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Bull you believed starting out | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4306 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 1 of 94 18 June 2015 at 10:06pm | IP Logged |
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Did you have any intensely held believes or dogmas about language learning? Did you
ever feel hopelessly optimistic, or believe that your level was substantially higher than it was? If you can bear to share these types of misguided thought, I think they would make for an interesting springboard for conversation. I for one was a fanatic for a kind of authodox Arguellean shadowing, believing that it was the perfect way to learn at all levels. But speaking as someone who has shadow- marched himself into two different languages, I realize that (as Arguelles always in fact said), that all this does is give you a foothold in the language. That metaphor is not just a safe piece of self-deprecation: fluent and accurate speech is the top of the wall: your footholds will only give you the semblance of a true grip for the duration of the climb (though the footholds deepen along the way). I wouldn't ever call shadowing "bull", but I think that it should be regarded as a solid beginner's strategy, and thereafter only a occasional activity. So, what bull did you once believe about language learning in your innocence? 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4887 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 2 of 94 19 June 2015 at 12:22am | IP Logged |
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I don't think I ever had any dogmatic beliefs, but I was definitely naive about a lot.
My biggest false beliefs: 1. That people who say they speak seven languages have full proficiency in seven languages. 2. That, once you've learned a language, it will just magically come back once you're exposed to it again. I heard this so much I thought it was common knowledge, though now I think it was just wishful thinking. 3. Massively underestimating the gap between elementary proficiency and full proficiency. These are all stories from before I came to HTLAL: I had done a couple international trips in the early 2000's where I studied the target language before I left: Spanish for Mexico, Arabic for Jordan, Turkish for Turkey. I'd spend about three months with a textbook like Teach Yourself or Living Language, and put in maybe 75-100 hours for each language. That's enough to achieve what FSI calls "elementary proficiency" (roughly a CEFR A-1 level). And I think sometimes we devalue A1 here, but it's actually a decent level and more than enough to get by, and take the leap into an immersive environment. And I did really well at the beginner level! In Turkey I spent about 2 weeks without English, in Jordan I helped a friend through a medical emergency and got help in Arabic (he had a seizure in the souk), and in Mexico City I even went on a few dates. By 2007 I was pretty confident: add Arabic, Spanish, and Turkish to my high school French, plus Micronesian and Indonesian (places where I had lived and worked in the 90's), plus my native English ... and OMG I've done the impossible I know seven languages! A few more good vacations and I would move from elementary to full proficiency. That won't be hard. Then reality set in. Or rather, after a bit of denial reality set in. Arabic - I take a trip to Egypt. I only study Arabic haphazardly before hand. I can't understand a thing anyone says. But that was obviously because they were speaking a different dialect from the one I knew. French - A layover in Paris on the way back from Egypt. No one will even bother speaking French with me. But that's because it was Paris, and we all know what their reputation is. Turkish - I take a three week trip through the East, five years after my last trip. And I struggle with the language. But that was probably because they weren't used to tourists in this region, and it was mostly Kurdish anyway, so Turkish probably wasn't even their first language. Spanish - I head to Jalisco, four years after last visiting. And I struggle with Spanish. But that was probably because ... er ... well ... damn. I didn't really have an excuse for this. Because languages don't really just magically come back. _________________________________________________ The first advice I got on HTLAL was that you don't learn languages in short intense periods; you learn languages through daily exposure over a long period of time - but that in time it all adds up. (and for the record, I had Paris wrong. People were super cool when I went back after making a serious commitment to French, rather than relying on high school memories) 19 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 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 3 of 94 19 June 2015 at 1:09am | IP Logged |
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I used to think tenses are the most difficult thing in any language... erm, if it doesn't use Chinese characters that is.
