Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
- 176
- 3
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Language Learning
I've always loved languages. I had aspirations when I was younger to become a polyglot. I had (according to the DLAB) a high aptitude for language learning.
Unfortunately, I have also always been a lazy student, and so initial enthusiasm always ran into the reality that learning languages, especially to anything approaching fluency, is hard. (Yes, I know a lot of you non-Americans grew up in multilingual environments and spoke two or three languages by the time you were in high school. Americans generally have to make a serious effort, outside of our sparse language offerings in high school, to acquire another language.)
Over many years, I have acquired bits and pieces of nearly a dozen languages, and true proficiency in none of them. I can read Cyrillic, Hangul, Arabic, Hiragana and Katakana and a few Kanji. I know enough Russian, German, Korean, and Japanese to express my ignorance.
Over the years, I have dabbled or studied in:
French: One semester in junior high school. I remember "Marie est une fille" and "je nais parle pas Francais."
German: In my opinion, the easiest language for English speakers to learn. With my rusty high school German, I retain the basic grammar and can still occasionally pick up phrases, and if I studied in earnest and built up my vocabulary, I think I could quickly reach at least conversational fluency.
Russian: Oh my god. Second hardest language I ever studied. I began studying Russian because my first girlfriend was Russian, and I took a few semesters in college. What are these cases? How do Russians even verb? And what am I supposed to do with my tongue? (My girlfriend endlessly made fun of my pronunciation, said I couldn't even pronounce her name in Russian correctly.) I am never, ever in a million years going to read War and Peace in the original Russian. (I am actually reading the Maude translation now.)
Irish: Too bad @FarNearEverywhere isn't around anymore to make fun of me. I took a semester of Irish Gaelic in college. Fucking incomprehensible. I remember zero grammar and maybe two words (including my username). They should never have used the English alphabet for written Irish; borrowing Chinese characters, or just refining ogham, would have made as much sense.
Esperanto: Yes, I also took a semester of Esperanto in college, for fun. One of the first conlangs, it was meant to be an easy-to-learn universal language, made simple with the absence of irregular verbs or complicated grammatical rules or any of the other things that make most languages difficult. It still has a fairly large global community of enthusiasts (though maybe now they are outnumbered by fluent speakers of Klingon or Dothraki), most of whom are still living the pre-USSR socialist dream. Fun fact: William Shatner starred in a 1966 horror film called Incubus, with dialog entirely in Esperanto. You can watch the whole movie (yes, including William Shatner speaking in Esperanto!) on YouTube.
Japanese: Took several semesters in college. Did terribly, but despite not practicing it since then, I can still read hiragana and katakana and remember a few kanji, and even manage some basic polite phrases. Although many people say Japanese is hard, I actually found it surprisingly - I would not say easy, but practical. There are no sounds in Japanese that do not exist in English, so it's not hard to pronounce, and I find the grammar to actually be pretty logical. The hardest part is the many different pronouns and inflections to indicate different politeness levels, and of course, fucking kanji. Chinese characters that the Japanese borrowed, much the same way Irish borrowed Latin characters, but to be literate in Japanese you need to know both the Japanese and the Chinese readings, and Japanese elementary school students are expected to know over a thousand. I remember maybe 20.
Korean: I never studied it very intensely, but I can still read Hangul (which is much easier than Japanese hiragana and katakana). The funny thing about Korean and Japanese is that linguists say they are completely unrelated languages. I suspect some cultural bias is at play here (Japanese and Koreans accuse each other of stealing pretty much everything from one another). It's true that Korean and Japanese share very little vocabulary (unlike, say, English and German or Spanish and French), but I found the grammar to be very similar.
Arabic: The language I have the most experience with. It's hard to pronounce, many sounds are difficult to distinguish for English speakers, the script is difficult and non-standardized, the grammar is complicated, and verbs have a billion different inflections. Also, you usually learn Modern Standard Arabic (or "Fusha") in class, which is basically media Arabic that zero native speakers actually use in conversation. Dialectal Arabic is broken into several different regional variants that are sometimes mutually unintelligible.
Of course I hadn't actually practiced any of them in many years, and language skills deteriorate rapidly without practice. So I occasionally looked at my shelves of books and told myself someday, I would brush up and get back into language learning. Realistically, though, it was never going to happen.
But recently I got on a language kick again. It started with DuoLingo ("Let's see how well I do with all those languages I studied back in the day") and now I am seriously cracking books again, watching YouTube videos, and even considering italki lessons.
I am concentrating on Arabic and Japanese. (Yes, for really serious language learning I'd stick with one; expert opinion is mixed on the effectiveness of studying multiple languages at once, but there's no question that it means dividing your time.) If I can stay motivated, I have decided to set a goal of someday achieving a CEFR level of C1 in Arabic. (Currently, I am, generously, at A2-B1.) I would like to do the same in Japanese, but right now I am actually doing a lot of Arabic practice and just dabbling in Japanese.
If I stick with it, I may post updates on my progress.
You read accounts of famous 'geniuses' of old and many of them are noted for being fluent in like 3+ languages, often starting at an early age.
I often wonder how many of these accounts are hyperbolized, since in my experience just flat out learning languages from scratch is a miserable task with only marginal success.
It feels like in principle it should be possible to learn some 'universal' rules that let you see the congruence common to all languages and thus make it easier to learn new ones and translate between one's you already know, but in practice the intricacies end up making each one so different as to feel almost incomparable.
There are a lot of confounding factors. If the languages are closely related e.g. Spanish, Italian, French, Latin, then it isn't too hard, particularly if you are a native speaker of one of them. If you truly, absolutely need to master a language for work as an adult e.g. English for immigrants to the US, then you aren't going to hear many complaints like "oh, I'm bad at languages" that you get from monolingual Americans or Brits. It's just that most English-speakers are never put in a situation where knowing a foreign language is essential, so the opportunity cost for them is too great.
I grew up in a State Department household (my parents speak 9 languages between them) that hopped from country to country so of course I'm biased, but I don't find learning a language at least to the basic "can barter for groceries and ask for directions" level to be that miserable of an experience. Sure, you might sound like a fool who can't conjugate verbs, but it can still be a lifesaver if you happen to be stranded in a third world country without any other means of communication with the locals. The hardest grammatical rules tend to come relatively far along the path of diminishing returns when it comes to language learning. Pronunciation can be trickier, but I would only expect that to be an absolute communication barrier at first in something like Chinese or Arabic.
I'm not sure what sorts of universal rules you are thinking of, but I find that learning the linguistic terminology for things like verb tenses, noun declensions, particles, etc. does help a lot when starting a new language, so I'm glad I went through the traditional schooling approach with a grammar textbook for at least one language. Of course you will encounter more new things the farther you stray from your mother tongue, but that's to be expected.
I'm just saying that I've worked on learning the basics of Japanese, Russian, and German and dear lord do the rules you learn in one mostly NOT help you learning the others.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link