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Americans and Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3885 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 33 of 41 02 April 2015 at 10:45am | IP Logged | ||
My experience is not remotely American, but I have found that my expectations and understanding of my own skills from time to time have been blown out of proportion by teachers. And when you're young, what your teachers say about you has an enormous effect (one often comes across people who, 15+ years after their last class in XYZ seriously maintain that they have a talent for XYZ even though they never went beyond an 8th grade introductory class). When I was in school, my French teacher set my French class up with pen-pals in France. We were twelve years old and had been studying French one hour per week for a few months. We probably didn't know the days of the week yet. We spent up towards a month writing letters introducing ourselves with her help, but none of us ever ended up writing a second letter. She gave us a long lecture about how disappointed she was in how we just dropped this, because of the effort she had put into getting us those pen-pals. If she spoke more than tourist French herself and had any feel whatsoever for what it means to learn a language she would've realised how ridiculous her expectations were, and she transferred those ridiculous expectations onto twelve year olds who thought they were now, with maybe 20 hours of ridiculously slow study, supposed to be communicative. When I took my final oral exam in French at age 16, my teacher, a native francophone, told me that I express myself "fluently" (NB! She didn't say that I was fluent, but that my French was good and my speech was fluent/fluid). I clung to that, because a teacher said it, and it was my only available measure. Now, I've rarely come across an adult Swede who considers him/herself to speak a third language fluently despite 4-7 years of study. But I think that's because most of us come into contact with other languages (e.g. through travel) and quickly realise our limitations. Less than two months after my French teacher told me I expressed myself "fluently" I struggled with my touristy French in Paris, and then blew up at my father because he kept saying, without irony, things like "Emma, you speak French! Come here, I want to ask this viticulturist how their wine is aged and how they harvest their grapes." A week later, on our way back to Sweden, I made him stop saying such things forever by saying "Dad, you speak German! Why don't you order our food? I want Chicken McNuggets!" He'd taken intensive classes and worked regularly in Germany for years but at McDonald's he suddenly felt less than confident. "You speak XYZ" is still a running joke in the family. Likewise, lots of young people will say something like "I understand Danish", and then they'll take the train over to Copenhagen and then assert "I don't understand a word of Danish" for the rest of their lives even though they could understand if they made an effort to listen. If you live in a huge country like the USA, though, and you never leave, your reality checks will be very rare and your decent grade in high school and your teacher's comments and transferred unrealistic expectations are going to fossilise into pure unadulterated truth. Edited by eyðimörk on 02 April 2015 at 10:48am 15 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4795 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 34 of 41 02 April 2015 at 3:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think eyðimörk just made the most important point. The reality checks are the key.
I could write a few paragraphs about their importance but I don't think it's needed. (And I hate it as well when family falsely claims me to speak German, becuase I spent two weeks in Berlin on an intensive class a few years ago. :-D It makes me feel bad about my real skills and offended about not recognizing all the real effort I am trying to put in my German) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4493 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 35 of 41 02 April 2015 at 4:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I can echo Eydimörk's perspective on French - it is exactly what happened to me, and I've
spent a lot of time battling to rectify that ever since. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5012 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 36 of 41 04 April 2015 at 3:11am | IP Logged | ||
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Just a few extra bits about some important points.
First, this phenomenon is definitely not a strictly American thing. I've seen Spanish speakers who actually understand Catalan after living in the region for a while claim to speak it and fail miserably. I've had many students of different nationalities state they could 'speak' English or Spanish at levels way above their real capabilities. Are CEFR or other measurement scales relevant in this situation? It may be in some cases, but in the examples I have observed first-hand, it mostly isn't. The key here, the reality check that somehow has been failing all along, is self-delusion, and the existence of the CEFR typically doesn't cure it -- even in the face of somewhat concrete 'can do' statements, I've had people claim they can, and proceed to demonstrate how they actually can't. No big deal if they're singing up for a class to help them improve, but an important starting point when this reality check succeeds / is accepted for the first time. It's hit and miss in my experience, and this I see usually coupled with [stopping] insisting how it's everybody else's fault when these people are not understood. Certainly, self-delusion may be attributed to this 'investment' thing you've been mentioning, and to bad teaching (but please refrain from saying that all language teaching is bad just because bad teaching exists -- broadly speaking, most teaching is unsuccessful in all fields the higher you go, and this is a complex matter that would deserve its own thread). I, however, have observed yet another important factor --with respect to cases I have observed directly, anyway-- that I call the 'one-eyed king' factor. I routinely deal with exchange students that live in a partying expat bubble and people who are the only ones who try to learn a language in an otherwise very nearly monolingual environment, for career opportunities or whatever the reason. Lacking serious or ongoing contact with native or skilled speakers of their TL, these people often go by the adage 'in the land of the blind...' simply because they are actually good, compared to their immediate environment. Of course, that may or may not hold true outside their little bubbles (typically it doesn't). When they're confronted with this broader, wider, deeper, and harsher reality, those who are sincere in their learning efforts usually soldier on and become better, but there are always some who just can't take it and will be left behind. That, however is a story I'll leave for another moment or another thread :) 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| donJhon Newbie Costa Rica Joined 3265 days ago 5 posts - 10 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 37 of 41 18 May 2015 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am late to this party but I just want to say that for me it is very sad that many Americans (and other Anglophones) live for years here in Costa Rica (where +95% of the people speak Spanish) and never make any effort to learn any Spanish other than whatever they pick up by osmosis.
