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Discipline & age you started learning? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6906 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes  Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 17 of 19 10 December 2010 at 6:16am | IP Logged | ||
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Another 22-year old checking in.
My first exposure to a foreign language came when I was in fifth grade and my teachers somehow got the horribly mistaken idea in their heads that I was really good at math, so they pulled me out of math hour and set me up with a Spanish tutor instead. I don't remember caring one way or the other about it (it was more "what? I don't have to do math anymore? Well, cool"). Over the years, though, my interest in languages grew exponentially and I became a serial dabbler, displaying all the symptoms familiar to everyone on this forum- ordering grammar books from Amazon with my meager allowance, beelining straight for the dictionary section in bookstores, Googling "learn x language," signing up for every language course available at school. Unfortunately, this left me in a graveyard of unrealized potential: Spanish? I've studied it formally for eight years and currently rest somewhere around a low intermediate level. French? A year of high school study and two years living in Montreal somehow didn't manage to catapult me beyond stuttering out phrases like "Sorry, I don't speak French." Giving up my high school lunch hour every day for three years and taking a German class when I was in Sweden yielded similarly unspectacular results. Five months in Korea and I literally can't say "what's your name?" in Korean. Three years of Latin- it feels like exaggeration to even call myself a Latin beginner. A year of Russian instruction and a brief but passionate love affair with the language when I was living in New Zealand... can I converse in Russian? Um... er... well... no. I could continue- Hindi, Arabic, Italian, on and on as my face gets redder and redder. Somewhere in there, I did spend a year as an exchange student in Sweden and thus experience my first real language success. It was a bit of a shock when I realized that studying languages isn't just fun, it can also- you might want to be sitting down for this one, folks- eventually allow you to speak and understand them. Whoa. I'm currently studying Turkish, and I'm bound and determined that I'm going to learn this darn language if it's the last thing I do. I've been going strong for around eight months now, much longer than I've lasted with any previous language, and I'm already lightyears ahead of where my aborted attempts with Russian/Arabic/etc etc (oh God) etc left me. It's a great feeling. I think part of the difference is that my motivation is much higher this time around. I recently spent three months in Turkey, made Turkish friends, and somewhere along the line fell deeply and completely in love with the country, its people, and its bizarre yet beautiful language brimming with "ch" and "sh". So fascination/addiction/obsession (call it what you will) is one major factor. Age, I think, doesn't really play a part for me- except that it took me around ten years to get so sick of looking at my mental pile of failed languages, all the while calling myself a "language lover" and a "language nerd", that I had to storm off to the bookstore with something to prove. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| J S Newbie Netherlands Joined 4887 days ago 25 posts - 31 votes Studies: Irish, English* Studies: French, Dutch | Message 18 of 19 10 December 2010 at 12:04pm | IP Logged | ||
I had to laugh when I read this, crescend0, because I recognised myself. As several posters have said: success has a lot to do with passion for learning the language. For myself, part of the reason I love to learn languages is because I love to learn. Which means part of what I LOVE is "faffing around reading about HOW to learn." If I spent as much time actually reading French or Dutch as I do reading this forum and other language-learning web sites... well, it is overwhelming to think how much further along I might be. It feels as though I am not being "disciplined" in my approach to learning, and I am often quite hard on myself for it. But I work to recognise this is fun too -- almost (but not really) as fun as feeling confident in L2 language skills -- and give myself some credit for doing what I enjoy. So, for the original poster, I recommend putting a bit of time into understanding what you love about learning languages and being kind to yourself if your path does not lead you to highest fluency in the shortest amount of time. You can enjoy the journey along the way, including all the distractions and deviations it brings you. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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