Learning Foreign Languages

Ophiolite · May 18, 2024

The curse of being a native English speaker is that there is less need to learn another language. Despite this I have made multiple attempts to do so. All have failed. I am curious as to what languages other members may speak, including those for whom English is a second, third, or even fourth language. For the record, here are the languages I have attempted to learn (and failed), in no particular order: French, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Latin, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Indonesian, Mandarin.
These failures frustrate me, as I think being monolingual restricts the freedom of our thought, channeling it into a single perspective. To those who are fluent in multiple languages, do you find that aspect to be an advantage?

Lost4words · May 18, 2024

Took me quite some time to learn English. I kept slobbering trying to get the words out! I ruined quite a few exercise books in the early days!!

Tuur · May 18, 2024

Technically I speak English, but the grammar checkers have a different opinion.

At one time I knew French, and while forgetting it would find myself understanding French until the moment I realized "This is French." Then I no longer understood it.

Would like to know Spanish. The only thing stopping me is sloth.

dzheremi · May 20, 2024

English is my first language, though Spanish is not far behind, since I've spoken it since approximately age 4 and can't remember a time when I didn't know it. So I was raised in two languages thanks to my grandmother being from Mexico and making sure that her grandchildren grew up speaking it. My parents, however, were both monolingual English speakers. In practice, this meant having to translate for my mother from a very young age (including some places where it was super illegal, like the doctor's office she worked at; nobody cared about this aspect back then, of course).

Since about age 19 I set about learning Russian, which I ended up studying for 6 years but haven't really spoken since then). I would say it is passively still in there, but I need to be back in an environment where I would need to depend on it to 'reactivate' it. Most recently (by which I mean in college, almost 20 years ago) I took a year of Arabic classes, which in the U.S. basically just means enough to read and write, but not really enough for much vocabulary-building. That would come later via the Coptic Orthodox Church from 2009 to present, which has been very helpful in some ways (Egyptian Arabic is the most widely-understood Arabic dialect, so it's a good one to have a lot of exposure to), and somewhat unhelpful in others (you can guess how weird it is to essentially speak and understand 'Church Arabic' -- i.e., to have the liturgy and various 'churchy' things down pat, but to still struggle with other topics in the language.

I'm not sure what aspect you're referring to in the opening post when you ask about "that aspect", OP, but I do find that having knowledge of multiple languages is helpful. Even more so, I'd bet, when they are genetically unrelated to each other (as Arabic is to the Indo-European languages) or very distant relatives (as I would say Spanish and Russian are; clearly related insofar as they are both Indo-European, but there's really not a lot of crossover), since it is in some sense 'easier' (for me, anyway) to look at them from a macro level to see how they all work, and make connections between them in ways that help me learn more about and in each one. (Though that could also be the training in linguistics, since I have a master's degree in the subject.)

durangodawood · May 20, 2024

Ophiolite said:
.... Japanese.....

What specific efforts did you try for Japanese?

Back in 2019 I decided I wanted to go bike tour in Japan, by myself, in less touristed areas where not a lot of people speak English. And I had 30 days between conceiving this plan and getting on the plane. I tried working though my phrasebook every night for 30 min. Plus some youtubes. it all went out the window when I got there.

Ophiolite · May 20, 2024

durangodawood said:
What specific efforts did you try for Japanese?

Very limited. I was working on a Japanese rig in Indonesia. The senior drilling contractor personnel were Japanese, but the bulk of the crew were a mix of Americans and Indonesians. One of the Japanese taught me a few phrases and I followed that up with some rather low energy study of a Teach Yourself Japanese book. No YouTube options then! I think I gave up in favour of trying Indonesian which, for me at least, was a vastly easier language. I did get to the point where I could hold very basic exchanges in that.

jacks · May 20, 2024

I also have a very difficult time with foreign languages. I was able to develop a basic understanding of Mandarin and know enough to get around. (I believe it's the most spoken language in the world.) Since my hearing is going I'm now learning ASL, though not very useful since virtually know one knows it.

How about learning Toki Pona? It only has 120 works...I think they might of upped to 137, but it still seems like perhaps the easiest language to learn.

Ophiolite · May 21, 2024

jacks said:
How about learning Toki Pona? It only has 120 works...I think they might of upped to 137, but it still seems like perhaps the easiest language to learn.

Intriguing! I had never heard of that. I shall look into it. My intial reaction is a suspicion that while the words could be learned quickly the challenge would lie in expressing nuanced, or technical concepts. I imagine its use and development could shed light on the origin of langauge.

Chesterton · May 21, 2024

Ophiolite said:
The curse of being a native English speaker is that there is less need to learn another language.

I see that as a blessing rather than a curse.

