 I learned intermediate Portuguese using old books from the 70s plus TV Ciencia. This was almost like learning the language from scratch as the course I followed in the late 70s just was a one semester 'learn to read' course - which left me unable to even read the book we used: "Vidas Secas" by G.Ramos, and utterly unable to understand spoken Portuguese. But after one month I could have simple conversations during my stay in Cape Verde, and later I continued to study and could speak the language reasonably well during later visits to Moçambique and Portugal. Later on I have also revived my Catalan, though I was slightly better at this language in the 70s than I was at Portuguese - I actually had a few short conversations in Catalan around 1978 during a visit to Costa Brava. Latin was a very different task as I had been fairly good at it (I took the "Mellemste Latinprøve" in the mid 70s), but I only had learnt it through grammar-translation and couldn't say a thing, and I had forgotten most of it during my 'dry spell' . However when I returned to Latin more than thirty years later I could whizz through "Mikkelsen's læsebog" in record tempo, and it turned out that I still remembered all the irregular verbs etc. Therefore I just had to read and listen a lot and try to write and think in it - then my Latin was back, and this time as an active language somewhere around the high intermediate level. With some more activity I'm sure I could push it to basic fluency. My Italian had also become rusty and needed some brushing up, but I had never totally lost it, and my Spanish was even less of a problem because I had used it during my travels in Latin America. Finally I have worked briefly with for instance Filipino, Malaysian, Serbian and Polish in the last couple of years and put them on the backburner again for different reasons, but I intend to get back to them as soon as possible. In all these cases my chief motivation was the desire to know the languages rather than speak them. But I know from my experience with Latin that I forget a language if it is purely passive - to keep it alive I need to be able at least to think in it. Reading alone might in principle do the trick if I read enough, but if I can't at least think in a language I won't look for at the small details which I might use myself, and lack of attention to details is fatal for language learning. Edited by Iversen on 05 September 2012 at 1:16pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4639 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 11 of 15 05 September 2012 at 3:53pm | IP Logged | ||
I have the same experience. I learned Romanian in a passive way as part of my university studies, and when I try to read a Romanian text now I see how much I have lost. With German I have had a different experience. I learned it to a very high level (at least C1) in school, thanks to an excellent teacher. However, as my passion was the Romance languages, I did not keep it up nor did I read or listen to much German for about 20 years. A few years back I moved to France, 10 minutes from the French-German border, and since then I go to Germany for one reason or another every week. I was positively surprised to notice how well I could still undertsand German. I can read a book, listen to the news or get explanations from a car salesman without difficulties, and it has not taken me long to reactivate my spoken German as well, although it is probably still not at the level it was 20 years ago. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5166 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 12 of 15 05 September 2012 at 7:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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What made me restart French in the beginning of the year was the feeling that I knew a bit of several languages, but still couldn'none up to a useable level - a level that would allow me to go to the country and order stuff, to read books, listen to TV shows. So I realized that apart from discovering new languages I felt attached to, I'd always reserve part of my schedule for brushing up any of the languages that are actually more useful in a resumée for example. In my case it's English, French, Spanish, Italian and German, somewhat Chinese as well.
I was already able to read in French as in most Romance languages and I feel my listening and speaking skills have improved a lot since I started to pick one textbook after another since January. I'm learning in a relaxed way, since there are so many resources for French I know that whatever I miss could be found at another book. Now I want to do the same for Spanish, then maybe German or Russian then Italian. Recently I wrote a list of the languages I do plan to learn actively, as the main language in their families or groups. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5166 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 13 of 15 05 September 2012 at 7:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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An important note: I learned how to feel the pleasure in brushing up a language, while so far I only felt the pleasure in discovering wild grammar features. This accounted for my decision to always keep a language-to-be-improved and put an end to several yesrs (I'm speaking of twelve years) of little practical results regarding language learning
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| languagenerd09 Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom youtube.com/user/Lan Joined 5100 days ago 174 posts - 267 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Thai | Message 14 of 15 10 September 2012 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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For me, I think it is when I find a sudden 'urge' to want to be able to communicate with people from other nations, I have a lot of friends in countries across the world but I barely know more than saying hello/how're you/fine/thank you - unless it is Spanish or Portuguese really - and it I would really like to be able to sit and have an actual conversation in their native language because I think it's important to remember that yes English is a language but it doesn't always have to be used in conversation with somone from another country, especially when there is an opportunity to be speaking in another language.
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| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5924 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 15 of 15 11 September 2012 at 10:41am | IP Logged | ||
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I restart a language when I become interested in it again.
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