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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4310 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 17 of 94 20 June 2015 at 2:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Re the above poster, I'd like to qualify my last post because I totally agree with her.
By alluding to
I didn't mean literally one and only one response, but rather that in non-digital way, for every shade of meaning that you are capable of expressing as a native speaker of a language, equivalent shades of meaning in your L2 must be relearned. But it's also right, as the above poster intimates, to say that your strategies for dealing with this disheartening fact are quite limited at a higher levels. You can do exercises until you grow old or you can just integrate your life into the language culture and learn to forget about perfectionism. But this is a more general truth: fake it til you make it. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 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 18 of 94 20 June 2015 at 8:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
Gunnemark's book even mentions that kids' abilities "decline" at around 12, and for boys this lasts until 16 whereas for girls until 20. I still love the book but now this part makes me WTF both as a feminist and language learner. I don't think I ever truly believed this but I didn't explicitly challenge that either, even in my mind, so maybe this nonsense has affected me at 18-20. edit: he did point out that this still implies a fairly high level of ability/talent, and that many girls who started French before 20 can still develop a near-native pronunciation. Hm, maybe this is where my anxiety with waiting for the perfect moment came from. I would love to have a perfect pronunciation in Portuguese and Italian, so I was reluctant to start before I knew I could put in my best effort. For Portuguese, I ended up taking about a month of (regular) classes for that reason... and in Italian I mostly got over this fear when I started watching lots of football. But I still felt far less self-conscious about Spanish because I don't love it the same way, and since it's also more similar to Portuguese, I reached "basic fluency" sooner. Wow, how much a random remark from a respectable person can affect you, even if you don't think much about it. Edited by Serpent on 20 June 2015 at 8:24pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 19 of 94 20 June 2015 at 9:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Lots of good answers in this thread!
Some of mine: - I thought the goal of language study was actually reaching perfection, not making any mistakes and being erudite. It turns out that it's actually about communicating, often so so imperfectly, with whomever is there at the time. I can't believe how many years it took me to learn this, and how I still haven't fully absorbed it. - I thought everyone was on the constant lookout for my mistakes and would notice every single little thing. And therefore it made good sense to obsess about and plan out every sentence in my head before speaking it, to make sure it would come out correct. It turns out that the people we call native speakers make mistakes in their own language all the time, or speak naturally using "incorrect" constructions and don't remotely care one way or the other. As long as they can understand me at all they tend to be content. - I thought all the effort into studying a language went into learning it in the first place, and achieving proficiency. It turns out that your languages begin to erode if you don't use them and it takes a strategy to maintain them all. 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5347 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 20 of 94 22 June 2015 at 2:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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It turns out my ideas regarding language learning haven't been wrong. From my experience at least:
* You can easily learn 15 languages once you get the hang of it (and can devote 5-6 hours a day to them). * Production early on is a waste of time. In fact, production before you are passively fully proficient is a waste of time. * Listening (other than perfunctorily) to radio or TV before your vocabulary is large enough to enable you to understand most of it is also a waste of time. * You acquire a language through reading semantically meaningful texts of increasing difficulty and complexity while looking up unknown words (with the aid of ancillary grammatical explanations early on). And that's it; there is nothing else to learning a language. Anything other than this is -you guessed it- a waste of time. * If I had no other interests and could devote 9 hours a day to studying languages (no less but no more either than a regular full-time job), I have no doubt I could learn 40 or 50 languages to a very high level before I died. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arthaey Groupie United States arthaey.com Joined 5048 days ago 97 posts - 155 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 21 of 94 22 June 2015 at 2:58am | IP Logged | |||||
While I don't disagree with the intent of your statement, I do take issue with calling "5-6 hours a day" "easy". ;) 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5347 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 22 of 94 22 June 2015 at 3:47am | IP Logged | |||||
Well, think of the number of people who go through 3-5 hours per week or more of language instruction in school in a single language, and who get absolutely nowhere after many years of it. The point being, once you are able to hone your language learning skills, doing so becomes "easy", at least relatively speaking. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 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 23 of 94 22 June 2015 at 12:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'd say you can't be fully proficient without some minimal active skills. To appreciate the style, you need to notice the choices the author made, to know what other words/expressions/structures could be used instead. Specifically, I don't think you can be a passive B2 without being at about A2 actively, or a passive C1 without being B1. Whether you actually need to practise the active skills, appears to depend on the person. I just sort of create a model in my mind, but others seem to need this practice, for example tarvos.
Doesn't apply to related languages. And of course there's LR too. With an understanding of linguistics, even a distantly related language is doable (like English and Polish). Of course this doesn't meant it's the most efficient way. Edited by Serpent on 22 June 2015 at 12:47pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5209 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 24 of 94 22 June 2015 at 1:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
Missing the point of the thread then, there are enough other threads for people to push their thoughts on the best learning strategies. Another one I didn't think of in my first reply was that I believed that my pronunciation and accent would simply improve naturally as my level in the language improved and I did more listening. Nope. 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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