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Is speaking fluency always your goal ? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Swift Senior Member Ireland Joined 4608 days ago 137 posts - 191 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French, Russian | Message 25 of 38 28 June 2012 at 11:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Certainly fluency is my current goal with French (my only foreign language as of now),
but it definitely wasn't always. I started off learning it in school, and to be honest until I started self-study in February I never understood the path one would take to become fluent considering how counter-productive language teaching in school seemed to me. More evidently and pointed out by others, targeting fluency from day 1 can be very discouraging. Being a person that almost always devotes themselves to what they love, and considering how much I have enjoyed languages these past 5 months, I'd like to think that fluency will be a long-term goal for any other modern languages that I learn. However, having read some of the responses in this thread, I was surprised to find that that isn't the case for some people, even ones who I would see as "hardcore" language learners. On the other hand, I don't think my goals will ever have me focus on just one aspect, e.g. just writing or speaking, so I'm more inclined to say that fluency will be an eventual target for all languages that I learn. Alas, as in most of my posts on this site, I will say again that I am a beginner at languages and that I'll have to wait and see myself! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5453 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 26 of 38 28 June 2012 at 11:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Fluency is my ideal goal, but not always my realistic goal.
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| 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 27 of 38 29 June 2012 at 12:09am | IP Logged | |||||
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| PillowRock Groupie United States Joined 4734 days ago 87 posts - 151 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 28 of 38 29 June 2012 at 12:23am | IP Logged | |||||
I would say that it is almost always easier to read or listen than to speak or write at the same level. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jappy58 Bilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member United States Joined 4638 days ago 200 posts - 413 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Guarani*, Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Maghribi), Arabic (Written), French, English, Persian, Quechua, Portuguese Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 29 of 38 29 June 2012 at 1:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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As far as all the languages that I've studied goes, yes, speaking at a high level (in my case, a B2+ level) has always been a goal of mine, but not really my only goal. Reading, listening, and writing at a similar level have always been highly important to me. I love both verbal communication and being able to explore a language's literary riches as well.
As far as Quechua goes, however, I'd say that speaking (and listening) was really my only goal, since there is little literature for the language relative to Arabic, Persian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. I typically do find reading and listening easier than writing and speaking, but with practice, but it depends. With Arabic, I started strong in reading and writing (because I started with MSA), but didn't start training hard for listening and speaking until after six months of my study, perhaps because A) it was my first "leisure" language and thus felt a little less confident starting to speak it. Luckily, I advanced very well over a few years. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lingua nova Newbie United States Joined 4555 days ago 25 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Indonesian, Tagalog, French | Message 30 of 38 29 June 2012 at 4:42am | IP Logged | |||||
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No; some languages I'd rather be able to read and write well than comprehend aurally or
be able to speak and form good sentences on the spot. That could be because some languages interest me for their literary value more than their communicative one (Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, or even a living language like Russian), or because I'd be more likely to find and thus communicate with native speakers of certain languages on the internet as opposed to in the flesh. For example, though I live in a metropolitan area with diverse immigrant groups, it may be difficult to find a native Lao or Uyghur speaker to speak with, and I likely will never have the resources to visit Laos or northwestern China, whereas I may be able to communicate with Laotians or Uyghurs on the wide world of the world wide web. Edited by lingua nova on 29 June 2012 at 4:43am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4671 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 31 of 38 29 June 2012 at 8:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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Yes. And I don't observe a silent period; I think rumors about speaking early being damaging are false.
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| decamillisjacob Newbie Canada Joined 4732 days ago 38 posts - 63 votes | Message 32 of 38 01 July 2012 at 7:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Not always. I found though that when I was doing my BA degree in linguistics and English literature, reading knowledge of foreign languages came in handy. French has enabled me to read in a number of other Romance languages with a relatively high degree of comprehension--which was fantastic when it came to reading research papers in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, as well as some Latin material. In English lit, I had to read Old and Middle English as well---not be fluent (haha), but just comprehend. I'm now wanting the same out of German at some point down the road.
Translators often aren't fluent in the languages they translate. You need one writing language through which you rock socks in, and several languages you translate from, languages you can read at a very high level. Edited by decamillisjacob on 02 July 2012 at 7:07am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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