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Your earliest foreign language memory | ||
Tags: Children | Foreign Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| pookiebear79 Groupie United States Joined 6034 days ago 76 posts - 142 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Swedish, Italian | Message 41 of 98 22 December 2009 at 4:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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My very earliest foreign language memory was of things my Grandmother said to me in Swedish, but I don't think I was aware it was another language or any concept of what another language was at that point. (I was probably 2 or 3.) I think I just took it in as another thing adults said, but it was only later, once I went to school, that I learned of the fact that other languages existed.
My family is not exactly embracing of diversity of any kind or thinking outside the box in any way, so I guess it was fortunate that I was a total bookworm as a kid and was able to expand my mind that there were other countries, languages, cultures, etc...basically a whole fascinating planet and universe out there I know nothing about. So I educated myself the best I could, given my less than ideal upbringing. Otherwise I would have grown up as narrow and mean as them. Then again, being the "different" one in the family isn't exactly a picnic either. Being educated (specifically because I'm a female) is something they look down upon. Anyway, the first memories I have of a foreign language where I *knew* it was a different language was around age 7/second grade. There were of course kids in my class that spoke other languages at home and had accents, but at school they spoke English. I do vividly remember our class had to put on an assembly in which we sang a song in Japanese. Also around that same time is when my family went to Mexico for about a week. Other than Spanish, my exposure to other languages was very limited. The town I lived in (at that time, anyway...I'm sure it's different now) then had only a few different immigrant/non native English speaking groups. I remember a few things here and there, and because they were few and far between they really stuck in my mind. Like a Russian cartoon on TV once with a bunny rabbit in it, a drama in an Asian language on the "education" channel (not sure which, I know it wasn't Japanese though,) going on trips here in CA and seeing large groups of tourists speaking loudly in what I perceived then to be "weird" languages (I still don't know what language it was in one of the cases.) Just isolated things like that. Later we moved to the city I still live in, and it's got huge populations of people from all over the place, so going into my teenage years I had exposure to a ton of different sounds/languages, and all of those far off places I'd read about as a young child suddenly became not so abstract, and I of course developed my interest in languages of some countries I had always been drawn to for either some unknown reason (Dutch,) or because of family heritage (Swedish & Italian.) I also watched the channel which showed teleclasses from the local colleges and university and other educational programming, which carried "French in Action," "Destinos," as well as teleclasses for a couple of other languages. Eventually other languages joined the list of those which I am interested in learning even though there's no specific "why" other than the languages look interesting. So that's how I went from my earliest memory in which I wasn't even aware it wasn't English, to my huge interest in languages. :) Edited by pookiebear79 on 22 December 2009 at 4:55am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5474 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 42 of 98 22 December 2009 at 9:17am | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah, but when you're a kid you don't just get audio input. You get context, gestures, actions, and positive and negative reinforcement. For example if mommy tells you to give mommy the bear, and you bring her the girafe, she'll say "no, love, the GIRAFE" or maybe "ah, you're bringing me the GIRAFE, thank you, now, get me the BEAR" and she'll point to it. When you give her the bear, she'll probably congratulate you (positive reinforcement). If she tells you not to touch the oven door and you do, you'll get burned (negative reinforcement) and mommy will say: I told you NOT to touch the OVEN DOOR" 'stress on key words). So you'll associate OVEN DOOR with that hot thing. Television is different because there's context, actions and pictures, and especially cartoons because they're meant for little kids who are learning as well. And while I think you'd be able to pick up some stuff from the radio (recurring sentences that always appear in the same context, introductions, the ending and place of verbs, etc...), if the language is from a different family you wouldn't actually learn just like that. You'd probably get "hello" "welcome Mr/Mrs" "I am X" and some grammatical patterns, tops. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5474 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 43 of 98 22 December 2009 at 9:22am | IP Logged | |||||
You can compare it to other sentences I think. After a while, especially if the order of words is stable, you'll end up getting which is the verb, which the subject and which the complement. Then there are all the names to help you (of people, of places...) Then again even with a case - based language, you'd end up picking up the declensions (without necessarily knowing which is what case though) In any case, it's probably better to know something about the language or to learn vocab and grammar on the side. Besides it's very motivating when you are progressing and you see that because you understand more and more of what you hear. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5589 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 44 of 98 22 December 2009 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
I understand, that's why you can learn through videos and television :D because there's a visual part. Now if own I can accquire some German DVDs.... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| MegatronFilm Triglot Senior Member United States peligrosa.tumblr.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5942 days ago 130 posts - 275 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 45 of 98 22 December 2009 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My first memory of foreign languages was when I was around 4 or 5. My father was remarried to a Greek woman
who was trilingual (Greek, Italian and English). I attended Greek holiday parties with my step family, half of them whom could only speak Greek. I remember Yia-yia yelling at me because I was probably up to no good. She was yelling in Greek but I understood. I never formally studied Greek but I've always could understand the gist of what was going on in a conversation although I didnt know how to speak it. I'm 21 now and when I hear Greek now I still get bits and pieces of the conversation. I love Greek so much. Its beautiful and the language that got me curious about foreign languages and cultures. I want to study it someday. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6441 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 46 of 98 22 December 2009 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't think so, not if it was only audio with no basis for comparison. Eventually you would start to recognize words and common sentence fragments (like "-su ka?" in Japanese or "don't wanna" in English or "vamos a ver" in Spanish, but you wouldn't know what parts of speech they are or what they mean because there is no basis for comparison against anything else. I can teach you 1000 sentences in a language you've never heard of and you would never know what any of the words mean. Even if I wrote them down and showed you the pronunciation and where one word ends and the next word begins (which would be an advantage over someone just listening to the radio). Heck, you could even listen to 10,000 hours of radio in your target language while following along with a transcript of what is said for the entire 10,000 hours and it still wouldn't work. At the end of it, the only thing you would have accomplished is getting your brain adapted to becoming familiar with what the language sounds like and you'd recognize common words and phrases due to subconscious frequency analysis, but you wouldn't actually know any of the language. It would be like trying to translate a passage of text in an unknown language without having access to any tools, dictionaries, books, native speakers, or anything else. You can look at a book (no pictures) of Sanskrit all day long for 10 years and not know any Sanskrit when you are done. (I chose Sanskrit because if I picked some other language like Spanish, people would say "oh well I know x language which is similar to Spanish so I could figure it out blah blah." That's not what we're talking about here).
