[HN Gopher] When do people learn languages? (2002)
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When do people learn languages? (2002)
Author : hwayne
Score : 34 points
Date : 2021-12-24 18:56 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zompist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zompist.com)
| guy98238710 wrote:
| The article is a bit too pessimistic about bilingual homes. Most
| people in the world are bilingual. That would not be the case if
| people quickly forgot one of their native languages. Language
| death is not that fast. It is however true that utterly useless
| languages, especially those taught in schools, are abandoned as
| soon as the teaching stops. Success rates would be higher if we
| limited ourselves to one local and one global language, English
| being the obvious global language.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Computational Linguist here (by training, though not frequent
| practice) so I had to work through Language Acquisition courses
| in the process.
|
| Children learn language by necessity. They cannot translate needs
| and desires into meaningful results if they don't. Once they have
| the basics, they learn a lot more from peers (preschool) than
| parents: Adult speech patterns differ too much from the simpler
| language model of young children so it is their interactions with
| other young children where they learn pieces of each others'
| models. Pieces that they don't easily receive from their parents'
| speech patterns. Vocabulary explodes when they hit preschool even
| though parents and older siblings may speak to them just as much.
| This is first-language acquisition, and I hope it's obvious that
| this is an extremely simplified and incomplete explanation. As a
| side note, COVID is really screwing with this process for young
| children who are now far behind in this process. Research has
| shown that language delay can have lifelong impacts.
|
| SLA (second language acquisition) has many interesting aspects
| beyond what I can explain here, but I will say that the ease of
| learning-- _all else being equal_ (a very important caveat)--
| source language and target language play a large part. Languages
| that share similar phonemes tend to be a little easier, ditto for
| syntactic structure. It makes the exercise a bit more about
| mapping lexical entries in one language to another, along with
| learning declinations. Going from a non-tonal language to a tonal
| language is harder, though interestingly musicians may have an
| easier time. Conversely, tonal to non-tonal may be easier. Also
| interesting-- speakers of tonal languages tend to have higher
| rates of perfect pitch.
|
| True bilingualism-- learning two languages from birth-- is its
| own separate category of language acquisition. It's not uncommon
| for the learner to never quite learn either language as well as a
| single language learner. However the process, and learned
| facility for code switching, carries it's own cognitive
| advantages.
|
| Once again though, all of this is a highly simplified and
| incomplete explanation. There are plenty of very important
| factors that I'm leaving out here-- my comments here are probably
| biased towards those aspects of language acquisition that I find
| most interesting.
| icouldbebetter wrote:
| > True bilingualism-- learning two languages from birth-- is
| its own separate category of language acquisition. It's not
| uncommon for the learner to never quite learn either language
| as well as a single language learner. However the process, and
| learned facility for code switching, carries it's own cognitive
| advantages.
|
| This is an interesting point indeed as it pertains to my
| experience. I believe I learned both English and Arabic from
| birth, however, my Arabic skills have atrophied and my English
| is definitely stronger but it could use some improvement.
| However, Levantine Arabic phonemes not found in English at all
| come naturally to me and when immersed in my home country I
| would be able to pick up vocabulary quickly and to some degree
| reading skills although I have very little education in that
| aspect.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Yep, that fits. And it's been a while since this coursework
| so I may be wrong, but IIRC one advantage of being multi-
| lingual and specifically bilingual is the ability to more
| easily shift to different systems of abstractions. I think
| the wider range of idiomatic metaphors etc. also presented a
| more multi-perspective mode of viewing the world. Somewhat on
| that topic, I can highly recommend the book _" Metaphors We
| Live By", by George Lakoff. Truly a fantastic book &
| revelatory in showing just how extensively we _don't* use
| literal language and instead rely quite heavily on metaphor.
|
| One brief example is to say "up" when the literal is
| "increase". "Up" is a physical directions, yet we might say
| "My bank account balance keeps going up". Really, the $
| number is increasing though. Metaphor is everywhere.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I think languages are great to learn, as long as it's an
| elective.
|
| I legitimately had to go to a less prestigious college since I
| couldn't pass French at Community College. In hindsight I really
| should of took Spanish and practiced with people in my
| neighborhood.
|
| Unless you had a childhood which provided you opportunities to
| study languages it's very hard to pass a language class.
|
| That said, I take private Chinese lessons and it's been very fun.
| I even went out with a girl because of it( she's not Chinese, but
| she found it very interesting!).
