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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4994 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 9 of 94 19 June 2015 at 10:54am | IP Logged | |||||
I thought that I'd be fairly fluent after working through Michel Thomas and Pimsleur, because that's what their marketing told me. Just as well I got them from the library rather than paying full price...
I've very much been guilty of this too. I just dug out the first page from my 2011 log:
B1 to C1 in a year of spare-time study while juggling two other languages, ridiculous. It's 2015 now and I'm still nowhere near that level. Okay, whether C1 constitutes "full proficiency" is debatable, but it's a case of not being aware of just how big the gap is between intermediate and advanced. Edited by garyb on 19 June 2015 at 10:55am 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5319 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 94 19 June 2015 at 12:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I thought that kids were amazingly gifted language learners, and that it was basically impossible for adults to learn a language. And I somehow believed this despite having seen my wife pass from B2 to near-native conversational skills in her 20s, before my very own eyes. I guess I must have thought that getting to B2 was the hard part?
Today, I know that kids take a long time to master their first languages, and that they often fail to learn their family languages. And adults do just fine if they're willing to hang in there. I also used to believe that listening to lots of semi-comprehensible RFI Français Facile was going to improve my listening comprehension. It turns out that no, it wasn't going to, because there weren't enough hints for me to fill in the missing bits. So I switched to TV series, and made very rapid listening comprehension gains. My Cheating and consolidating post was an attempt to explain when extensive listening and reading would work, and how to make it as efficient as possible. That's probably the biggest single thing I've learned along the way. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| osoymar Tetraglot Pro Member United States Joined 4523 days ago 190 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English*, German, Portuguese, Japanese Studies: Spanish, French Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 94 19 June 2015 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'll speak up for the "you have to be immersed to learn more than the basics" theory. I
especially fell for this because I utterly failed to learn Spanish without immersion, I learned decent German with a bit of immersion, and then quite good Japanese with several years of immersion. How's that for proof? Now, my understanding is much more nuanced. Immersion will give you plenty of opportunities to interact with the language, but its effect on your motivation is highly individual. And immersion without an effective language strategy will be less effective than the opposite. I do think that to reach those golden C2+ levels you need several hours each day of intensive, varied interaction in the language. But if you can find a way to do that, it doesn't matter whether you're physically in the L2 country or not. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4676 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 12 of 94 19 June 2015 at 10:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think I came out of school with similar ideas. I will probably remember the Latin first conjugation forever (amo amas amat amamus amatis amant. Yeah. Still there.) In school we had to learn everything. These days I'd rather learn less, and be able to use what I know with more style and grace. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4320 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 13 of 94 19 June 2015 at 10:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I used to believe there were two separate parts to a language: the grammar and the vocabulary, and that each of these had to be learnt separately via textbooks and word lists.
I used to believe that it would be easy to close the gap between intermediate and advanced language use. I used to believe that C1 indicated an almost native-like level of proficiency. I used to believe that once your receptive skills were good enough, your productive skills would naturally follow. Edited by patrickwilken on 19 June 2015 at 11:00pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4077 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 14 of 94 19 June 2015 at 11:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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That one had to go to class to learn a language. Of course only the teachers said
this. I learnt more Spanish in one year of self-study than all 4 in classes of 8 semesters combined. I also was told that I had to be in a calculus class to learn it properly. I loved to prove my teachers long by teaching myself that and Spanish by myself. As well as French regarding its classes. I should have tried the same thing with Mandarin and German. But by far the biggest bullshit was that one had to attend a class to learn a language (or by extension, just about anything). Yet iroinically, I remember throughout my education that quite a few of the classes that I attended almost 100% attendance, I did worse than the ones where I attended less than 10% (if given the opportunity). Few years ago I wanted to do intensive classes for Dutch at a university in the Netherlands during summer holiday to do a big jump in my level for Dutch, because I was convinced that if I were to improve, only classes were the solution. Until my mother told me that it would be financially terrible for us, and told me, "Can you not just study by yourself at home? It saves us thousands." so I did that, and do that up to today. Edited by 1e4e6 on 20 June 2015 at 12:02am 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| soclydeza85 Senior Member United States Joined 3694 days ago 357 posts - 502 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 15 of 94 20 June 2015 at 1:53am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'll echo a few things that have been said here, such as thinking you need a class to learn a language, or that one run through Pimsleur or MT would make me somewhat fluent.
I'll add that I used to think that people could only learn one foreign language, as if there was a limit on mental capacity that wouldn't allow for anymore. Keep in mind I'm from the United States, where it's somewhat rare to find someone that speaks a foreign language, let alone multiple. That only children can learn, or are better at learning foreign languages. I feel like it's almost a catch phrase that people say anytime language learning is brought up (by non-language learners). I don't know why, but it really peeves me. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5553 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 16 of 94 20 June 2015 at 2:31am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think the thing that tripped me up most was the belief that there is a 'correct' way to express every thought in any given language. Of course, things like believing that you're 'good' or 'bad' at learning languages didn't help, nor did not realizing that you need much more exposure and memorization of meaningful text fragments than I'd been asked to do to pass my classes. But the thing that made me fail several starts at self-learning a language was this idea that thoughts must map perfectly to one single way of expressing them. Because once you realize that isn't the case it becomes much easier to accept ambiguity and incomplete information; and to paraphrase whenever you realize you lack the words to express your thoughts like you would in your native language. Which, I think, is a prerequisite to being able to deal with n+1 until there's mostly n left.
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