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Most annoying: beginning, middle or end?

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
49 messages over 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6


Iversen
Super Polyglot
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Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6462 days ago

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 Message 49 of 49
24 January 2014 at 10:39am | IP Logged 
For me the most annoying phase is the one where I know that I have spent gazillions of hours and I still can't ask for a burger without cucumber or a train ticket to the North Pole. Luckily I have been through this a couple of times. I know that at some point I can read the stuff, and then I can start putting sentences together with the help of a dictionary and maybe one of my green sheets. Then some kind of epiphany experience will occur (also known as the ketchup effect) and I can suddenly understand the spoken form and eventually I'll go to some suitable place and after that I can at least think better, but maybe even speak the language in question. If not then it'll definitely happen at my second voyage there, and I like traveling so this shouldn't be an obstacle - just something I have to get organized.

In the ensuing middle phase I can do intensive studies AND extensive studies - or in other words, I can relax with my new language. People may correct my attempts at writing here at HTLAL and I may still get a ticket to Timbouctou instead of the one I requested, but by and large I don't feel as frustrated as I did before the ketchup sploshed out of the bottle and the language became comprehensible.

And the almost advanced phase where people seem to accept me as slightly weird and definitely a foreigner? Well, I don't care. Everything that happens after the stage where I can communicate efficiently is an added bonus, and whether I get that extra bonus depends entirely on the amount of exposure I can manage to get - not on the kind of intensive studies I had to do at the lower stages. Enough opportunities to use the language, and my level will automatically rise. Less exposure, and it won't. But it is not likely that I'll ever be called to demonstrate any kind of supreme skill level in a language I hardly ever use - I just have to be able to get by.

Edited by Iversen on 24 January 2014 at 10:49am



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