Language classes in school are horrible. You’re going for an hour a day for 180 days, with significant gaps every few months, and moving at the rate of the slowest learners in the class.
500 hours of constant, immersive study would likely get you most of the way there, which is not the same as being immersed for 500 hours without study :)
I thought I was doing well with Duolingo once, then realized, 40 hours in, that I had almost no concept of formal/informal, and barely had any verb conjugation or grammar.
I used to agree with you, then I came to Europe where everyone can speak at least two languages. So they must be doing something right in schools here
My coworker moved to Sweden for three years, and his kids had a much less favorable experience.
Je ne parle pas Francais.
Ohh, mais non! Je parle le fracais trés bien. Je peut achetee une Pizza avec pas de probleme.
(I’m so sorry, please excuse me my french friends, I had shit teachers on a shit school with shit classmates)
If your main language is English you probably can’t. There’s just little need since everything is so English-centric that almost everyone else has to learn it as a necessity.
Larger countries like France and Germany can often get on without it as there’s enough population to be worth dubbing and translating things to it, but go somewhere smaller like the Nordic countries, and you’re basically stuffed without it.
I took German in school, then moved to Germany and gained (rudimentary) fluency, then moved back to the US and lost it after a couple decades of disuse.
“Mexican Americans…take Spanish in school…and get a B”
Between the ages of 7 and 14 i was taught five languages, at best i could say hello me name is u\manuallybreathing in a grand total of one
you’d amazed what you can teach yourself woth motivated self study as an adult though, don’t fall for that ‘your brain solidifies after 25’, I’ve learnt a lot since i started again after the age of 30
only after meeting someone who’d done the same though, i really doubted myself
That “brain matures at 25” bs is a myth that was caused by a study in brain development losing funding when its subjects (that it follwed from birth) were 25.
Concluding brain development stops there is like assuming the road ends at any point where you have stopped following it.
They wouldn’t let me take foreign language classes because my English grades weren’t good enough. It wasn’t that I was even bad. I just didn’t do homework.
Speak for yourself: I built on learning 2 foreign languages in highschool to end up speaking 7 languages (granted, only about 5 at a level of easilly maintaining a conversation).
The more languages you learn and the more you use them, the easier it is to add more languages to the pile.
Also, at least for European languages, because they generally are related, learning a few helps with learning others: for example, my speaking Dutch helped me learn German and there are even weird effect like me being able to pick up words in Norwegian because they’re similar to the same words in the other two or when somebody gave us an example of Welsh in a trip to Wales I actually figured out he was counting to 10, both because some numbers were similar to the same numbers in other languages plus there is a specific rythm in counting to 10.
As I see it, the more languages you know, the more “hooks” you have to pick stuff up in other languages plus you’re probably training your brain to be better at learning new ones.
That said, you have to actually try and practice them: for example, most of my French language was learned in highschool, so when I went to France or even Quebec in Canada I tried to as much as possible speak French, which helps with retaining and even expanding it so my French Language skills are much better now than when I originally learned it in a school environment.
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信じられないよ。
Va fungulo ti, cretino
Idk learning Chinese could be really beneficial, especially over the next 50 years.
Probably should start with leaning the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese
I can speak English quite well.
I speak three languages. My native, one learned at school and another self taught.
In my experience, the inability to learn languages is mainly English speaking people problem.
That’s because of the “language tiers”.
People don’t usually learn languages for fun, at least not to a point where they can actually speak it fluently. They learn it because they have an use for it. If you learn a language without having an use for it, you lose it quite quickly.
The highest tier language is the worldwide lingua franca: English. You learn English to talk to anyone, not to talk to English native speakers. For example, my company (a central European one) uses English as the work language. We don’t have a single English native speaker on the team. But if I want to talk to a colleague from Rumania, Egypt, Spain or the Netherlands I will talk English with them.
The next tier is the regional lingua franca. That’s e.g. Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Russian or Arabic (and likely a few others, I don’t know the whole world). These languages are spoken in certain regions and can be used to communicate with people from neighbouring countries. You can get around with e.g. German in Hungary, because most Hungarians learn German. It’s also sometimes necessary since TV, books or other media might not be available in the local language. For example, a lot of Albanians speak Italian, because TV shows and movies are rarely translated into Albanian and instead broadcast in Italian. (Also, since Italy was so close, many people watched Italian TV while Albania had communism.)
The lowest tier are local languages. These are languages that are only spoken in their own country. For example: Rumanian, Serbian, Hungarian, Welsh, Gaelic, Dutch and so on. People speak these languages because they live in that country. For someone who doesn’t live in that country, there’s rarely any major benefit to learning these languages.
