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Is speaking fluency always your goal ? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 38 28 June 2012 at 3:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Not for Middle Egyptian, it isn't. Sometimes I poke at a language just for fun, without
wanting to blow a thousand plus hours of my life on it. :-) Besides, there are a couple of obvious problems: (1) Somebody misplaced the vowels, and (2) it's not exactly one of those widely-spoken languages like Latin. Sometimes, you need a good excuse to goof off and be wildly impractical. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 10 of 38 28 June 2012 at 4:05am | IP Logged | ||
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Given that my target list has five languages, and given that I don't believe I have time to learn to speak all five of them, I am forced to consider the trade-off between learning only some of them, or learning all of them passively and then targeting just one or two among them for speaking. The latter choice is my preference, since I spend most of my time with any language reading, followed, rather distantly, by watching movies. What is not acceptable to me, however, is reading without listening comprehension skills - a language must have a sound to it to feel 'right', whether I can speak it or not.
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| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4701 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 11 of 38 28 June 2012 at 5:01am | IP Logged | ||
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Yes.
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 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 12 of 38 28 June 2012 at 9:24am | IP Logged | ||
To be able to read or write fluently in a language you probably need to be able to 'hear' it (although people who have been deaf from birth may have found a way around this). So my first goal is to achieve this. And if you can write a language fluently it should not be too difficult to convert this skill into speaking the language, although you may fall in the trap of pronouncing it in a totally incomprehensible way if you always have read it with a 'dummy' pronunciation. Generally I try to learn to speak languages which I might need for travelling, but I don't go to extremes (like hiring a pronunciation consultant or settling abroad) in order to get an absolutely perfect accent. I'm generally satisfied if the local people don't seem to mind my way of speaking.
I haven't studied Ancient Greek, but recognize the feeling from my Latin studies. So when I decided to relearn my Latin I aimed for basic fluency also in the active skills. In practice it is obvious that I won't need to speak Latin, but thinking in Latin is a good alternative because it doesn't imply that I have to find somebody to speak to. Being able to think in simple Latin doesn't automatically mean that you would be able to use it for speaking here and now, but it would be relatively easy to 'upgrade' a thinking skill to the coveted speaking skill. But even when we speak about reading skills there are different grades. If you can express yourself in a language it doesn't garantee that you can understand everything written in that language, and classical rhetorical or poetic writings or the interminable phrases of both Classical and Medieval Latin are problematic from any point of view. However because of the infatuation of past generations with the classics they used reading these works as their primary reason for learning Latin - and for this reason they turned Latin studies into rebus solving rather than language learning. So when I (occasionally) hear/read about people who learn a langage just for reading I equate this with the skewed Latin pedagogics or the studies of old languages with weird writing systems (Maya or Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform, ancient and modern Chinese...) - worthwhile activities in their own right, but in my opinion not as much language learning as code breaking training. Edited by Iversen on 28 June 2012 at 9:32am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6865 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 13 of 38 28 June 2012 at 9:44am | IP Logged | ||
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Depends. In most of my languages, I aim to get as good all round batch of skills
(speaking, reading etc). There can be exceptions. For example, I will spend almost no time learning how to read Japanese if all I am going to do is visit Tokyo for two weeks. Instead, I'll focus on speaking and listening. Also, for some languages like Biblical Greek or Latin there is little point in speaking or listening skills 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5207 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 14 of 38 28 June 2012 at 11:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Yes.
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| sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4636 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin | Message 15 of 38 28 June 2012 at 2:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes it is.
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 16 of 38 28 June 2012 at 4:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Actually I do see a point.
If I can find enough people speaking decent Latin on the internet it will help me to think in Latin, and if I can think in the language it will be easier to keep it alive and it will sound prettier in my head when I read it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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