What IS the dirty little secret of multilingual people??

I'm a slow language learner here. I am very interested in grammar and that gets in my way. I am always translating, and, again, that is in my way. Years of high school latin and a natural instinct for crossword puzzles leaves me speaking to my own mind and not communicating. I don't hear fast enough, if you understand what I mean, much less speak back coherently. I want to say something complex, and get bogged down in the tenses. I took seven quarters of italian at around age 50, wrote many excellent compositions, and struggle to talk.
On the other hand, although I have been to the country, I have not really been immersed. Luckily, italians are rather forgiving of your efforts. Mostly.

So let me add my bit.


You are so right and have the experience to back it.

My perents imergrated to South Africa when I was about 9 years old. I had lived in U.K until then and had no exsposure to other languages, However upon arriving in S.A I came to realise that english was not the first language in this country and communication was limited to english speaking people. I was diognosed with epilepsy 3 months later and as a result had to go to a specialized school. This school was naturally not an English school as it was not the official first language of the coutry, It is or was Afrikaans, which is a derivitive of Dutch as it was them who came to colonize here first.

Now this is where it comes together. :

It was in this period that I managed to lerarn Afikaans in 3 months due to the following reasons:



This has proved to be true as I can now speak "Zulu" too. As a result of being exposed to it.

In conclusion: I now live and work in Brazil where as you all know everything is Portuguese and not having been exsposed to this, when I arrived here I could not speak a word of it. After 1 year here, I find that I was able to learn languages a lot quicker when I was younger but with the added bonus being multi-lingual, it is indeed easier for me than most.

I've learned a lot of languages and I think the reason why is that I began early. We had French classes from 1st grade onward. When I was 10, I lived in Holland and learned Dutch. When I was a teenager, I studied in France. Later, I lived in Spain and Italy. Did I ever really "learn " a language, as one does in class? Only French. The rest I took in in through the pores, as kids do. Probably self-consciousness re structure and grammar are the biggest impediments to actually just learning a language the way babies do. I've known translators -- one a literary translator and another a simultaneous translator at the UN. Both agree that being a linguist for that kind of work and being a linguist for the purpose of communicating on a day-to-day basis are quite different. If the latter is your goal -- just "being Italian" -- then relax, hang out there, pick it up and don't be more critical of yourself than you are in English! The more languages you know, the easier it gets.

(Backing way, way up... having tried to read some Portuguese -- signs, menus, and the like -- with my limited knowledge of Spanish, couldn't the greater ability of Portuguese speakers to understand Spanish than vice versa be at least partly accounted for by the complexity of the two languages? It's always seemed to me that Spanish was the most simply inflected (please, no offense meant here; I love the language) of the romance languages, so a speaker of Portuguese listening to Spanish is listening to a "simpler" relative of their own language, while a Spanish speaker listening to Portuguese has to make a step up, for lack of a better term.)

Good little discuss you all had a few months ago...

I don't know if Spanish can be considered any easier. I think they are about the same.

Could be an exposure thing, as I grew up in California, and learned some Spanish before I ever encountered any other languages. Just a thought.

Another thing which has puzzled me: traveling with the gf, who speaks about the same small amount of French as I speak Spanish, it often seems that she is more likely to pick up the gist of what a speaker is saying in Spanish, and I'm more likely to pick it up if they are speaking French. Could be because I feel no pressure to understand all the words coming out in French (or she in Spanish), so am more open to body language, inflection -- all the stuff that goes along with the babble-play that is language.

Could this, if there's any validity to it, play into the relative ease with which some folks learn new languages? This doesn't always correspond to conventional measures of intelligence, in my experience. My uncle's been totally immersed in English for 20 years and still has trouble understanding and being understood. He's not a very playful person, but rather intensely focused and serious -- an accomplished carver, etcher, sketch-artist, and instrument maker, but not one to play around with words. His wife, on the other hand, is kind of a goofball, never shown much inclination toward academic learning, but picked up a tremendous amount of Hungarian in less than two years there.

Different intellectual functions, though, so I'm probably barking up a wrong tree...

Interesting... I read an article in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell (?) which I hope I can find online but don't have time just now. Anyway it was REALLY interesting, about people who can read faces, irrespective of language. It made a huge amount of sense to me as to how I can understand a guy with a handlebar mustache, but then can't understand his mustachio-less but aviator-sunglass-wearing pal.

I'll see if I can find it when I get back later.

It's a little bit out of the subject, but "Spanish-language-related":

"When Does Language Become Exclusivist? Linguistic Politics in Catalonia

Elisa Roller

Abstract:

This article traces the development of linguistic policy in Catalonia over the last few decades and argues that language and linguistic policy continue to be crucial elements in the Catalan nation-building project. In addition, the growing politicisation of language has increasingly become a divisive issue amongst Catalonia's political elite. The Catalan linguistic landscape has moved from one based on linguistic 'normalisation' to a situation where bilingualism is the norm, but the degree to which one language predominates or should predominate over the other continues to be subject to intense public debate. Finally, the article argues that the linguistic consensus which prevailed among Catalan political parties for nearly two decades has slowly begun to disintegrate, accompanied by a growing debate on the use of language as an exclusivist mark of identity in Catalan society. "

Article website

I think the key for linguistic stress in Catalan nationalism is the fact that the language was heavily repressed by the regime during the Franco era.