| JohnCurran wrote:
| > Concentrate on learning words, not on grammar
|
| I have to disagree with this. If you focus on just learning words
| in a target language, you just become a foreign language
| dictionary. Knowing how to say "train station" in Spanish doesn't
| help when you can't use it properly in a sentence.
|
| I think Michel Thomas has a fairly succinct take on the topic:
| "If you know how to handle verbs you know how to handle the
| language. Everything else is just vocabulary". Although he is a
| somewhat controversial figure in regards to claimed past
| achievements, his system for language learning works well. Don't
| worry about amassing large amounts of vocabulary at the outset,
| just use words like "it" (Where is it / What is it / I can do
| it). You can swap out "it" for any other noun you learn later on.
| cgag wrote:
| Anyone who learns enough vocabulary to be something resembling
| fluent (say, can comfortably watch tv shows or read books in
| that language), will be good at grammar far before they learn
| the 10k+ words they need to know. You can't consume enough of
| the language to acquire that kind of vocabulary and not have a
| decent intuition for the grammar.
|
| I don't advocate ignoring grammar, but you really just need
| awareness of the basics, not to spend time doing drills or
| filling in blanks.
| aix1 wrote:
| What really jumped out at me in your comment is that its
| definition of fluency (watch tv shows, read books) focuses on
| comprehension and appears to completely ignore being able to
| _produce_ anything in the target language.
| yosito wrote:
| For sure! When I learn a langauge, I find word frequency list
| "100 most common verbs", "100 most common nouns", etc. You
| really don't need more vocabulary than that. You can find a way
| to commumicate anything with a relatively small vocabulary.
| Once you have a base vocabulary, you can start practicing
| grammar and actual usage, and your vocabulary will naturally
| skyrocket without any additional vocabulary memorization.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Verbs become a bit tricky when they are heavily inflected,
| with the most common having the most irregularities.
| Collisions become a problem too, it's almost as if a heavily
| inflected language, with a fairly consistent root vocabulary,
| quickly runs out of distinct syllable combinations. E.g.
| Portuguese, and presumably the other romance languages.
| Compare the past perfect of 'to go' and 'to be' in Portuguese
| - they are identical for all persons.
|
| Getting the wrong inflection ruins any sense you're trying to
| make!
| throwaway55421 wrote:
| This is true for speaking but listening is impossible.
|
| The vast majority of people do not speak using the simple
| terms that are in those 100 top lists.
|
| As an example - I would guess that from my previous sentence,
| "vast", "majority", "simple", "terms", "lists" and possibly
| more would not be present, and that's in only one relatively
| simple sentence.
|
| I can "speak in" probably ten languages, but I'd only say I
| can really _speak_ bidirectionally in one or possibly two.
| BossingAround wrote:
| > You really don't need more vocabulary than that.
|
| What do you want to do with the language? Do you want to be
| able to book a hotel? Because if that's your goal, then
| you're probably correct. Then again, you can probably do that
| in English anywhere in the world.
|
| However, if your goal is to communicate, you won't be able to
| get by with 200 words. Just try to watch an episode of
| Friends with a non-native speaker.
|
| > "Just a pinch!"
|
| A: "What is a _pinch_ "?
|
| B: "A little"
|
| A: "Ah! They should say little!"
|
| (Though the conversation above is highly contrived since you
| wouldn't be able to understand the vast majority of Friends
| with at the very least 2000 - 3000 words)
| louhike wrote:
| Exactly and that's the big problem when people talk about
| learning a language. For some, to learn a language is to be
| able to get by on a trip. Sure you can do that on 3 months.
| But being able to have conversations on advanced topics,
| read books or watch movies? Good luck, unless you spend 6
| hours everyday, immerse yourselves and use good ressources.
| And you'll actually probably be at the level of a middle
| schooler. Really learn a language is quite hard (pitch
| accent, new sounds, specific grammar, concepts which can't
| be translated). And even experts spent years to master one.
| [deleted]
| yosito wrote:
| I've learned two languages other than my native language
| (English), and use both actively. I'm probably categorized as a
| "language nerd" because I wasn't required to learn either. But I
| do agree with almost everything in this article, especially that
| kids aren't any better at learning languages than adults. I will
| say that one of the biggest keys for me in learning a new
| language is to start using it as soon as possible, and to do as
| much as I can in the target language. I think most languages
| could be learned in this way with very few formal classes. In
| essence, you trick your brain into thinking that the language is
| necessary, even though the reality might be that you could get by
| without it, and your brain will just start picking things up
| seemimgly through osmosis.
