Languages and the learning thereof

Starker on 19/4/2017 at 05:01

I'm a bit curious, how many people here are learning a foreign language and what has your experience been like? Or maybe you plan on learning one in a more serious way than just "wouldn't it be nice..."? Also, what are you doing/using to learn it? Are you taking classes? Using a textbook? Are you on Lang-8 or italki? Duolingo? Flashcards with Anki? Do you read books in the language? Watch movies?

I've been taking Mandarin Chinese classes for something like 6 months now, mostly because they are free from my university, and boy is it an uphill struggle. I'm not new to learning languages, but with Chinese I have had a very hard time understanding what anyone says. Part of it is being a bit tone deaf, but everyone also speaks too fast for me. By the time I'm done with parsing the first part of sentence, if I'm lucky to understand it, I will have already forgotten what the second part was. I've been wanting to do some independent studying at home, but I haven't really been able to find a good textbook or study program that clicks with me.

I've also been learning Japanese for a while now and it's going much better. It helps with Chinese too, as I'm able to recognize a bunch of the characters. With Japanese, I'm at a stage where I'm able to read things with the help of a dictionary, so that's what I've been doing recently. I've been struggling though short stories and light novels and I think I'm slowly starting to get a hang of it. Of course, I've also been consuming other kinds of media, such as games, movies, etc.

I've always wanted to learn languages, but now is really the best time for it. There's so much media available just a click away and there are all kinds of tools available now that I couldn't even dream of when I was younger. For example, I've used Anki a lot for vocabulary learning and it's great to have a program do all the tedious flashcard management for you.

Yakoob on 19/4/2017 at 05:08

I'm bilingual in English/Polish and semi-decent in Japanese, altho incredibly rusty. I learned Japanese back in college and did a study abroad there for 5 months, which helped immensely. Altho (sadly) I don't have much reason to keep the language up, I find it linguistically interesting. It's both bizarre yet oddly logical in a weird way. A lot of cultural influences and dialects as well, but same could probably be said about any language if you really dug into it.

Starker on 19/4/2017 at 05:32

Ah, being bilingual must be nice. I had to learn English the hard way and up until Chinese it has without doubt been the most difficult language I've ever learned.

Kolya on 19/4/2017 at 06:38

So Japanese is easier to you than English? Where did you say you're from?
I learned Russian as a child but forgot most of it. Some Japanese in university, but forgot all of it. I learned Hungarian when I had a Hungarian gf, but forgot it later. And I learned some Greek just because I love Greece so much. Didn't get too far though.
The only other language I ever had any regular use for was English, which I learned through Beatles and TTLG.
For the Hungarian and Greek I used audio courses which I found to be very efficient for me.

Thirith on 19/4/2017 at 06:44

I grew up kinda, sorta bilingual: German dad, English mother, we learnt German first, from our mum, but she also spoke to us in English, which we responded to in German, for some reason. Still, we definitely learnt the basics at a very early age, and as a result 'properly' learning the language wasn't a problem for me. Learning other languages, though... I speak French okay and I understand it very well, but considering that I did French at school for ~10 years it's pathetic how clumsy my French is. Back when I went to school, though, I also did Latin, and we did a lot of grammar as part of the German curriculum, which means that I have a chance of figuring out other Romance languages somewhat, plus my background in linguistics helps on a structural level. My sister's much, much better at actually learning other languages, though.

I still have a pretty good working knowledge of C-64 Basic, mind you, including some of the important POKE and SYS commands.

Fingernail on 19/4/2017 at 07:48

Briefly tried to teach myself Mandarin (spoken only, not written!)

Found it very interesting, but also very difficult initially just to make the sounds (and tones especially). What I found hard, even as a musician with I guess a fairly good ear, was even hearing the difference between the tones - in English we use similar variations but it's just intonation giving a particular inflexion, rather than actually changing the meaning of a word. So definitely a gear-shift. But you can kind of fudge it and people will (hopefully) understand by context.

Still, I ground to a halt. I think I need proper classes or something.

Starker on 19/4/2017 at 07:57

I'm not really from anywhere, but I was born in the Soviet Union. I'm sort of an international bastard.

From the perspective of someone to whom both languages are equally alien, Japanese is not really all that difficult. Also, English was one of the first languages that I learned and learning languages gets easier over time.

N'Al on 19/4/2017 at 08:45

Quote Posted by Thirith

she also spoke to us in English, which we responded to in German, for some reason.

I don't know about you, but in my case it was because my surroundings were German. I lived in Germany until I was 16; even though my mum spoke to me in English everyone else spoke German, so responding in German - even to my mum - was simply the way it was done (TM).

For the past twenty years, though, I've mostly lived in English-speaking countries so nowadays I mostly speak to her in English - even when she talks in German, strangely enough. The only person I still regularly speak to in German is my sister.

Thirith on 19/4/2017 at 08:54

Quote Posted by N'Al

I definitely think that was it (and was mainly too busy/lazy to write this in my earlier post). It might've been different if my parents had spoken English to each other, but they didn't. However, we did go through all the "Learn English with the BBC" tapes in the early '80s, we had a bunch of Ladybird books that I read early on, and we got one of the first Betamax (!) video recorders and my uncle sent us regular shipments of stuff recorded off of TV. (One of my defining childhood experiences: we got Star Wars and watched it - but since I was the only one who actually liked it, my parents recorded something else on that tape the very next day. It's a miracle I still talk to my dad.)

Quote:

For the past twenty years, though, I've mostly lived in English-speaking countries so nowadays I mostly speak to her in English - even when she talks in German, strangely enough. The only person I still regularly speak to in German is my sister.

Because we always spoke German at home, it feels weird to me to speak English to my family, even when we're in England. Whenever I'm with my sister and we've got Swiss people there as well, we still talk to each other in High German, which weirds out the natives. The most awkward thing, though, was when I co-taught Creative Writing at Uni and my mum enrolled to take that course, so I was in an institutional position of critiquing her use of her mother tongue.

It's funny how much languages tie in with relationships. My wife's Swiss-Slovak, but since we met during our studies at the local English Department and always spoke English to each other, it feels decidedly weird to talk to her in any other language, except for the occasional code switch.

N'Al on 19/4/2017 at 09:13

Quote Posted by Thirith

One of my defining childhood experiences: we got Star Wars and watched it - but since I was the only one who actually liked it, my parents recorded something else on that tape the very next day. It's a miracle I still talk to my dad.

:wot:

My childhood Star Wars experience: it's responsible for the first and only time I ever got grounded by my parents.

Started watching A New Hope - German dub, unfortunately - at a friend's place. By the time it had finished I was already well beyond my parents' curfew. Whatever, I was so hooked I proceeded to watch the other two as well. I was veeeeery late home.