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Ignorance is Bliss | ||
Tags: Wanderlust | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| leonidus Triglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 6328 days ago 113 posts - 123 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English, French Studies: German, Mandarin | Message 17 of 25 02 June 2009 at 1:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, it's not just languages, it's pretty much anything. We have a proverb in Russian, I think you'd be interested to enrich your vocab, it goes as:
Глаза боятся, руки делают. or its English equivalent would be something like: Everything is difficult before it becomes easy. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6036 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 18 of 25 02 June 2009 at 2:13pm | IP Logged | ||
Buying books would be a wonderful thing if we could also buy the time to read them ;p. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| theallstar Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5804 days ago 81 posts - 85 votes Studies: Japanese, Esperanto | Message 19 of 25 03 June 2009 at 12:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I completely agree with this. When I started to learn Japanese (my first self study language) I just went for it only. The only difficulty I really knew about was that there are a lot of kanji to memorise but that wasn't enough to put me off. Now that I'm thinking about learning a second language alongside Japanese I can never decide - each language supposedly has "hard" parts which keeps me fliting around (especially as I want a language I can progress in fast whilst I digest all the kanji).
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| TheBiscuit Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 5925 days ago 532 posts - 619 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Italian Studies: German, Croatian | Message 20 of 25 03 June 2009 at 5:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think any language is as hard as you decide it to be. The trick is not to let other people decide how hard it's going to be for you.
I remember the French subjunctive in school being billed as 'the hardest thing ever' by the teachers and consequently passing on their own suffering to the students. Or how ser and estar in Spanish are just there to cause unnecessary confusion etc. But... if you change your way of looking at these things (which does require effort) then you start to see that ser and estar give you some fantastic ways to express yourself, subjunctives too. They get you to a deeper level. 15 cases endings? Wow, 15 ways to express things - kind of like getting a new toy rather than coming up against an obstacle. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| yobar Diglot Groupie United States Joined 7034 days ago 52 posts - 54 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: German, Spanish, Irish | Message 21 of 25 05 June 2009 at 5:02pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes, eyes are afraid while the hands do the task. Darobat, what do you know of Irish (Gaedhilg)? There's a nice one to try. ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| crackpot Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6303 days ago 144 posts - 178 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 22 of 25 07 June 2009 at 6:54am | IP Logged | ||
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I know what you mean Darobat. At first I figured I'd learn French from my phrasebook alone. Boy was I wrong. Then I thought "As soon as I know what's in my pocket dictionary..." Boy was I wrong. It seemed that everytime I opened a door into what I though was the last room in this language house I just found another door to another room. It's fun to learn but it's also fun to "get there".
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| Siberiano Tetraglot Senior Member Russian Federation one-giant-leap.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6495 days ago 465 posts - 696 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, ItalianC1, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Serbian | Message 23 of 25 07 June 2009 at 9:17pm | IP Logged | ||
Good point. I guess you're interested in language classification and technical aspects more than in their content itself. For this reason most language classes fail: they make the language a matter, not a means of something else. Compare: someone asks you to stand up and open a door in a room, or the same person asks you to walk few metres back and forth. In the latter case you'll pay much attention and feel ill at ease walking, because it would be the matter, not just a means of doing something else. So, search for an interesting content, don't care of languages' difficulty and learning stuff, let your curiosity drive you. I've made this a system for myself: never care what is supposed to be difficult or easy, never care of making mistakes, always trying to do things that're supposed to be above my level, since I care of the content, of making joy and communicating. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Vinlander Groupie Canada Joined 5823 days ago 62 posts - 69 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 24 of 25 09 June 2009 at 6:50pm | IP Logged | ||
I totally agree with this. But for the thread i think ignorance helps in many ways. Lets say russian takes twice the number of hours to become fluent in than say french. However you enjoy learning russian half the time, and French never, you'll find russian much easier to learn. I think in alot of ways no language is hard its just a long language journey in terms of time to learn it. Another example walking 25 minutes to school for me is alot harder than walking for a hour to get to a friends house because i actually enjoy the destination. The other thing is when you start off learning a language like japanese or russian and are ignorant you don't focus on the things that you can't do instead learn what you can and gradually learn the harder parts later on, where if you foucus on grammar from the start your more likely to get discouraged. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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