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"I can’t learn foreign languages" | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6439 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 41 of 47 17 March 2010 at 6:31am | IP Logged | |||||
Different people, different cultural conversation conventions. I'm not fond of that way of making conversation either, but expecting people to "just say" things in accordance with the level of directness you're used to is something which will cause you a lot of bother if you do much internationally/across languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6125 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 42 of 47 17 March 2010 at 6:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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The thing is, not all immigrants do so well at English. My Japanese-side grandparents were in the USA for over 50 years, and they never became fluent in English. I'm not sure if they had any idea how to begin learning English -- our interaction consisted mostly of them saying "Eat, eat, eat!"
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 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5847 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 43 of 47 18 March 2010 at 10:37am | IP Logged | |||||
I am also jealous about plurilingual countries like Luxembourg for example, multilingual families, or other kind of multilingual communities which create natural multilingualism. It's so much more workintensive to achieve my language levels in my monolingual German envrironment. Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 18 March 2010 at 10:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| The Blaz Senior Member Canada theblazblog.blogspotRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5600 days ago 120 posts - 176 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Swahili, French, Sign Language, Esperanto | Message 44 of 47 20 March 2010 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I was just reading some articles from a British columnist living in Uganda writing for a
Ugandan paper, making excusing for not speaking Luganda yet. It reminded me of this thread!
Sound familiar? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5470 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 45 of 47 20 March 2010 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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While I think everyone technically could learn languages, it is a fact that there are differences in skill between us. I know both people who are naturally more gifted and less gifted than I am at learning languages. Beyond that, some people are just unable to learn languages because they can't even conceive of anyone actually speaking another language, just like some kids learning geography don't understand what distances and other countries are, even thought they "know" they exist. Plus you have to accept a different mode of thought, that meaning is relative and not absolute... all that before actually being able to learn. So if you are raised in a rather open-minded, language aware family or even if your parents ergularly make puns, it will certainly help. Edited by joanthemaid on 20 March 2010 at 7:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5506 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 46 of 47 20 March 2010 at 7:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
I often have this experience as well. To be honest, I said something like this just the other day - I was talking to a stranger who is studying Japanese, and I said something like, "Oh, Japanese is so hard, I tried to study it and I just couldn't do it. Have you been studying it long?" Now obviously I don't think that I literally can't study Japanese, and in fact I quit Japanese study not because I "couldn't do it" but because it was no longer a priority for me and I had no interest in putting in that time. But it would take longer to explain the details of my situation, and anyway he wasn't interested in those details, nor was I interested in explaining them... it was just social filler to get to the question I was really interested in, which was his experience with Japanese. I find that often when people tell me that they "just can't study languages," they don't really mean that in the literal sense, and if you ask them in a different conversation if they can speak any languages they are often delighted to tell you all about the French they know... particularly if you don't know French and can't judge their proficiency ;). Edited by annette on 20 March 2010 at 8:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| markchapman Diglot Groupie Taiwan tesolzone.com/ Joined 5472 days ago 44 posts - 55 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Portuguese | Message 47 of 47 21 March 2010 at 1:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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When people say they can't learn a foreign language, it usually means that they don't have the time or motivation to
learn it. Most people are too busy - or not organized enough - to find an hour or so every day to devote to language learning. Sometimes it can mean that they have not discovered good ways of learning languages as well. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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