I studied Spanish, but am not fluent because I'm lazy and had no need to be fluent. I'd recommend you take a second try at Spanish. The rules of pronunciation and grammar are simple and consistent compared to English, where almost every rule has arbitrary exceptions.

I agree that different languages give us different perspectives on how we think.

Ophiolite · May 21, 2024

Chesterton said:
I see that as a blessing rather than a curse.

I studied Spanish, but am not fluent because I'm lazy and had no need to be fluent. I'd recommend you take a second try at Spanish. The rules of pronunciation and grammar are simple and consistent compared to English, where almost every rule has arbitrary exceptions.

I agree that different languages give us different perspectives on how we think.

I like spanish for the reasons you mention and also because it is pleasant language to listen to. I've taken the occassional stab at it over the years, but the sad truth I am also lazy. I did an intensive course on it in Mexico when I worked there briefly and was actually getting somewhere. Unfortunately the Mexicans I was working with spoke fluent English and generally insisted in using it rather than suffer my painful attempts in their language. Consequently over the next several months I lost most of what I had learned. Meanwhile, my wife who did not have the advantage of the intensive course, picked it up from speaking to shopkeepers and the maid and neighbours, and was conversationally fluent when we left. Then again she grew up speaking Malay and English fluently, Cantonese reasonably, and later added passable German. Some people have the knack - or maybe it is they put in the necessary effort.

durangodawood · May 21, 2024

Chesterton said:
.....The rules of pronunciation and grammar are simple and consistent compared to English, where almost every rule has arbitrary exceptions.

English. A mush of 2 different languages.

Shall we go for a walk.... or a promenade?

Chesterton · May 21, 2024

durangodawood said:
English. A mush of 2 different languages.

Shall we go for a walk.... or a promenade?

Yes.

jayem · May 21, 2024

The university where I live offers adult classes in conversational Spanish. I've thought about taking them. Not exactly cheap, but some Spanish fluency will likely be useful in the years to come. And I can watch Telemundo to maintain what I've learned.

I'm reminded of a saying attributed to one of the old King Louis's of France: He spoke French in his court, English to the British ambassador, Italian to women, Spanish to his servants, Latin to God, and German to his horse. :oldthumbsup:

essentialsaltes · May 22, 2024

I took German in high school, and though I've forgotten a lot, I can still get by fairly easily doing regular tourist-y things. I apparently have enough German ancestry that the locals often address me in German or hand me a German menu (but my spouse gets the English one).

Living in LA, I have only a sadly limited amount of Spanglish, and it is now adulterated by trips to France and Italy, so that I have some sort of rudimentary blenderized born-out-of-wedlock-ized Romance language probably worse than Salvatore in Name of the Rose.

¿Donde esta il Vaticano, s'il vous plaît?

Tuur · May 22, 2024

durangodawood said:
English. A mush of 2 different languages.

Shall we go for a walk.... or a promenade?

Perhaps more than two. English is probably a pidgin language, and say that without a slur.

That said, there are shades of meaning to all words. A stroll has more leisurely connotations that a walk. A promenade has the air of fanciness about it. Not grasping the shades of meaning in French made some French language magazines difficult to follow. Oh, we could following the definition of the words, but not the shades of meaning. Had we (the class) been fluent, the hue of different words would likely have been obvious.

durangodawood · May 22, 2024

Tuur said:
Perhaps more than two. English is probably a pidgin language, and say that without a slur.

That said, there are shades of meaning to all words. A stroll has more leisurely connotations that a walk. A promenade has the air of fanciness about it. Not grasping the shades of meaning in French made some French language magazines difficult to follow. Oh, we could following the definition of the words, but not the shades of meaning. Had we (the class) been fluent, the hue of different words would likely have been obvious.

For sure. Thats half the "fun" of it.

Ophiolite · May 22, 2024

jayem said:
I'm reminded of a saying attributed to one of the old King Louis's of France: He spoke French in his court, English to the British ambassador, Italian to women, Spanish to his servants, Latin to God, and German to his horse.

Apologies in advance. Are you sure it was his horse and not Marshal Ney?

Ophiolite · May 22, 2024

dzheremi said:
English is my first language, though Spanish is not far behind, since I've spoken it since approximately age 4 and can't remember a time when I didn't know it. So I was raised in two languages thanks to my grandmother being from Mexico and making sure that her grandchildren grew up speaking it. My parents, however, were both monolingual English speakers. In practice, this meant having to translate for my mother from a very young age (including some places where it was super illegal, like the doctor's office she worked at; nobody cared about this aspect back then, of course).