The language is easy for native Spanish speakers. After two weeks in Barcelona, I understood everything in Catalonian TV and also streets conversation.

Then there is some not very nice stuff. Like being ill treated when speaking "castillian" until the Catalan finds out -by a word or an accent- that you're not from other part of Spain, and treat you with warmth and kindness.

(Walter Hinteler writes excellent summaries of articles -- and in a nonnative tongue, no less!)

"The dirty little secret of multi-lingual people"? That they can say things in front of us that we can't understand? I've always envied them that. It's almost like being invisible...

I speak five (seven) languages. Swedish (natively), English (fluently), Spanish (some), French (some) and I'm also learning Esperanto. And like as Scandinavians, I also understand the other Scandinavian tongues which are Norwegian and Danish and I also speak some Norwegian.

I seem to have a knack for languages. I don't know why. Languages have always made a lot more sense to me than maths. I also think that a key to learning a language is "immersion". If you have to speak it, you will! There's no better way to learn Italian than to live in Italy.

Very true. (Welcome to A2K!)

Thanks. I must say I really like this place. Very interesting discussions going on.

I like it too. Nice to have you around.

Hi Kail! You are right - if you have to you will. This why I do not speak Swedish - even though I have been married to a Swede for more than five years now. But he speaks German and his family speak English. But I do understand some Swedish.

And like you I was never very good at math - I always loved English classes. The teacher was not very good, but I liked the language.

I'll vote for a combination of early exposure to multiple languages, immersion and benefit/need. I spoke German and Portuguese before I started school, then learned English and French at school, and taught myself Dutch through shortwave radio (whoa that makes me feel old). My French was always decent, but when i went to live in a french-canadian community and needed to be able to speak french to survive, my fluency sky-rocketed. I can fake it with my Italian and Greek neighbours, simply through exposure and knowledge of other languages. I understand Yiddish and am apparently understandable in it as well. Need definitely came into play there as well.

I agree with everyone that immersion tends to be a key factor. For exmaple the Defense Language Institue trains our military etc in foregin languages. There you can be fluent in Spanish in a matter of months and more complicated langauges like Russian in a year. This is total fluency including many defense terms. The key for this is that the the classes take place 5 days a week for 6-8 hours each day.
With small children the key is age. When we are very young our ear can differentiate the various phenomes (different sounds associated with languages). This is why children who are very small can just grow up hearing several languages and know them all. Our ability to hear the different phenomes is pretty much gone by age 7 and this is when it becomes more difficult to learn languages. When I was a kid our public school program had a special program for "gifted" students that taught Spanish starting in 4th grade. It was much easier to learn it at such as young age.

Certainly it is much easier to learn a foreign language in a foreign country or when growing up in a bi-/tri-lingual family.
They started tot each English from 1rst grade just some years ago here in my German state. So I was best taught when travelling to those countries as a schoolboy. (I started with English in 5th grade and French in 8th. Didn't visit 'Latinia', but learnt Latin from 7th grade.)

So many languages!
It's a combination of 'natural ability' and understanding of how languages work that are the factors which you need to add to exposure to become multilingual.

I know that I'm lucky to be able to pick up languages, but I've done plenty of understanding of languages.

English is my native language. I learned French from age 8 to 16. Latin from 10 to 16. Ancient Greek just 11 to 13 - I never got to grips with that. I only started learning German at 13 and carried on at school until 18, but I've now spent more time in German-speaking countries than any others (except "home" - the UK!) and that's actually my effective "second" language.

OK, so I did a 2 month intensive German course in Munich after I left university, where I was surrounded by Italians and I found that from being a tourist in Italy, the Latin and French, I was able to understand quite well what they were saying to each other.

I can only claim "tourist" Italian, but I can make myself understood, thanks to an Italian on the German course who taught me "to be", "to have" and one regular verb "to eat" in the present tense.

What am I saying?

I've spent a lot of my life learning languages, but what's affected me most are the trips to the countries in which the languages are spoken. I spent a week at the age of 9 with a family in France. That made a huge difference to being comfortable speaking French, as I never really translated the words, I just experienced them and used them.

Eventually I got to that stage in German, but not before a few trips to Germany. I now find that I can speak better German if I just speak it, without worrying if I know the words or not. Usually the right word will just "appear" where it's needed, if I just allow myself to think in German.

That now takes a couple of days to get used to, but it works fine!

So, if you want your children to be multilingual, even if you think it's not much of a chance for you:

1. Get them to learn languages from an early age

2. Expose them to "full immersion" in the language, so there is no excuse not to bother.

3. Once they've learned how one language works, they'll find it easier to know what to learn in another language.

Sorry it took so long, and I hope this doesn't seem arrogant. I know most Europeans with my kind of education speak English and other languages much better than my French or German!