How do foreign languages work for you?

[michgc]

Originally Posted by Sydney123

Yes, I work for a major air carrier dealing with mostly international passengers.

That's cool. People who speak several languages fascinate me. I'm trying desperately to learn French, but it's hard as an adult learner unless you immerse yourself in the language. People who were given the opportunity to speak more than one language as a young child were truly given a gift!

[Sydney123]

Originally Posted by michgc

That's cool. People who speak several languages fascinate me. I'm trying desperately to learn French, but it's hard as an adult learner unless you immerse yourself in the language. People who were given the opportunity to speak more than one language as a young child were truly given a gift!

Agreed.. By the time my twin brother and I were 5 it was like we'd been speaking it forever.
Have you tried Rosetta Stone? A friend did really well with it. Amazon has French levels 1-5 for 229.00, but I know where to get it a lot cheaper. .. And it's legit.

[ellise11]

Hi,
Learning a new language takes time and dedication. Once you do, being fluent in a second language offers numerous benefits and opportunities. Learning a second language is exciting and beneficial at all ages. It offers practical, intellectual and many aspirational benefits.

[OwlAndSparrow]

The Defense Language Institute has some estimates about how long it usually takes a native English speaker to learn particular languages.

Category I languages take 575 to 600 hours of study. These include French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Scandinavian languages.

German falls between Category I and Category II. It takes about 750 hours.

Category II languages take about 1100 hours. These include Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Slavic languages, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Finnish, Khmer, Lao, Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, Baltic languages, Mongolian, Persian, Tagalog, Uzbek, Turkish, Xhosa, and Zulu. Of these, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Thai, and Mongolian are a bit harder than the others.

Category III languages take 2200 hours. These include Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean.


These numbers are based on the observations of expert teachers who have observed motivated students for many years, and for the most part, they seem to square with intuition.

For example, I can confirm that Vietnamese is extremely difficult, especially at first, though it gets a little easier for learners once they get comfortable with pronunciation. The two main difficulties are the different phonology, which makes it tough to hear what native Vietnamese speakers are saying and to distinguish between similar words, and the lack of cognates with English words. Even with all of that working against the learner, it's still only a Category II language, though it's one of the harder ones. It has a familiar word order, though it's even more isolating/analytic than English, so learners have to get used to expression most grammatical functions using only word order and function words.

Category III languages usually have something exceptionally tough going for them. Chinese (any dialect) has that infamously difficult writing system to slow things down. Otherwise, it wouldn't be any tougher than Vietnamese. Mandarin pronunciation is notably easier. Japanese and Korean have different word orders (subject-object-verb instead of subject-verb-object, as in English -- note that SOV is probably more common worldwide, and Into-European languages are the outlier in this respect) and a ton of grammatical particles to get used to. Expressing nuances in those languages requires intimate knowledge of the grammar.

Notice that I neglected to mention the things that people usually associate with the difficulties of those languages. Tones, present in Vietnamese and Chinese, are hardly a problem at all. The writing system in Japanese is not as hard as its reputation, even though it can seem like a formidable first hurdle for new learners. (Really, it should only take a week to learn the kana, and after that, things should feel pretty smooth for a while.) Kinship terms in Vietnamese aren't a huge deal. Honorific levels in Korean and Japanese aren't, either. These things have a reputation for being major difficulties simply because they show up early on when learning these languages. Really, though, they're just minor issues. The biggest issue is definitely the lack of cognates.

The easier languages (for an English speaker) all have lots of cognates. If you known English, you already know a lot of Spanish and German and Dutch and Norwegian. You just have to adjust to the parts you know and then build off of that. The most infamous grammatical pitfalls in European languages are probably the gendered nouns and the inflection systems, but those are mostly rules-based issues that you get used to after a while. Pronunciation of these languages is very easy.

A few of the others might have their own special difficulties. I don't know enough about Finnish or Turkish to know why they're easier than Korean and Japanese, which have similar structures. I have no idea what makes Arabic so tough.


All in all, learning a new language is a very difficult endeavor, and it requires either hundreds or thousands of hours of hard work if you attempt to do it as an adult. It's very rewarding, though. I feel closer to my home culture when I learn more Vietnamese, and once I've mastered it, I plan to use it as a springboard to other langauges in the region. Fluency in one language will mean the big hurdle making several of the others so tough -- the lack of cognates -- will no longer be an issue. Thus, I hope to pick up a couple other languages that also have a lot of borrowings from Classical Chinese. By the time I die, I hope to speak Cantonese and Japanese and maybe even Thai and/or Mandarin. It should be a fun journey.

Studying languages really opens the world up. I see that a lot of people seem to think it's a waste of time, but it's really not. It's especially good for kids to get familiar with another culture so they can view the world from a new perspective. It's really restrictive to think of the English-speaking world as the only real world, with everyone else some sort of barbarian who doesn't know how to speak properly. Foreign language education can help fix that.


Edit: Oh, I should add that my favorite ways to learn languages are to find whatever I can online for listening practice, parallel English and target language texts for reading practice, and electronic flashcard spaced repetition systems for vocabulary. Any method is probably going to require a lot of hard work, of course, but this is a mix of the methods that most people who love studying languages tend to endorse. It helps that I have a lot of relatives who can help me practice conversation, so I don't have to hire a tutor or other conversation partner.

[BLDSoon]

I grew up trilingual as i grew up in a foreign land. I primarily communicate in english as it is most familiar and comfortable but i will switch back and forth with ease. I think the only reason that is the case is due to being immersed in all three as a child and constantly hearing and having to speak all three. I do still have trouble with auto translating to english when i'm speaking in any of the other languages and then having to translate it in my head. Bilingual people will know what i mean. Sometimes its hard to explain the exact same thing and get the exact message across in another language.

So what do i do? I mix all three languages in one sentence sometimes. People that grew up where i did respond without blinking. Everyone else gets completely thrown off.