How would you know they're declensions? You might eventually be able to realize that are different version of the same word, like: thenakka thenakko thenakkon thenakkona But how do you know those are declining nouns? How do you know they're not conjugating verbs? How do you know they're not varying levels of diminutives being added on to a name or other noun? Or honorifics? Remember, you don't know any other words in the language so you have no idea of those are nouns (being modified by adjectives) or if they are verbs (messing with objects) or what is going on. What you are suggesting is only possible if you already know some of the language, then you can identify noun declensions by context. But in a new language where you know nothing, doing so is not possible. I absolutely agree, however, that listening to the radio/music/TV in your target language is a phenomenally powerful tool when used in conjunction with other learning methods. Keep in mind when people claim to have learned a language by watching TV, that 1) this is more plausible than radio because with TV you can see what is going on, and 2) they are potentially being modest; it's possible they studied for hours a day but don't want to go into it or exaggerate their efforts for the sake of modesty, so they just say "oh, I watched TV." It's kind of like when you see a friend you haven't seen in a while and suddenly he's lost a ton of weight, or he's all huge and muscular, and you're like "WOW! Have you been working out?" And he replies "yeah, a little." Don't take it literally and think you can work out "a little" and achieve the same results. He's probably just being modest because he doesn't want to say "oh man, I worked out SO HARD and watched every single calorie I ate and completely changed my lifestyle around to facilitate this physical change in my appearance" (which is what actually happened). Edited by IronFist on 22 December 2009 at 6:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| chanjhj Bilingual Diglot Newbie Singapore Joined 5453 days ago 7 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* Studies: Japanese, Spanish | Message 47 of 98 24 December 2009 at 12:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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To be frank, I can't remember my first memory of encountering a foreign language. I
live in a multicultural/multilingual country. So on the streets you can usually hear about four different languages, usually English but also Chinese, Malay, Tamil (plus others like Japanese, Korean, German, Dutch etc...) and different dialects (though its getting rarer) So my earliest memory would be English/Chinese and different dialects (though i just started learning these dialects, pity I didn't try earlier). Then Malay and Tamil as I grew up and then Japanese and Korean through dramas. Actually, on the topic of learning from media sources, I would agree that it is possible to learn the basics of a language through television, because of the subtitles. That was how I first started learning and was able to at least listen to a simple program in Japanese without subtitles anymore, although I didn't understand it entirely but I still got a very good idea of what was going on. However, I agree that you still need a basis for comparison and proper learning materials/resources to learn the language to a certain level eg. having basic conversations. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Muz9 Diglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 5528 days ago 84 posts - 112 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Somali | Message 48 of 98 24 December 2009 at 3:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I already could speak basic English by the age of around 3, 4 or 5. I learned it solely by watching American cartoons with Dutch subtitles. It was extremely effortless, I have Anglophone family members from Canada who visited us several times during my childhood and I could communicate with them without any problems. My aunt used to get angry at my cousin because he failed at learning anything but English whilst we were ‘fluent’ in it, I don’t blame him though, the incentives for learning a foreign language for Anglophones is just negligible. I didn’t receive any English in school until the age of 12, the odd thing was the classes did not start at basics like I am, You are etc, they expected all of us to know the basics without any previous education in it! Some monolingual Dutch kids were suffering due to this, while most who already knew it found it very easy. I flirted with French and German during secondary school but it was never really successful, neither of these languages motivated me to learn it as English did. I regret not paying more attention to German in the past though. I could have reached fluency by now considering it is so close to Dutch. Edited by Muz9 on 24 December 2009 at 4:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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