|
 |
Frustrazione/Frustración | ||
Tags: Loss of confidence | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| mrmap167 Tetraglot Newbie United States Joined 4494 days ago 21 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Italian, German | Message 1 of 5 26 October 2012 at 7:11am | IP Logged | ||
|
Long story short, I speak Spanish and French pretty fluently, and can understand
Italian very well because of that being the case. I am trying to become fluent in Italian as well (getting there!) I can understand it five times better than I speak it (since I always wind up using a Spanish word here or there in its place). 1. Is there a similar language to one you speak that you can understand almost perfectly but cannot speak it? If yes, is it a frustration to you? 2. When trying to learn to speak that language, how do you avoid not mixing up the languages. In my case it's Spanish and Italian. But I'm sure it's the same with Norwegian and Swedish, Czech and Slovak, etc. Molto grazie!/¡Muchos gracias! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| bela_lugosi Hexaglot Senior Member Finland Joined 6265 days ago 272 posts - 376 votes  Speaks: English, Finnish*, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish Studies: Russian, Estonian, Sámi, Latin | Message 2 of 5 26 October 2012 at 9:57am | IP Logged | ||
|
I had the same problem with Spanish. Even nowadays, after many years, I still tend to use Italian words and grammar in Spanish at times even though I'm well aware of all the differences between these two languages. It's because they're so similar... One thing that has helped me a lot in the past is reading books simultaneously in those two languages in order to better get used to the "flow" of Spanish, thus making a clear(er) distinction. The strange thing is that I never mix up Swedish and German, though.
I think you need to find a way to separate the two in your mind. This can be done by speaking them with a clearly different accent or by concentrating exclusively on the weaker language for a period of time, for instance. :) Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6514 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 3 of 5 26 October 2012 at 10:14am | IP Logged | ||
|
I don't think it is a big deal. It is quite normal to be better at understanding than at speaking or writing a target language, and with related languages this situation becomes even more pronounced because you can guess a lot of things. For instance I can understand Galician because I know Portuguese and Spanish, and I can understand a lot of English and German and Italian and Norwegian and even Danish dialects which I can't speak. So just carry on activating your Italian .. and accept that you sometimes use an Spanish word instead of an Italian one. After all, if you have a hole in your Italian vocabulary your best strategy will often be to cross fingers and hope that the Italian word resembles the Spanish one.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6258 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 4 of 5 14 November 2012 at 4:26pm | IP Logged | ||
You should doublecheck both of your thank you notes. 1, Yes. Is it frustrating? Eh, yes, but not in the way you suggest. I cannot get frustrated that I cannot speak a language I never spent any time studying. I would expect you to understand Italian 50 times better than you speak it assumin g the other two are truly learned and you have only recently embarked on Italian. It is almost a missed opportunity not to take advantage of this, but if you don't want to sound or write like a drunk sailor, you need to curb your enthusiasm a little. Or a lot. That can be frustrating. 2. I simply won't attempt to speak until I am "in the zone" i.e. I can "feel" the language.Then I proceed slowly, I never "monitor" both for mistakes, just try to be as Italian as I can. You can have interference from surprising places, I have heard a native speaker of a Slavic language mix German learned and abandoned 60 years ago with newly learned English with occasional helping of French. I have heard another, a university professor of Italian, mix "cold" and "caldo". While this may be unavoidable, sounding like someone who has spent too short a time in each port is certainly not. A possible approach may be to concentrate on one until you really make it your own. The other one won't fly away, it will become more approachable. I cannot judge your fluency buy my experience has been that English speakers are often way too confident in their Spanish abilities. You're not mentioning French but there's a chance that might trip you up here and there as well, possibly more in writing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4499 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 5 of 5 14 November 2012 at 6:19pm | IP Logged | ||
1. Yes, Dutch. I'm currently reading A Song of Ice and Fire in Dutch, and often can understand every word for page- long stretches. I can follow audio at the level of a news broadcast pretty well, also. I recently met a Dutch-speaker and could understand him perfectly but couldn't get out a single sentence. In my defense, I was exhausted and unprepared, but either way I'm not disappointed, because I've accomplished what I tried to do: understand Dutch. I haven't worked on speaking it, and that's a skill that needs to be trained separately (I wish it were as easy for me as picking up a book, but that's another matter). 2. Hm, I don't know. Maybe by paying close attention to the different accents, my brain manages to classify words and structures into the proper language bins? I'll frequently try to recall an expression for one language and remember one from another (usually the language I've been working on most recently), but I almost always realize it before it comes out of my mouth. 1 person has voted this message useful |
If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