I used to wait for some mysterious perfect circumstances. In my first two 6 week challenges I did Yiddish and Esperanto although what I really wanted to learn was Portuguese and Italian. I used to think listening should be done later, when you are "ready" (spoiler alert: you never are). I used to think it was a difficult skill but I've realized most people simply didn't do it enough, and most teachers don't use enough recordings (and usually boring ones anyway). I thought it was weird and random how I was bad at German but my listening was my best skill, but now I know that this was simply due to using more audio in class, compared to when I was at this level in English. And finally the classic, I used to think you can't learn a language on your own. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |
| basica Senior Member Australia Joined 3534 days ago 157 posts - 269 votes Studies: Serbian | Message 4 of 94 19 June 2015 at 3:00am | IP Logged |
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I think my biggest conceptions that needed to be sorted out was that I both
overestimated and underestimated the difficulty of language learning though it seems rather obvious now. What I mean by both underestimating and overestimating is this: I was taught several languages in school and I had tried to self teach myself multiple times a variety of languages but I never got past a few basic memorized phrases - why? Well because I didn't bother sticking through more than a couple chapters of material that's why. It's actually surprisingly easy to get to an A2ish level if you actually spend a little bit of time each day over a couple months and not just try to cram in 5 or 6 hours of studying haphazardly. So, in this sense I overestimated the difficulty of getting your feet wet in a language. Now in terms of underestimating, it wasn't until I started getting somewhat proficient with Esperanto that I began to realize the serious gap between an A2ish level and actual fluency. While I always though languages were hard to learn, I just imagined it was something you could do and be over with in a year or two of consistent effort, but I've found that's not the case and languages ability is measured in shades of grey, not just black or white. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 5 of 94 19 June 2015 at 7:16am | IP Logged |
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I've never held any dogmatic beliefs about language learning. The only thing that's
really become true for me is that I have realised that my attachment to languages fluctuates strongly and is more dependent on social factors than on any linguistic ability. I don't feel the need to learn languages for languages sakes, but for travel or social reasons - always. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| DaisyMaisy Senior Member United States Joined 5378 days ago 115 posts - 178 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish Studies: Swedish, Finnish | Message 6 of 94 19 June 2015 at 7:37am | IP Logged |
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I felt I needed to be able to conjugate all the Spanish verbs through all the different tenses, and that it was necessary to learn this before learning anything else. I can't read that simple material yet - I haven't memorized all the perfect tense of those verbs! :) Now I realize there is more to language learning than just verbs.
I don't know where I got this idea. Possibly in the 7th grade doing verb conjugations. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5922 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 7 of 94 19 June 2015 at 9:15am | IP Logged |
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The were a few things I believed were true when I started.
In the fall of 2007 I was very naïve and believed I could learn Afrikaans and Dutch at the same time and be fluent within three to six months in both languages. This was wrong because I had no idea what I was doing or it might mean to be fluent, and I made no attempt to keep the languages separate. After three weeks I got hopelessly confused and frustrated and after briefly giving up I decided I would focus on Afrikaans for a while because it was the language I really wanted to learn. I also believed that I could learn pronunciation with very minimal input, and that I could hear someone speak or sing the language once and would imitate that persons pronunciation flawlessly. Fortunately I was quickly humiliated when I tried to pronounce some Afrikaans words while standing in front of my bathroom mirror and discovered words that I could not pronounce because I had never heard anyone say them. Edited by mick33 on 25 June 2015 at 6:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4306 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 8 of 94 19 June 2015 at 9:16am | IP Logged |
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Yeah so did I, DaisyMaisy. Right at the beginning, I thought that learning the
conjugations and declensions would be the difficult thing and that "everything else is just vocabulary" (Michel Thomas). This was just wishful thinking, however, and in fact it gets the two things backwards. Some people say "this is a complicated language" to mean "the conjugations are more complicated than in my language," but when you think of language not as the conjugations but rather the large set of appropriate responses to situations, it's natural to prefer the pretty lie that language is mostly a matter of learning tables, rather than the more disheartening truth that every chunk of language in your L1 has a translation that must be learned and integrated. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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