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Does language learning make you.. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6665 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes  Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 17 of 37 12 May 2010 at 11:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Having lived in France for four years and having made a huge effort to learn French has certainly made me much more intolerant towards immigrants who have lived in Germany for 10 years or more and whose German is still rudimentary.
Before, I always thought 'OK, it's difficult for them to learn the language'. Now I think that after so much time in the country, not having learnt the language simply shows that they haven't tried hard enough. Of course, this only applies to people who've been immersed in the language for an extended period of time. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ThisIsGina Groupie United Kingdom languageblogbygina.w Joined 5318 days ago 56 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Romanian, Catalan, Greek, German, French | Message 18 of 37 13 May 2010 at 12:08am | IP Logged | ||
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Learning Spanish (and studying several other languages) has made me appreciate how difficult my native language is. As well as making me feel incredibly lucky to be able to speak English without having to learn it from a foreign perspective, I have a great amount of respect and admiration for those who do manage to learn it.
My interest in languages makes me very forgiving of gramatical errors made by foreigners speaking English. In fact, I enjoy hearing these mistakes, because I can gain an insight into their native language by hearing the way they speak English. For example, if a Russian didn't use articles when speaking English, the sentences with missing words would sound a bit odd in English, but would be correct in Russian. Edited by ThisIsGina on 13 May 2010 at 12:10am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| bela_lugosi Hexaglot Senior Member Finland Joined 6454 days ago 272 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English, Finnish*, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish Studies: Russian, Estonian, Sámi, Latin | Message 19 of 37 13 May 2010 at 1:24am | IP Logged | ||
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When I was little I never actually pondered why foreigners made mistakes in spoken Finnish. Hearing a non native Finnish speaker was such a rare occasion that I really admired and still admire for example Roman Schatz, a German-born journalist who speaks and writes Finnish almost perfectly.
Starting to learn foreign languages made me comprehend how high the level of difficulty actually was, so I guess I've become more appreciative of other people's efforts to learn a language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cristiana Diglot Newbie Romania Joined 6000 days ago 31 posts - 38 votes Speaks: Romanian*, English Studies: Russian | Message 20 of 37 13 May 2010 at 7:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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It made me less forgiving of people who claim to speak a language when they can barely watch a movie or read in that language, much less hold a conversation.
Those same people make fun of the Iranian guy who's studying biology and chemistry at a Romanian university, in Romanian (and passing all of his exams), just because he makes mistakes and has a strange accent. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 21 of 37 13 May 2010 at 8:01pm | IP Logged | ||
It depends on the languages involved. For example, I would be less sympathetic when hearing some monoglot Anglophones complaining about having to learn Norwegian than if they were complaining about doing the same with Ukrainian. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5352 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 22 of 37 14 May 2010 at 8:17am | IP Logged | ||
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How I feel depends on why the people are struggling to learn the languages, and why they are learning the languages to begin with.
I recently completed a Spanish course at the university, and my frequent in class partner just didn't seem to be good with languages. I always saw him memorizing verb conjugations, nouns and grammar points, but when it came time to practice speaking the language, he really struggled. On the other hand, I was just taking the class as for the knowledge, and as a fun course and as such, really did not put much effort into it and did really well...when we spoke to each other in class, I really tried to water-down my skills to his level, and work with him a bit, because he tried so hard and it was obvious that he just isn't good with languages. Others in the same class obviously just didn't put any effort into the class and then "struggled" and I did not feel bad for them at all... After studying a few foreign languages, I quickly came to understand that it requires a lot of time and effort to become fluent, and as such, I easily ignore the mistakes when I hear a foreign speak English. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sunny Groupie United States Joined 6248 days ago 98 posts - 128 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Welsh, French | Message 23 of 37 18 May 2010 at 3:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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Honestly, learning other languages has not made me more understanding.
I was actually raised by a hippy-ish liberal-thinking mother who somehow taught me to place myself in "other people's shoes". This trait seems to be sorely lacking in the current American society at this point in time... I have no problem understanding the difficulties most people face*, and I remember feeling this way even as a young child. I don't take credit for this however, it was all due to my mother's open-minded influence. *There is a caveat: I have no comprehension of some people's drive for ostentatious wealth and the troubles they face. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| CheeseInsider Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5122 days ago 193 posts - 238 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* Studies: French, German | Message 24 of 37 24 November 2010 at 6:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I guess it helped, but I was like this before I started learning French.
Now I get really angry when people I know make fun of immigrants for their English. It frustrates me, I just want to drown them in a river. Learning languages has definitely made me an angrier person in this regard hahahaha! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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