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Same conditions, very different fluency | ||
Tags: Learning Experience | Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Siberiano Tetraglot Senior Member Russian Federation one-giant-leap.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6302 days ago 465 posts - 696 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English, ItalianC1, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Serbian | Message 1 of 5 16 February 2014 at 7:25pm | IP Logged |
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A "don't be shy" thread, inspired by "celebrities speaking foreign languages". I suggested speaking of usual people who get fluency somehow in the same situations when others don't.
My example: we had 10 years of English at high school, then 2 at the university. Then 2 years of break. At year 5 we got another compulsory English class, "to maintain it", as Uni officials said. I studied with a classmate. We spoke similarly at the end of those 12 years, and I didn't get any practice, except a video game forum, but when that last course started, I could maintain a discussion, and he instead often lacked grammar and vocabulary. I was shocked. (He also did play videogames. :) And me, only later that year I could really get enough practice.) Do forums really help that much? Any similar stories? Edited by Siberiano on 16 February 2014 at 7:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Avid Learner Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4471 days ago 100 posts - 156 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: German | Message 2 of 5 16 February 2014 at 9:17pm | IP Logged |
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In my experience, yes, forums really do help that much. I've already posted about it in another topic, but I went from having a hard time formulating a sentence to being able to speak in a few years without speaking more than an hour a year. Edited by Avid Learner on 16 February 2014 at 9:18pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6406 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 3 of 5 17 February 2014 at 3:44am | IP Logged |
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Not exactly what you described, but it's you who said "don't be shy", so... :P
-I have a friend/acquaintance who's studied Finnish at university, done postgrad and has had more exposure in her daily life due to living in St Petersburg and being able to visit Finland more easily (she's also been there as an exchange student). When she was already in postgrad and working as a Finnish teacher, she said it herself that my Finnish was better than hers. Right now she's translating some literature so hopefully she's caught up, but I'm not sure because her blog is in Russian, and if anything specific accounts for the difference, it's definitely the fact that she uses a lot of Russian online. -As I often say in the threads about "depth vs breadth", I have quite a few friends who are passionate about Portuguese, Italian, German, Spanish and the respective countries the way I'm passionate about Finnish. Sure, they speak these languages better than I do, but not better than I speak Finnish. And most of them admit that they are "forgetting English", and that they want to "learn one more language". (Well, this is more about motivation already. I simply love about 10 languages the way most language learners love one or two) -In Russia it's extremely common to take private English classes in addition to those at school, even if the school is good. In secondary school, I remember my English teacher being surprised that I wasn't taking any classes apart from hers. I just listened to a lot of music and translated the lyrics in my free time, and I loved reading the dictionary. -Later on, I was always one of the best among my peers, despite also being the only one who's not been to an English-speaking country. I only (sort of) visited one for the first time at the age of 23, and it was Malta and I was trying to speak as much Italian as possible. What's in your room matters much more than what is outside, especially for introverts. -When I started learning Ukrainian, I decided to read a whole book aloud, page by page. When I was done, I recorded myself reading a short passage (available in my "sounds"), and my Ukrainian friend said that people from her school would not be able to read aloud so comfortably. Of course their Ukrainian is still miles better than mine, and they simply learned to read in their native Russian first and didn't read aloud much in Ukrainian (if at all), but it's still very nice to be better at something :-) Edited by Serpent on 17 February 2014 at 3:49am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| yantai_scot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4611 days ago 157 posts - 214 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 4 of 5 21 February 2014 at 10:18pm | IP Logged |
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My friend's an East German. After a year of
Russian when she started secondary school, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, she found herself taking English and French. 5 years later and her English was good enough to apply to British universities for a psychology degree. Meanwhile, her French remains poor- maybe A2 (I'm guessing). Why the disparity? She attributes it to MTV. In the new political and cultural climate, she couldn't get enough. She'd turn on the tv as soon as she got home from school (which is something like 2pm) until her mother got home at the end of the day. Another example of grounding your language learning in your interests. Her's was Western Music. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4253 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 5 of 5 22 February 2014 at 12:19am | IP Logged |
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Don't forget that a language is a form of communication. A lot of people still think of it as a subject you take in
school. When school is out, your exposure to the language is much less and in some cases practically 0. The only way to maintain your fluency is to make a conscious effort to increase your exposure by reading books, newspapers & magazines, listen to music, TV & radio programs outside school hours. Don't think of your lessons as your only mean to learn a language. Especially on the Internet you have access to foreign radio stations. All you need to do is to spend some extra time to tune-in. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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