| BossingAround wrote:
| There has been _so much_ written on this topic. I don 't think
| people actually agree on what's the best way to learn a foreign
| language, and that includes language teachers. Various methods I
| have encountered include:
|
| * Focus on reading text and vocabulary. Grammar will follow
| naturally from the text.
|
| * Focus on grammar. Vocabulary is a detail.
|
| * Focus on speaking. Speaking is the key to fluency. Speak to as
| many natives as possible. (Note: this can be incredibly annoying
| to said native speakers)
|
| * Focus on writing. This is the best way to retain both
| vocabulary and grammar. Speaking will follow when you have
| vocabulary and grammar memorized.
|
| * Focus on listening/hearing. Understanding is the key to
| communication. Remembering grammar and vocabulary will follow
| naturaly, e.g. from TV shows, games, movies, songs, etc. in the
| target language.
|
| I could go on and on and on. Seriously. My advice is two-fold:
|
| * Stick with a language. Whatever your method is, don't give up.
|
| * If your method doesn't work for you, change it. If your teacher
| doesn't work for you, change it (e.g. textbook, school, course,
| TV show, whatever the "teacher" is).
|
| It's that simple. Truth to be told, learning a language is mostly
| hard work. There is no secret. There is no "aha, you've been
| doing it wrong, you could have learned Chinese in 3 months!"
| method.
|
| For example, using Anki might be useful, and you might find it
| fun, but it will not magically make you remember anything. And,
| even if you remember something in the context of Anki, you might
| not recognize it in the wild (e.g. in a text, song, or a game).
| Alternatively, you might not be able to produce it (e.g. passive
| recollection is very different from active production of the
| language).
|
| I think the best one can do when learning a language is to simply
| stick with it. In the grand scheme of things, whether it will
| take you 4 years, 5 years, or 6 years to _feel_ fluent is fairly
| insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It will, most
| likely, be years though.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| There's not one method, because there's not one type of brain,
| not one type of learner.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Also, not one type of language.
| dheera wrote:
| > aha, you've been doing it wrong, you could have learned
| Chinese in 3 months!
|
| Honestly there kind of is, you just have to put yourself in a
| "sink or swim" situation as the article says. You'll be
| surprised how far you can get in 3 months if you are in such a
| situation.
|
| Also, don't believe any crap when someone tells you "X language
| is hard". This is perhaps the biggest myth I have ever seen.
| It's only hard if you think it is, and if you try to learn
| everything by rules and flashcards, which native speakers don't
| generally do. You can also try to make anything look hard that
| actually isn't. I find people in the US especially love to talk
| about how hard Chinese (and also Japanese and a few others) is
| but it isn't particularly different in difficulty than English
| or any other major world language. 5-year-olds can handle it,
| they just weren't told it's hard, they just needed to speak it
| if they wanted to argue and get their stolen pencil back.
| kevinstubbs wrote:
| Any grammar is surmountable, but the languages that are truly
| hard are ones which have sounds or consonant clusters that
| your native language(s) don't. For example, learning Georgian
| as a native English/Italian speaker.. I could hardly even say
| basic words like "forest" (t'ke), "water" (tsqali), or "frog"
| (baqaqi) for the first few months. Look up the q letter, or
| listen and judge for yourself baqaqi cqalshi qiqinebs (the
| frog cries in the water) Hear natives speak it: https://forvo
| .com/word/%E1%83%91%E1%83%90%E1%83%A7%E1%83%90%...
|
| The one by shaburgiorgi is the most faithfully enunciated,
| while the others are what you would more likely hear
| casually/in conversation.
| dheera wrote:
| > I could hardly even say
|
| If I may take the liberty to nitpick, that's a thing only
| an adult would say. A 5-year-old would just try.
| kevinstubbs wrote:
| That's a pretty unforgiving interpretation of what I
| wrote. Sounds came out of my mouth and people didn't
| understand what I was trying to say.
| dheera wrote:
| > Sounds came out of my mouth and people didn't
| understand what I was trying to say.
|
| Right, and as a 5 year old who wants your pencil back,
| you find another way to say it. If you don't know how to
| say "backpack" you say "bag". If you don't know how to
| say "foyer" you say "that place near the door". If you
| don't know how to say "pencil" you say "pen" or "writing
| stick".
|
| I realize it was an unforgiving interpretation. That was
| directed at the topic and not you personally. That's kind
| of my point. If you have a sink-or-swim attitude or
| situation you _will_ learn it.
| bsder wrote:
| > A 5-year-old would just try.
|
| And a 5 year old would be cut a lot of slack for screwing
| it up.
