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HOW much easier is your third language? | ||
Tags: Time to learn | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| zerrubabbel Senior Member United States Joined 4600 days ago 232 posts - 287 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 9 of 20 13 September 2012 at 6:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I just take languages for what they are... the whole, "oh that languages is a catagory 3 languages and oh, you can
learn that one in 4 months" is nothing more than a bunch of red tape that tends to skew peoples expectations about learning the language... In my opinion, I dont care how hard a language is, its pretty obvious to me that if you keep up the effort and give it time, then the only direction you can go is up... but on another note, learning a second foreign language does mean you should already have some experience under your belt which may soften up your next language a little. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cymro Triglot Groupie Wales Joined 6454 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English*, Welsh, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 10 of 20 13 September 2012 at 10:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think there is no question that you learn a 3rd language quicker. I dabled at learning a bits of a few languages for foreign trips before I tackled Welsh. It was made much easier. I don't think either that you can really go by other people's definition of what a difficult language is. It depends on your motivation, your access to resources and there are differences in individual cognition which make things different, as has been said it may also depend on what your sedond language was.
In my case Welsh, traditionally discribed as difficult was effortlessly easy for me. I remember a friend saying that I was "Dros y bont" ( over the bridge) I.e a fluent speaker mot a learner any longer just a matter of months after I started. Fortunately I was raised a monoglot English speaker in a Welsh family where the language had been lost. I had cousins in the same street who spoke it. This means I have a natural accent. I was told again this week that someone couldn't tell I was a learner. I actually know the imperfections that I am still hiding though. There are 80+ words for yes and no which I cannot always get right immediately and I use tricks Like saying "why not" for yes. There is another factor in language learning that seems to be independent of actually ability to speak the accent That is the mimicing of accents. I have a friend who has about 10 loanguages and I have heard him using 5 of them but his English accent shows through. I have been told my French sounds very French but cannot judge but I know that I am a good mimic as I have used my mimicry of people as a party piece. All these things are very individual. Abilities vary so much. Edited by cymro on 13 September 2012 at 11:00pm 1 person has 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 11 of 20 13 September 2012 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
Oh, my brain does that too. Or at least it used to operate in terms of "native language" (German) "foreign language" (English) and "foreign language but the difficult one" (Japanese). Funny how it goes, my immersion in Spain seems to have fixed that. Nowadays my brain seems resignated and tries to default to the language I hear. But I guess that wasn't because of it being my language no. so-and-so, but because I had to take care of little children in that language. Edited by Bao on 14 September 2012 at 11:20pm 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, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 12 of 20 14 September 2012 at 12:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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Used to be a problem for me as well, even when I was fluent in English, intermediate in German and Latin and started learning Finnish. It was never a problem for my English but in the beginning I'd use English calques in Finnish sometimes... funny how it's easier to convince yourself something is correct if it would be wrong in your native language :)
I've not needed immersion, at least not true immersion. And learning not to translate as early as possible has been essential too. But also, the language just needs to gain strength, by any means. Sometimes I still think in other languages during German classes, and it doesn't help that we often have to translate stuff rather than just come up with it in German... But my German is finally getting better and it's becoming less of a problem. 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, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 13 of 20 14 September 2012 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I just thought of another important factor... You'll be able to handle idiomatic expressions much better. That's important, because it's a common situation when you know (or have looked up) all the words in a sentence/text but still don't understand it. When you're learning your first foreign language, the real meaning can seem arbitrary, but in your second and other foreign languages you'll be able to guess this sort of thing and only true idioms will give you trouble.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tanya b Senior Member United States Joined 4778 days ago 159 posts - 518 votes Speaks: Russian | Message 14 of 20 15 September 2012 at 3:29am | IP Logged | |||||
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This thread will give me another opportunity to talk about how difficult it can be to learn Russian for a native English speaker. Russian happens to be my third language, and after being assured by my Armenian friend that learning Russian would be a cakewalk when compared with Armenian, the exact opposite turned out to be true. My studies of both languages somewhat overlapped, but it took almost a year longer to reach fluency in Russian than in Armenian, starting from scratch...
Fluency in Armenian--2 years Fluency in Russian--3 years My definition of fluency, as an incurable perfectionist, is the ability to understand the whole spectrum of TV programs (without subtitles) in the target language and the ability to describe coherently the content of said programs, even with some minor mistakes. Those of you in Russia and Ukraine probably remember a tragic dam collapse in Siberia in 2009, in which a number of workers drowned, possibly because of a failure of its warning system. You may also remember the Artek scandal in Crimea, involving a children's summer camp and allegations of child sexual abuse. It took me a full 3 years of studying my 3rd language to reach a level where I could comfortably and confidently describe in detail these events to my native Russian-speaking friend as 2 educated informed people would in Russia. I believe Russian, as a 3rd language, was so much more difficult to learn than Armenian because its grammar especially verb conjugations can really slow you down and delay fluency. With Armenian, which is spoken from the throat and not the mouth, the difficulty was pronounciation. My theory is that it takes much longer to master grammar than pronounciation. 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, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 15 of 20 15 September 2012 at 10:08am | IP Logged | |||||
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5766 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian | Message 16 of 20 15 September 2012 at 11:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't think you can say that after studying a specific number of languages it is
definitely going to get a lot easier. I've studied a reasonable amount of languages, although not half as many as most on here I'm sure (German, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Attic Greek, Russian, Slovene, and have messed around with Slovak and Czech). That's a fair number, but almost all of those in that list that I learnt to speak and use actively are in just two language families. Which is making it really difficult for me to study Mandarin now I'm moving to China so soon. In short, it's nothing to do with the amount of languages you've studied, it's about the variety of languages you've studied. I feel like a complete beginner going into Mandarin, as it's like language- learning in mega-slow mode compared to what I'm used to with the language families I actually know well. Jack 1 person has voted this message useful |
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