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Are we all a bunch of wusses? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| maya_star17 Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5708 days ago 269 posts - 291 votes  Speaks: English*, Russian*, French, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 1 of 151 15 December 2008 at 11:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Before I begin, I'd like to make it clear that I realize what I'm saying here applies to myself as well. I'm not by any means saying that I'm exempt from this, so please don't take it that way. I'm just curious...
Are we all just a bunch of wusses? It seems to me that the vast majority of the people in these forums (again, including myself) stick almost exclusively to European languages (especially Romance and Germanic languages). On the rare occasion that we do venture outside the comfort of IE languages, we often opt for East Asian languages like Japanese and Mandarin - and I get the impression that most people studying the latter don't genuinely enjoy it at all, and wouldn't be studying it if they weren't worried about China getting rich. Furthermore: -Cantonese is spoken by the same number of people as Italian (in total throughout the world), yet there are more than 3 times the amount of people studying Italian than there are studying Cantonese -Hindi is spoken by far more people than Swedish, and yet this forum has far more people learning Swedish as it does learning Hindi -The number of people on these forums learning "African languages" (Zulu, Swahili, Xhosa, etc) is very negligeable (sp?) Are we really all (myself included) a bunch of wusses? 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| dmg Diglot Senior Member Canada dgryski.blogspot.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6804 days ago 555 posts - 605 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Dutch, Esperanto | Message 2 of 151 15 December 2008 at 11:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think people have different reasons for studying the languages they do. I live in Montreal, and I need to speak French. Thus, I'm studying French. Perhaps if I lived in Burundi Swahili would have more of an appeal to me.
Second, if you live in Europe, it makes sense to learn other European languages so you can communicate with the people around you. It makes much more sense for somebody in France to learn Italian and vice versa, than to have them both learn Zulu as some sort of international Esperanto replacement. Thirdly, people have to be attracted to the culture. It's easy to get a taste of the other European cultures since they're so common, and even more so if you already live in Europe. Japanese similarly has a huge cultural export in terms of anime, manga, and video games. Chinese has been getting a lot of press for the "huge business potential" you mentioned in your post. However, I haven't run across any Xhosan poetry that would make me want to start learning this language or otherwise be enticed by the culture to want to dedicated 2+ years of my life studying it... Now, if language learning was just a way to compare dick size, then yes perhaps we would see a different distribution of languages. But I would like to think that the members of this forum are a above that. 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| maya_star17 Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5708 days ago 269 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English*, Russian*, French, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 3 of 151 15 December 2008 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | ||
There are other examples, I'm sure, but I'm too lazy to think of them now. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Darobat Diglot Senior Member Joined 6981 days ago 754 posts - 770 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Latin | Message 4 of 151 15 December 2008 at 11:56pm | IP Logged | ||
I think one of the main reasons for this imbalance is lack of resources. It doesn't matter how interested you are in a language or how many people speak it if you have no way of learning it. Given that most people on this forum are primarily self taught, the languages people here learn tend to be ones with lots of courses and materials readily available. Just because a language has a lot of speakers, it doesn't mean that there are a lot of resources to learn it. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6165 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes Speaks: English* | Message 5 of 151 16 December 2008 at 12:21am | IP Logged | ||
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It depends on your very motivation for learning a language in the first place.
Unlike some hard-core language enthusiasts, most people want to learn languages for their practical usages. There's no point dedicating good time to a language that won't serve you in any way shape or form and will take longer to learn. I don't think it's that people are wusses at all. I just think that they are intelligent enough to choose a language suited for them and what they want. A lot of the choice comes down to the culture, the history, the people, and the ethnicity of the language's country. I will never learn Hindi or Punjabi because I don't really like anything about India. That's just a personal thing. I think people are more likely to like what is more familiar to them anyway so that's why a high amount of Westerners want to speak the languages of and understand the cultures of other Western countries. I see no reason to assume people are just wusses. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6949 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 6 of 151 16 December 2008 at 12:45am | IP Logged | ||
"Wuss" isn't really the word that I would use, but there is something to be said about the path of least resistance. I think that the distribution can be traced to the fact that the background of the membership is substantially Anglocentric and the fact that languages outside the "comfort zone" have relatively few materials in a language in which a lot of us are fluent. For example, I wouldn't mind delving into a Central Asian language such as Kyrgyz one of these days. However a couple of obstacles are that I haven't been able to find any substantial course in Kyrgyz in English or French. Courses that do exist as far as I can tell are printed in Russian (not surprising because of Kyrgyz-speakers being under Russian control for a couple of centuries) or in a neighbouring Turkic language such as Kazakh. It's too bad that Kyrgyz courses in those latter two languages are inaccessible to me. However, I do see your point about the preponderance of Romance and Germanic languages and "large" Asian languages as target languages for a lot of us on this board. I have thought somewhat similarly as to whether it's that beneficial or impressive to have that many English-speakers stay within a relatively small subset of target languages. I reiterate that "wuss" is not quite the word that I would use, but it does convey a bit of what I have in mind with this post. Unfortunately, I suspect that there are some wannabe polyglots in the English-speaking who are more competitive and get a charge by dreaming about going through life with the idea that quantity is more important than quality. Thus it's not surprising to see a drive to study kindred languages - the closer the better, but not so close that we can start considering these "languages" to be dialects or different names for the same language/dialect. To be honest, I sometimes get annoyed by other North Americans who become boastful and think that they're kings of the hill by saying that they're trilingual by knowing English, Spanish and French (any of us here would agree that it is a fairly "easy" triglot situation). On the other hand, I consider the "triglottery" of a friend from Thailand who speaks Thai, English and Czech (by virtue of her degrees in Eastern European Studies and her Czech boyfriend) to be much more impressive. 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| MegatronFilm Triglot Senior Member United States peligrosa.tumblr.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5731 days ago 130 posts - 275 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 7 of 151 16 December 2008 at 2:08am | IP Logged | ||
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If I could learn all the languages I would. If I knew I could become fluent in Hindi or Korean I would do it in a
heartbeat. I am learning Spanish (focused on Mexican dialect) and Portuguese (Brazilian) because it is convenient for me to learn, therefore cheaper. Plus, Spanish and Portuguese are widely spoken. I don't think anyone who spends time with a language is a "wuss". I think a wuss would be more like someone not taking up the challenge of learning a language 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6496 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 151 16 December 2008 at 2:44am | IP Logged | ||
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Wussy or not, I have chosen to start my language learning in my own corner of the world, but within this narrow area I try to cover the ground as thoroughly as possible. Measured in time and effort I couldn't spend more time than I do, and because I can draw on common vocabulary etc. I can get through a lot of languages. Maybe it isn't as adventourous a tactic as going for Japanese and Chinese, but I like to finish a job. Btw. there are lots and lots of Indoeuropean-speaking people here who study East Asian languages, so it is clear that this alternative also has its supporters. The 'losers' in this game are for instance the African and the Indian languages which have lots of speakers, but few ressources for self study and few learners on this forum. Edited by Iversen on 16 December 2008 at 3:30am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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