|
| One of the issues with learning _anything_ as an adult is
| that other adults are viciously unaccommodating. Foreign
| language learning turns that up to 11.
|
| Personally, I think this is _the_ primary issue with
| adult learning. You have to be a very strong personality
| to have an intrinsic motivation that will cause you to
| put in long hours of work because you aren 't going to
| get any external motivation for a _very_ long time.
| dheera wrote:
| Interesting take. Are they?
|
| I know adults in the US are often sadly viciously
| unaccomodating of broken English, but I feel that isn't
| the case in most of the (especially non-English-speaking)
| world, where any attempts to speak the local language are
| usually very much welcomed.
|
| There are some places where the locals tend to speak good
| enough English that if they realize you speak English
| better than their language they'll viciously insist on
| speaking English to get business done, but that is
| sometimes mitigated if you place yourself in a more rural
| area or less cosmopolitan city where English isn't
| common.
| throwaway55421 wrote:
| This doesn't match my experience at all, you just have to
| have a good sense of humour.
|
| One of the first things I learn in a language is how to
| say some variant of "I'm a little puppy", spring chicken,
| I speak like a 2 year old, etc.
|
| You're never going to sound like the Queen, no-one
| reasonable expects that.
| Tomte wrote:
| Even listening is hard.
|
| I spent quite some time with the Swedish retroflex
| fricative, and always heard something else than my teacher
| described. I finally settled on learning it by IPA, i.e.
| learning where exactly the tongue needs to be.
|
| Even harder are Russian consonants for me: I can try as
| much as I want, but I will probably never be able to
| distinguish Russian hard and soft consonants, even with a
| Russian speaker saying them slowly and in contrast (and
| with lots of "you're kidding me, right? Those sounds are
| nothing alike").
| kevinstubbs wrote:
| I can completely relate to everything you wrote haha. I
| never mastered sh (which I guess is retroflex fricative?)
| vs shch and I've completely given up on hard vs. soft
| sounds in Russian because this
|
| >and with lots of "you're kidding me, right? Those sounds
| are nothing alike"
|
| Is too true. With practice and listening, my
| pronunciation is naturally improving over time, but I
| really don't know how to improve it in a faster way. Do
| you think learning and practicing IPA would do the trick,
| like you did with Swedish?
| jcranmer wrote:
| There's a variety of factors that make language easier or
| harder to learn. Broadly speaking, you can divide them into
| writing, grammar, vocabulary, and phonology.
|
| So there's languages that are hard to read and write. People
| love to talk about how poor English is when it comes to
| correspondence between written letters and sounds, but
| honestly, it's not close to the head of the pact. There are
| some Southeast Asian languages today where the gap between
| written word and speech is very much akin to writing Latin
| but speaking French. Japanese kanji is a moderately different
| level of burden, as every kanji has multiple different
| pronunciations, and it's at the point where--even for native
| speakers--it's not particularly expected that you can read
| someone's name and know how to pronounce it. Of course, for
| those of who use Latin scripts, any language that also uses
| Latin script is going to be easier to learn than one that
| doesn't.
|
| Phonology can be a challenging aspect, because several
| languages don't have the same phonotactics as English does
| (or insert whatever native language here). There are multiple
| Slavic or Chinese sounds that my ears would process as "sh"
| and yet would be considered different consonants. Some
| phonemes are legitimately more difficult to pronounce--
| pronouncing click consonants literally scars your vocal
| tract. Some languages demand that you pay attention to tones,
| creakiness, breathiness, or aspiration, none of which is
| phonologically relevant to English or most Indo-European
| language.
|
| Grammar and vocabulary are, as you imply, pretty mild
| concerns at the end of the day. They're not difficult enough
| to impede language acquisition, but there is actually some
| evidence to suggest that a language that becomes a major
| second language in the process goes through stronger
| grammatical simplification than their closest linguistic
| relatives--consider how much simpler English, Swahili, Malay,
| or Persian are compared to "normal" languages in their
| respective families.
| dheera wrote:
| So yes, I'm aware of analysis like this.
|
| I think my point is, even "polluting" your brain with
| analysis like this of a language will make it actually
| hard. For example
|
| > Japanese kanji is a moderately different level of burden
|
| If you didn't read this, you wouldn't actually go into it
| thinking of it as a burden, and it would turn out to not
| actually be a burden. The fact that "even" native speakers
| from time to time have to ask how to pronounce something is
| just a fact of life, and not a difficulty of the language,
| but observers have come to think of it as a burden for some
| reason. But now that you've read that it is a burden, it
| will be a burden to you.