In general, people only really learn to speak languages that are on the same tier or higher.
If you live in Albania, you learn Albanian as a child, then probably add Italian to understand TV. In school you will learn English and once you go online you will use it. You might also learn Russian to be able to communicate with people in nearby countries and if you are from the muslim part of Albania you might also learn Arabic.
If you live in Germany, you’d just learn German and English. No need for any other languages. If you spend some significant time in France, Spain or Italy, you might pick up one of these languages.
If you live in the US or GB, you start with English, and there’s hardly any point to learn anything else. By default you can already communicate with everyone, read everything on the internet and watch all TV shows and movies (pretty much everything is translated into English, if it isn’t even refilmed in English). If you try to learn another language and try to use it with native speakers of said language, chances are pretty high they just switch over to English.
That makes a lot of sense and is pretty much why I speak three languages.
In my experience when I lived in Holland, compared to me my friends and colleagues from English-speaking countries had the additional problems in trying to learn Dutch that people would tend to switch to English when they heard them speak in Dutch (probably because they picked up from their accent that they were native English speakers) plus their own fallback when they had trouble expressing themselves or understanding others in Dutch was the “lowest energy” language of all - their native one.
Meanwhile me - being a native Portuguese speaker - suffered a lot less from the “Dutch people switching to English when faced with my crap Dutch language skills” early on problem (probably because from my accent they couldn’t be sure that I actually spoke English and they themselves did not speak Portuguese) and my fallback language when my Dutch skills weren’t sufficient was just a different foreign language.
So some of my British colleagues over there who had lived there for almost 20 years still spoke only barelly passable Dutch whilst I powered through in about 5 years from zero to the level of Dutch being maybe my second best foreign language, and it would’ve been faster if I didn’t mostly work in English-speaking environments (the leap in progression when I actually ended up in a work environment were the working language was Dutch was amazing, though keeping up was a massive headache during the first 3 or 4 months).
That said, some other of my British colleagues did speak good Dutch, so really trying hard and persisting worked for them too (an interesting trick was when a Dutch person switched to English on you, just keeping on speaking in Dutch).
I mean, I took Spanish and use it, but I’m New Mexican and work with Cubans elsewhere.
It is still very good brain exercise to learn new languages. It’s a way of keeping your brain muscle in Shape. Just like math exercises and reading books.
I took english in school, and I speak it all the time :3
Good job. English is a very hard language that barely uses logic.
All languages have their difficulties. English pronunciation and spelling is a mess but grammar is easy for example. My native language has 3 genders and 4 cases for example and there are languages with more.
Just have to memorize all these irregular verbs. It’s so easy.
7 cases in the standard version of my language, 8 in the dialect I speak :3
You didn’t mention genders so I guess you have none which leads me to Uralic or Turkic languages maybe?
Oh if we’re doing a guessing game then…
3 genders technically, though the 3rd one (neuter) is super rare, so it’s basically 2 in practice :3
That makes it harder. 7 is the limit of Balto-Slavic languages but I know that one Baltic language used to have more, loaned from Estonian or something, but lost them over time. So my guess is your local dialect preserved one? Otherwise I have no clue. I think modern Indo Aryan languages have less, Semitic languages have 2 genders and I don’t know how many cases. I could rule out some more to show off but not much.
Lithuanian! Im not sure if they were loaned from estonian :3 we used to have 10 (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, illative, allative, adessive, and vocative) allative is basically dead outside of a few words like velniop, adessive is just dead (only really seen in old writings) but illative is the interesting one: it’s not used in standard lithuanian outside of some set phrases (kairėn, dešinėn, and in our anthem vardan), but it’s still used in dzūkija and east aukštaitija, so… Yeah that’s some lore :3
Yeah same. 6 cases, 3 genders and also dual form because why not.
I wish for spelling reform, but that’ll never happen.
It really is illogical lol :3 I tried teaching my parents before and trying to explain why all 3 Es in mercedes or all 3 Cs in pacific ocean make different sounds like “they just do”
Though my native language is quite hard for non-native speakers as well
mercedes
In English’s defence, it’s not an English word. It’s a German company named after a Spanish name. And at least to my ear, the Spanish and German pronunciations also have 3 different Es. One helpful Redditor also provided an IPA guide to the German pronunciation, agreeing with my ears:
mɛrˈtseːdɛs
The “e” in the middle is long and stressed.
Edit: I would also say, that most of the times it is even pronounced like this:
məˈtseːdɛs
But I can’t even begin to justify the letter c sounding like /s/, /k/, and /ʃ/.