Another thing, do not come here thinking it will easier to learn the language here than at home. Unless you are going to an immersion program at one of the many schools with a home stay it will not work. There are too many English speaking expats here and they just all hang out with one another. And the biggest problem is so many of the locals speak English and the moment you open you mouth they start speaking English, sometimes badly. They do not want to help you practice Spanish, however, they want you to help them practice English. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4076 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 38 of 41 20 May 2015 at 3:21am | IP Logged | ||
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I am not sure if this helps, but what happens if an American is someone who is either
of Spanish or Hispanoamerican descent and so looks exactly like the people of those countries, or is of a different ethnicity that looks similar? Surely that would help in getting people to speak to you. I am from an Anglophone country, and having lived in both the UK and USA, people either mistake me for being Hispanic/part-Spanish/Latino, or think that I an immigrant. When I go to Hispanophone countries, I get mistaken for being a native Hispanophone based on appearance. So perhaps those who look more Anglo-Saxon, especially Americans, have problems getting practise because they are assumed to know nothing but English? I was unsure to phrase this without sounding awkward, but I did discuss it in my log. First of all, Hispanophones are generally not the best at English especially compared to Northern European countries' levels of English. They are towards the bottom on the English Proficiency Index scale with a score of either "poor" or "very poor" English levels. But if you actually look Hispanic, this definitely helps in avoiding English. Each time I go with my family to Spain or Latin America, no matter which country in the region, we always get Spanish as the first language based on our looks. My father, who is half Spanish, looks very Hispanic and unsurprisingly no one speaks English to him there. When I was in Mexico, my father was mistaken for a Mexican citizen and was asked from what part of Mexico he came.I look quite Hispanic myself, so I also do not get English. If not look Hispanic, maybe change the way you dress. If I wear my trademark Argentina football apparel in any Hispanophone country, in addition to my facial appearance, this effectively shuts down any possibility of anyone speaking to my in English, not that it was very low in the first place. Hispanophone cultural contexts also should help, like I have a "La Batidora" design T- shirt that references a Puerto Rican dance song common in all Latin American nightclubs. No monolingual Anglophone could possibly know of this, so choosing things like this might help. Edited by 1e4e6 on 20 May 2015 at 3:43am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| glidefloss Senior Member United States Joined 5754 days ago 138 posts - 154 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 39 of 41 07 June 2015 at 8:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm from the US and I lived in Mexico over the last year. People in many parts of the US, like the East Coast, rarely come into contact with any other language, even Spanish, except in high school classes, so I have noticed what others here have said, that after 8 years of high school and college Spanish, people often consider themselves fluent in the sense that 'they speak Spanish,' without much contact with native materials -- ie they don't read for pleasure in the language, or watch TV in the language.
I fit the stereotype of constantly saying 'I can understand more than I can speak,' but I'd thought that was a natural stage of language learning, especially when you put in a couple thousand hours of listening work. When traveling in Mexico, I struggled immensely with simple conversations about directions and food, but if someone were to start talking about something a little more involved, I could usually follow along enough to interject some comments (as long as I didn't have to conjugate too much), and I thought that was a result of listening to a lot of audiobooks. In Mexico City, I was constantly confronted with how little Spanish I knew, but since most people didn't speak English, Spanish was the only option. No one ever seemed put off by my low abilities, and they tolerated me politely. Even people who did speak English, like my landlord, soon wanted to talk only in Spanish with me, even though I was lagging behind significantly in the conversation, and made many errors. I guess it's a personal thing, since sometimes younger people would want to use their equally faulty English with me instead. When traveling, not many people spoke English. Maybe they knew some, but didn't use it. US travelers I met often said "I can speak well enough, but I can't understand because people talk to fast in Spanish for me." I heard that line much more than when I say I can understand but can't speak. Overall, my experience was that not speaking fluent Spanish was an enormous social disadvantage. My French friend constantly made fun of me for how much effort I was putting into Spanish and how poor my speaking ability was. Edited by glidefloss on 07 June 2015 at 8:54pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4451 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 40 of 41 08 June 2015 at 3:53am | IP Logged | ||
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English speakers are in the funny situation of often taking way less time to learn to understand discussions of philosophy and politics in Romance languages than someone talking about things as basic and everyday as the steps taken to cook a meal or repair a hole in a wall. It's because the "intellectual" and conceptual vocabulary in English mostly comes from either French or Latin.
There are thousands of little concrete items and tons of verbs for different types of movements and physical phenomena that any random native speaker would learn by five or six years of age but that most learners will not need to know unless they stay a significant time in the country -- and the words for these items usually have absolutely nothing to do with the word for the same thing in English. Edited by tastyonions on 08 June 2015 at 3:55am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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