Well I was going to say it was offensive and so on, but I came to the conclusion that getting worked up about something so small, and making a petty first contribution to the forum wasn't advisable.
I also live in Japan and have found learning Japanese most difficult. A few months ago I realised that my approach was wrong. Since then I have learned at a faster pace but still not fast compared to those who seem to just pick it up. What I realised is: you can't just translate what you would say in English to Japanese, you have to learn what the Japanese say in each situation. Of course you'd have to be living in an all Japanese environment to achieve this. A good memory also helps, which I lack. I think the words and sentences that make sense when directly translated, not that many, are things they picked up from English speaking countries and incorporated into their language. Trying to understand Japanese as if it was structured like English does not work. You gotta picture yourself as a baby learning from scratch. Anyways, my Japanese slowly progresses.
Language as a martial art
In his novel Iron and Silk, Mark Saltzman describes a Chinese martial artist who wishes to learn English. Since his study of martial arts is built as a series of attacks and responses, he explains to the narrator that his wishes to learn English in the same way. So he memorizes a series of conversations as one might learns katas.
And it seems to work (in the novel, that is). It keeps the brain from trying to map the foreign language one-to-one onto the native language.
If I could figure out how to make something like that happen in the real world I would try it myself.
- Terry Allen
Olá !
Many are surprised at the number of languages I speak fluently and suppose I have an inate ability at picking these up or am rather clever. I have neither inate ability and nor am I especially smarts ;-)
I am Portuguese born in South Africa .
I am learning German as my girlfriend's Austrian and it is going at a snail's pace at the moment. See? I am a lousy student.
I know why I am not picking it up as my past expriences at learning Dutch & Spanish were very successful. My declining ability with Dutch is also easily explained: I am no longer exposed to it.
Memory helps but more so for vocabulary, not the actual fluency.
Being brought up in an immigrant family with a mother tongue different to the host country's language helps. The fact that the host country has 11 official languages helps too ;-) Many South Africans speak 5-6 languages but there is some cheating: Xhosa, Zulu & Swazi are very similar, while N Sotho, S Sotho, Tswana are similar too. All distinct but easier to learn if one knows its cousin. The European languages Afrikaans & English are also widely spoken by most South Africans, with English taking a dominant role now.
Necessity is also another good teacher. I don't need to speak German with my girlfriend hence my slow progress in it :wink:
But I blabber , lemme explore your forum further
Terry, if you're having trouble learning a language with a different alphabet simply because it's harder to read, it would probably be easier if you held off on learning the language until you knew the alphabet pretty well. When I learned Hebrew, I spent like 2 years or so learning the letters and reading nonesense words for practice before I started learning the real language. And I've forgotten parts of the language now, but I can still read the letters.
Don't know if I can agree with that advice, rufio. It depends, really, on why one is learning a language. Reading, I think, is secondary to being able to speak it with some degree of fluency and here an alphabet is quite unnecessary. It's a different matter, of course, if one's primary interest is in reading the literature of a given country in the original. I do agree that the worst (and most useless) method of all is trying to translate an English sentence into the target language word-for-word or vice versa. Grammar, syntax and word order is quite likely to be different. Listen to what people say and how they say it. In Spanish, for example, the adjective generally follows the noun and so you have to get used to saying 'casa grande,' not 'grande casa' when you mean 'big house.'
Well, I think learning the orthographies is pretty interesting - it won't make a difference really, if you just want to be able to speak the language to communicate with people on a job or something, but I don't learn languages for practical purposes anyway.
Hello everyone!
I think that learning a new language requirs a lot of self-discipline, open-mindedness, and exposure to the language. Merely sitting in a clasroom reading through dialogues and grammar books doesn't work at all in the long run to help you achieve fluency. In my opinion, learning a language is like becoming left-handed. (if you are right-handed)
You have to force yourself to start anew, use a new language for all of your thoughts. Just as you have to start using your left hand for all of your actions. it is all about familiarity. Familiarity with the new vocabulary and the new grammar. Otherwise, by simplying memorising al the grammatical genders of French vocabulary is pretty hard work. Try to achieve a comfort level in which you will feel comfortable speaking your new gained foreign language. From then on, you need to gain lots of vocabulary, and then after a few years, you will have learnt a new language. The fastest and best way would be to immerse yourself in the enviornment where the language is spoken. Otherwise it would be quite a difficult task.
-Shibo
Shibby, shibo, true words.
So what's your personal multilingual story?
Shibby?
My name often reminds people of "shibboleth"...
I live in Beijing, which is in China.
Chinese is my native language.
Then I learnt English and French.
Now I study Arabic.
I taught myself toki pona, and working on Esperanto...
-Shibo
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shibby&r=f
Wow your language skills sound impressive.
Is studying languages all you do or is that just some hobby of yours?
Very cool!
No, I major in engineering.
-Shibo
re Socialisation
I will theorise that human activity is quite limited and repetitive. If you have a good understanding of what people want in a given situation and can interpret non verbal signal well than you have a better chance of relating to the language and you can learn a lot faster.
I find, as probably most people do, that all European languages are fairly similar and therefore fairly easy to understand if not speak. Non latin-based languages are completely different though! I recently had a look at some Quechua phrases, hoping to learn some for my travels to Bolivia (Quechua is the language of the Incas and is used by a high percentage of Bolivians as their first language) and could not make head nor tail of it. Sure I'll get there eventually though!
travelbug : give the finnish , estonian and hungarian languages a try and you may change your mind about the similarities of the european languages. i believe those three languages actually have a common origin. when we stopped over in tallinn/estonia on a baltic cruise two years ago we attended a 'hungarian' folk-festival there. we were told that there is a regular interchange between these two countries based upon their language relationship (the festival was a great deal of fun; the young ladies even invited me to dance with them - much to my embarrassment - but it was fun). hbg
Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian all belong to the Finno-Ugric group of languages, a non-Indo-European group. They are nothing whatever like the Romance languages or the Germanic group, which includes English. They have a kinship with some languages spoken in Central Asia and, to the best of my knowledge, no historian has ever been able to explain where these people came from, or, more to the point, when and why they came that far west and settled in. Incidentally, I have heard some Estonians say that if one is familiar with the dialect spoken in the north of Estonia, Finish news broadcasts on the telly are quite intelligible. So those two languages, at least, are still very close to each other. Another Finno-Ugric language -- Livonian or Livish -- is spoken by a very small indigenous ethnic minority, the Livs (or Libs) in parts of Latvia.
Finland and Hungary have some of the highest suicide rates in the world (could be the top 2 countries).
Bizarre fact, I know, but maybe the "nobody understands me" concept is just magnified to a national level.
KP
<Just thinking that Trondheim could be a suicide, too :wink: >
MULTULINGUAL PEOPLE
TRONDHEIM looks like quite an interesting city, really no need to commit suicide, is there ? hbg
checked the 'geograpy.about' website. highest suicide rate is shown for lithuania(hungary, finland and estonia are also quite high on the list). interestingly, life expectancy for the finnish people is quite high. here are just a few stats : canada 79.4 years, finland 77.4, germany 77.4, united staes 77.1. in canada people usually die of old age !!! ... saw a documentary on finland last winter. one of the funniest things was the obsession of many finns with ' dancing tango' - yes, really ! it showed the dancers in some community very rigidly and WITHOUT any smile at all 'tangoing' - it was so funny i had to cry. perhaps finns that don't get the hang of how to tango commit suicide out of embarrassment. hbg