For what it’s worth, all the ‘e’ in mercedes pronounced in swedish sound the same (first can sound ‘ä’ in some regions though).
For Spanish, at least, your ears deceive you. It’s /meɾˈsedes/ in the vast majority of the Spanish speaking world, and /meɾˈθedes/ for large parts of Spain. All 3 ‘e’ sounds are identical.
Spanish can be weird and nonsensical at times, but it’s mostly counterintuitive grammatical rules. Things like “antes de que” having to be followed by the subjunctive, even in the past tense when you’re speaking of an event you know for certain occurred as you’re saying. The relationship between phonology and orthography in English is just a mess that’s gone and contaminated this one.
I do wonder if there might be a difference between the phonemes and the realisation, the way there was in German according to the German commenter.
But also, even without that, stress undoubtedly changes the perception of the vowel (not nearly as much as in English, but certainly not nil), as does an r after a vowel.
məˈtseːdɛs
Don’t know about other Germans but for me, the last e is a schwa. So it’s more [mɛɐ̯ˈtseːdəs] I think but I’m not completely sure.
Well the c being s and k thing comes from latin I think :3 like v and u being the same letter… and I believe i also had a second sound? Plus there’s vowel shifts that happened after the writing was standardized and all that, and characters that no longer exist like Þ and ð
Either way it can be confusing when coming from a language with a fairly regular pronunciation ^^ (though of course we also have some quirks lol)
English is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn.
Chinese, Arabic, and Russian speakers laugh at me when I say this.
Why? There’s plenty of strange things in English, inconsistent grammar rules, weird pronunciations, and pointless words for simple ideas.
Like there’s umpteen words to describe different kinds of meat, pork, beef, veal, mutton. In Chinese you can get away with saying just the animal + meat, 猪肉, 牛肉, 小牛肉, 羊肉 (pig meat, cow meat, young cow meat, goat meat).
English has stupid rules around pluralisation. There’s been arguments that the origin of the word should dictate how it’s pluralised, and other arguments that a “true English” pluralisation rule should apply, but then incorrect usage slips into common vernacular and suddenly it’s perfectly okay to pluralise a Greek word with a Latin plural suffix. Then you end up with the plural of octopus being octopodes, octopuses, and octopi!
The long and the short of it is that all languages have weird-ass quirks in them that don’t necessarily make any sense but feel natural to their native speakers. It’s a prime example of how intuitiveness isn’t actually real a thing.
You can get away with lots of things in English too! Just curious, do you speak another (than english) second language ?
I speak Japanese, and can still read German and understand most of it. German’s the secondary language I studied.
I’m a native Swedish speaker so technically English is my second language, and the others came after.
Tjena malena, en annan svenne på lemmy 💕 !
Ja vi “fick” ju engelska på köpet kan man väl säga, sverige var world nr 1 i engelska i andraspråk för några tiotals år sen om jag inte missminner mej, men dom hänger i bra nuförtiden också. Stack -95 till Frankrike så va tvungen att lära mej franska, vansinnigt språk men fantastiskt kultur!
Tjosan! :) Vi har ju haft det som kärnämne sedan 50-talet. Min mor är i 70-års åldern och är yngre än engelska som kärnämne. Så om vi inte var bra på engelska måste ju något ha gått fel någonstans.
Me, an English teacher: nods somberly
Have you tried French?
Would you believe if I told you that there’s someone who speaks 20+ languages
doesn’t count
I am the world’s shittiest polyglot. I lost a lot of my native language, turkish. I can get by. I speak english, but my accent is getting worse. I studied german in school for 5 years and forgot most of it. I live in the river plate, so the shitty amount of intermediate spanish I can speak has one of the worst accents for spanish, just behind tied first of caribbean and chilean. I can READ cyrillic, but not understand it, except few words whichever language has in common with languages I know. I can recognize some chinese glyphs, and understand some words.
I have no idea about any grammar words except the obvious ones (verb, noun) and get as much use of IPAs as I do IPAs (the pronunciation guide/the beer)
I have seen the vowel chart a billion times and still don’t understand it.
But did you use AI for this post? … otherwise your English is pretty sound (to me as a non-native speaker) :D
English is my primary language. I said my accent is getting worse, which is only a spoken thing
Don’t forget that you can also understand beginner level Azerbaijani and Gagauz but not speak either of them.
mən çox eyi Azərbaycanca konuşorum. /s
I probably speak better portugese than azerbaijani. / Eu problamenche falo melor portugues que azerbaijani.
