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Learning a language only through speaking | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| albysky Triglot Senior Member Italy lang-8.com/1108796Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4390 days ago 287 posts - 393 votes  Speaks: Italian*, English, German | Message 9 of 19 02 February 2015 at 6:20pm | IP Logged | ||
It is true even in our mother tongue , even more so in a foreign language indeed. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 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 10 of 19 02 February 2015 at 8:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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You can, but you'll always be shittier than if
you took a more holistic approach. So why? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4446 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 11 of 19 03 February 2015 at 1:54am | IP Logged | ||
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When we were younger, we all learn to say "apple" and "orange" before we went to school to learn to spell.
There is no reason why we can't learn to speak before learning to write a language. In the Chinese communities outside Asia (including the US & Canada), there are many second-generation Chinese who are fluent "speaking" the mother-tongue but would be considered illiterate in the sense that they don't have any training writing Chinese characters. They can communicate in Chinese shops, watch TV programs and listen to the radio but would not be able to read a Chinese newspaper. Many languages like Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi, Arabic, European languages etc. use an alphabet. Once you learn the basic sounds of a language you can learn the symbols and write everything phonetically. I know someone who is a Cantonese-speaker. He took Mandarin classes for 6 months and quit. The 2 Chinese "dialects" share a common set of Chinese characters. The only problem was that he had trouble with pronouncing words & phrases. If he had spent the same amount of time with a private tutor who would focus on speaking he would be much more at ease with the language.. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4624 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 12 of 19 03 February 2015 at 12:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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First of all you have to listen because you can't speak at the outset. But yes, I learned a lot of German through living among native speakers for a few weeks at a time. However, that is only one part of learning and if I hadn't also gone to classes, listened to audio courses, read newspapers and books, watched TV and listened to radio, my progress would have been far slower.
Spending time in the country where the language is spoken natively can be a huge advantage, provided you use opportunity to engage with the people and their language. But as we all know, humans can be lazy in this respect and many people hide inside an expat bubble or just learn survival skills for shopping, transport etc. The internet makes it easy to access foreign media and to make contact with native speakers of your TL who are in your own country. People all over the world learn English to a high standard without setting foot in an English-speaking country. 1 person has 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 13 of 19 04 February 2015 at 10:14am | IP Logged | ||
This seems accurate in my experience, from having met a lot of people who learnt English by immersion without much studying; many of the Spanish immigrants in my city come to mind. I've met some people who've lived here for a few years, even a decade in a couple of cases, who express themselves with an impressive level of fluency yet make a lot of very basic grammatical mistakes and have just the necessary vocabulary to get their point across. So it appears to work, but result in quite unbalanced skills. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4624 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 14 of 19 04 February 2015 at 12:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, huge amounts of immersion works at any age and leads to people becoming strong speakers, provided they are mixing regularly with the native population. There are millions of living examples. But if you don't back it up with lots of reading or some sort of disciplined study then grammar issues and significant vocabulary gaps will remain. This doesn't matter when chatting informally in a bar but it could prevent you being considered for certain jobs.
Maybe this is part of the reason why kids are supposedly better at learning languages. They receive a formal education alongside a massive injection of immersion among peers, not to mention the enormous social pressure to fit in. Meanwhile, adults often have to learn "on the job" and have many other responsibilities which detract from language learning. It's not an exact analogy, but some people mess around on a piano by themselves and get the the point where they can play tunes, largely self taught. But to truly understand the music theory you would have to use books and tutors. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4670 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 15 of 19 04 February 2015 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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So, reading Mandarin is the key to fluency?
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| albysky Triglot Senior Member Italy lang-8.com/1108796Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4390 days ago 287 posts - 393 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German | Message 16 of 19 05 February 2015 at 9:48am | IP Logged | ||
Bingo that's the point, it is the combination of what you said that makes the difference. In my opinion no matter if your immersion stay is 1 week or 1 year , the more "equipped" you are at the biginning , the more you will profit from that , I am not saying that you can learn really a language only with books , podcasts , radio etc , but that will certainly provide you with a very solid basis to build upon . what some people cannot realize is that if you rely 90 percent on conversation( most of the time meaningless ones a) because your level is too low ,b) because these people most of the time end up doing dishwasher like jobs ) and you can get only 2 words out of 10 , you'll learn very little , unless you can find people willing to "feed" you word for word, which is also unlikely in our society where everyone seems always to be very busy . 1 person has voted this message useful |
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