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Your earliest foreign language memory | ||
Tags: Children | Foreign Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5470 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 33 of 98 21 December 2009 at 10:58am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I must have been about 7 years old. I used to go on holiday to the South of France and we'd stay there for a month (outrageously long French holidays, I know). In my neighbourhood down there there we a lot of Swiss people, most of whom spoke some or other variety of German. I don't think I was surprised by that: I already knew there were other languages because my father sometimes said English words around us and made puns about them. So not understanding what someone said was actually pretty familiar.
Anyway, that year there weren't many kids around when we got there, and the only other kids there were were Germanic Swiss kids. We couldn't communicate at all but we almost naturally started hanging out together and communicating with signs and mime. Eventually we taught each others a few words by pointing at things Thinking back on it, I realise this would never have happened if we'd been older. We just took the difficulty to communicate in step, which an adult who's used to perfect understanding adn efficiency, or even a teen, would never have accepted. Edited by joanthemaid on 21 December 2009 at 10:59am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5585 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 34 of 98 21 December 2009 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Levi, would listening to a radio station continulously now have any effect on the language and how we learn? If all that I did was listen to a radio station would I eventually understand it? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6439 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 35 of 98 21 December 2009 at 8:52pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Yes, though if you didn't supplement this with any other activities, it would be incredibly inefficient. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6142 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 36 of 98 21 December 2009 at 8:58pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
So you mean to say, Volte, that if I just sat and listened to a radio program in, let's say, Hungarian (completely alien language to anything I know or have studied), I would eventually understand it without doing anything supplementary (even though it would take a long time)? If this is indeed what you mean, how long do you suppose it would take and how exactly does this work in our brain? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| leniko Diglot Newbie Greece Joined 5453 days ago 12 posts - 15 votes Speaks: Greek*, EnglishB2 Studies: German, Japanese | Message 37 of 98 21 December 2009 at 10:21pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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In my early childhood years I had some experiences of foreign language encounters from the cartoons I used to watch on TV (English, Russian, Polish). My fully conscious earliest foreign language experience however was when I started learning English at primary school. It seemed and sounded very exotic to me back then, and thus I instantly fell in love with it and with foreign language learning in general. I could never imagine at those times that I would later on dedicate myself to ELT. I feel some goosebumps now I'm thinking of it (LOL!).
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6439 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 38 of 98 21 December 2009 at 11:37pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Yes, that is what I mean. Hungarian isn't so bad - you'll start recognizing loan words fairly quickly (it's much less insular and puristic than people believe - the majority of the vocabulary is borrowed from other language families). As for how long it would take: my best guess would be thousands of hours, but I lack data. Reineke mentions having done this with cartoons on TV as a kid, to the point where he could understand them, and mentioned 600 hours. I think it's fair to assume that input in a language with is nowhere near mutually intelligible with your own takes longer to pick up from the radio than from television, due to less context. I've listened to the radio in various languages, some of which I'm fluent in, others of which I don't know a word in when I start. It's possible to learn at every stage, but the more you know, the easier it is to learn what's left over, usually. As for how it works in our brains, I can give you my best guess based on my very partial understanding of this field of research, but I can't guarantee a thing. First, we pick out cognates as we get used to sound shifts. Afterwards, more and more gradually becomes clear from context; our brains are amazing at statistical pattern matching. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5585 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 39 of 98 22 December 2009 at 12:52am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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That's how we pick up our native language as a child, so why wouldn't wouldn't it work now. I think I'll try it over the next year, supplementing with German Made Simple and Assimil German Without Toil, and even German: How to Speak and Write It.
I think it should work very well, I've met many people that have learned English through television and radio. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6437 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 40 of 98 22 December 2009 at 1:37am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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No way you can pick up a language just from listening to it.
How would your brain form any basis for what any of the words mean? If you hear: "kleebo stetch zorafon" Even if you hear it 5,000 times, without having any context or basis against which to compare something you'll have no idea what it means. Loanwords are irrelevant. "kleebo stetch airplane zorafon" You heard "airplane." Do you know if any of those other words mean "fly?" Maybe he was listing his 4 favorite vehicles. Maybe he was listing things he's afraid of (and those other 3 words mean "snakes" "bees" and "scorpions." You would eventually memorize phrases that you hear commonly (in fact this is very important and useful for language learning), but that isn't learning. Heck, I can sing entire albums of k-pop in Korean because I've listened to certain albums for over a decade, but I have no idea what I'm actually saying. I think you could maybe pick up a language by listening to it on the radio if you have some other basis for your brain to assign meaning. Perhaps a little kid's word book, or TV, or something. But just hearing it? No. Not going to happen. There's no basis for construction nor is there anything to compare against. Edited by IronFist on 22 December 2009 at 1:40am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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