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Learning Style vs. Transparency | ||
Tags: Learner type | Transparency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Akao aka FailArtist Senior Member United States Joined 5337 days ago 315 posts - 347 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Toki Pona | Message 1 of 3 16 May 2011 at 4:19am | IP Logged |
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In terms of languages being easier for you, do you think that the way you learn things
trumps how close the language is to your native one, or is it more of an equilibrium in which both far ends of the spectrum attribute to their reasoning, and the center is a perfect language for you? I think, if you were to test it out, learning style would trump transparency most of the time. This is from my own experience in dealing with various "easy" and "difficult" languages for English speakers. I tend to have a really tough time with grammar, and any language with simple grammar is much easier than any language with complex grammar. Of course, say, the "simple grammar" language has near impossible pronunciation and the "complex grammar" language has the pronunciation of Esperanto the "complex grammar" language would win, but I do not see many language combinations like that. What do you think? Edited by Akao on 16 May 2011 at 4:20am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Keilan Senior Member Canada Joined 5087 days ago 125 posts - 241 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 2 of 3 16 May 2011 at 5:26am | IP Logged |
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I think your learning style would have to be a very big problem to make a language like German take longer than a language like Japanese. Referring to this:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Language_Learning_Difficulty_fo r_English_Speakers Japanese is expected to take nearly three times as long as German. So while you could quite possibly learn something like Swahili faster than Spanish, learning Mandarin faster than Spanish would be very unusual. Although at the end of the day I believe the biggest factor is motivation. If you absolutely love Mandarin but don't like Spanish at all, you'll probably learn Mandarin faster (although if you measured hours spent studying, I suspect you would also have studied Mandarin more). However, there would also be exceptions (some people have weird mental blocks for things) and well, I might just be flat out wrong. I'm just going by gut instinct here. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 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 3 of 3 16 May 2011 at 10:20am | IP Logged |
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It is a tricky question. I'm not sure that the total time to learn different kinds of languages depends in a consistent way on your learning style (insofar you accept that learnings styles exist, which I do), although there could be some localized benefits from being a certain type of person. For instance the very social person who has an ear for languages would benefit from studying a language with many native speakers in the neighbourhood. People with a good visual memory would not be fazed too much by the Chinese signs and those who are good at learning melodies could probably learn tonal languages faster than those who can't. And so forth. But you cannot conclude that painters and flute players should learn Chinese instead of Dutch.
At the end of the day I think that factors like accessibility and interest are more important than learning style - we'll just use different methods to learn each language. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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