Since about age 19 I set about learning Russian, which I ended up studying for 6 years but haven't really spoken since then). I would say it is passively still in there, but I need to be back in an environment where I would need to depend on it to 'reactivate' it. Most recently (by which I mean in college, almost 20 years ago) I took a year of Arabic classes, which in the U.S. basically just means enough to read and write, but not really enough for much vocabulary-building. That would come later via the Coptic Orthodox Church from 2009 to present, which has been very helpful in some ways (Egyptian Arabic is the most widely-understood Arabic dialect, so it's a good one to have a lot of exposure to), and somewhat unhelpful in others (you can guess how weird it is to essentially speak and understand 'Church Arabic' -- i.e., to have the liturgy and various 'churchy' things down pat, but to still struggle with other topics in the language.

I'm not sure what aspect you're referring to in the opening post when you ask about "that aspect", OP, but I do find that having knowledge of multiple languages is helpful. Even more so, I'd bet, when they are genetically unrelated to each other (as Arabic is to the Indo-European languages) or very distant relatives (as I would say Spanish and Russian are; clearly related insofar as they are both Indo-European, but there's really not a lot of crossover), since it is in some sense 'easier' (for me, anyway) to look at them from a macro level to see how they all work, and make connections between them in ways that help me learn more about and in each one. (Though that could also be the training in linguistics, since I have a master's degree in the subject.)

Somehow I missed this when you first posted it - sorry for the delayed response. Your comment about being in the right environment to "reactivate" your knowledge reminded me of a similar experience. I did get far enough with Indonesian to hold very basic conversations, ordering food, asking for directions, enquiring after friends and family, but this capacity faded quickly after leaving Indonesia. Three or so years later I returned on holiday with my native Malay speaking girlfriend. (Malay and Indonesian have about the same relationship as US English and British English.) By the time we got to the hotel I was chatting away with the taxi driver in Indonesian. When we left Indonesia a week later I was unable to speak it by the time the flight landed in Singapore.

As regard to the aspect I was speaking of, I think that some languages lend themselves more easily to discussion of certain topics than others. Whether this is a matter of vocabulary, grammar, or convention I don't know, but it seems to me a reasonable presumption. Moreover, I seem to recall reading passing references to this over the years, though I failed to take note, or follow them up. For example, there is the claim about how many words for snow the Innuit have. Certainly they have fewer than some claims suggest, but certainly more than in English. That must facilitate discussions about the nature, impact and importance of snow.

Chesterton · May 22, 2024

Ophiolite said:
For example, there is the claim about how many words for snow the Innuit have. Certainly they have fewer than some claims suggest, but certainly more than in English. That must facilitate discussions about the nature, impact and importance of snow.

C. S. Lewis wrote a book called "The Four Loves", based on the fact that Greek has four words for love, where English only has one. We can say "I love my father", "I love my wife", "I love science", "I love pizza", but obviously we don't love these things in the same way.

dzheremi · May 22, 2024

Ophiolite said:
Somehow I missed this when you first posted it - sorry for the delayed response. Your comment about being in the right environment to "reactivate" your knowledge reminded me of a similar experience. I did get far enough with Indonesian to hold very basic conversations, ordering food, asking for directions, enquiring after friends and family, but this capacity faded quickly after leaving Indonesia. Three or so years later I returned on holiday with my native Malay speaking girlfriend. (Malay and Indonesian have about the same relationship as US English and British English.) By the time we got to the hotel I was chatting away with the taxi driver in Indonesian. When we left Indonesia a week later I was unable to speak it by the time the flight landed in Singapore.

Yep! That's a common phenomenon. At least it was working when you needed it to.

Ophiolite said:
As regard to the aspect I was speaking of, I think that some languages lend themselves more easily to discussion of certain topics than others. Whether this is a matter of vocabulary, grammar, or convention I don't know, but it seems to me a reasonable presumption. Moreover, I seem to recall reading passing references to this over the years, though I failed to take note, or follow them up. For example, there is the claim about how many words for snow the Innuit have. Certainly they have fewer than some claims suggest, but certainly more than in English. That must facilitate discussions about the nature, impact and importance of snow.

British-American linguist and University of Edinburgh lecturer Geoffrey K. Pullum published a book of collected essays in 1991 called The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, the title essay of which covered this exact situation. It turns out the 'answer' to the question of how many words the Inuit have for snow (which I won't spoil here -- primarily because I don't know where my copy of this book is right now, and I can't remember off the top of my head...) requires a dive into the thorny issue of what exactly qualifies as a 'word', cross-linguistically. This is a question that does not have a universally-accepted, pat answer, and many books and articles have been written about it. Suffice it to say that the number of words for snow in Inuit languages is far, far fewer than what people who do not speak an Inuit language tend to imagine, and that the popularity of this idea hides a somewhat less numerically-impressive (but still very interesting) reality. If I recall correctly, it is shown in the essay that there are more individual words for types of snow in English than in Inuit languages, again owing to the difference between how English and Inuit words 'work'.

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