|
| I have pretty firm conviction that "hard" is very much
| influenced within some range by how hard you a priori think
| it is, and that logic is not the way to approach this.
| Rather, being blissfully unaware of any logical or
| linguistic experts' arguments around how hard others think
| something is will actually help you learn the language much
| faster and more efficiently.
|
| > going to be easier to learn than one that doesn't.
|
| > There are multiple Slavic or Chinese sounds
|
| > Some phonemes are legitimately more difficult to
| pronounce
|
| > literally scars your vocal tract
|
| > demand that you pay attention to
|
| Without any intent to personally attack you, because a LOT
| of people have logical arguments such as the above, it's
| quite literally even _hearing_ such logical descriptions of
| languages which may make something extremely hard. We aren
| 't fully logical creatures, the languages we invented
| aren't designed to be logically analyzed.
| pezezin wrote:
| I live in Japan, and every single Japanese person that I
| know, and a few Chinese coworkers too, have told me how
| kanji/hanzi is so ridiculously difficult to learn. I
| mean, native Chinese and Japanese speakers require at
| least 12 years of education to learn how to read and
| write their languages at a basic level. They are the most
| difficult writing systems in the world by far, saying
| otherwise is totally disingenious.
| dheera wrote:
| Difficult is subjective.
|
| > at least 12 years of education to learn how to read and
| write their languages at a basic level
|
| The idea of a "basic level" is fundamentally flawed.
|
| Can a 10-year-old child in Japan function to a similar
| level in their society as a 10-year-old child in England?
| If asked to water the plants can they do so? Can they
| catch the correct school bus? Can they read a children's
| book for their age level? Yes? If so language has served
| its purpose, and there isn't really a fundamental
| difference in difficulty level.
|
| Yeah, native speakers will tell you their language is
| hard, but they too are influenced by the media that all
| says it's hard.
|
| You might be right that it takes 12 years for the average
| kid to learn a particular set of Kanji but that's a very
| arbitrary standard applied to a language that does not
| demand you know all of those Kanji to be functional in
| society. There is context, there is the simple act of
| asking, there is so much more to it. Likewise, English
| speakers don't demand that they know the entire Oxford
| English Dictionary to be considered literate. I mean,
| yeah, if you asked the 10-year-old to "irrigate the
| agricultural enclosure" instead of "water the plants" you
| might stump them, sure. If we had those kind of
| expectations, English would be considered "hard" -- look
| at that thick book of the OED! It's thicker than the
| Kangxi dictionary and Xinhua dictionary combined, and
| therefore it must be harder! (My point is -- logic isn't
| the way to analyze this.)
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Difficult is subjective.
|
| You're not responding to the evidence presented in this
| thread that there is evidence that some aspects of
| language learning is _objectively_ harder. Specifically:
|
| * There's pretty strong evidence (comparison between
| literacy rates of children with different native
| languages) that some languages have writing systems that
| are harder to learn than others. (I feel obliged to point
| out that writing is the least important part of language
| acquisition--after all, writing dates to only ~6,000
| years ago, whereas spoken language dates at least 100,000
| years ago, possibly earlier. Of course, for most major
| modern languages, a language learner is equally expected
| to read/write in it as they are to listen/speak in it)
|
| * There is some evidence, albeit more controversial, that
| there is a critical age range in which it is far easier
| to acquire pronunciation of phonemes than learning
| subsequently.
|
| * Again, there is evidence that some phonemes are
| physically easier to pronounce than others, discovered in
| part by the order in which toddlers acquire various
| speech sounds. If you've got a toddler learning to speak,
| listen to the sounds he/she can pronounce and also the
| ones that aren't properly pronounced. I wouldn't attempt
| to chart out a full objective scale on which phoneme is
| harder than the other one, but I would be moderately
| confident in asserting that an Arabic ayin is objectively
| more difficult to pronounce than an `m' sound.
|
| * I also mentioned evidence that some grammatical
| features may be more complicated: the developments of
| lingua francas, or additionally creoles, does suggest
| that languages used heavily as second language
| acquisition tend to drop several grammatical features.
|
| (Now I should also addend that just because something is
| objectively more difficult doesn't necessarily mean that
| is specifically "hard." It is clearly objectively more
| difficult to lift a box 2 meters than to do so 1 meter...
| but that doesn't mean that it's hard to do so.)
| golemiprague wrote:
| [deleted]
| davidzweig wrote:
| There are different valid approaches, but there are certainly
| techniques that are ineffective; I think the popular "just do
| something" advice is harmful as it suggests all approaches are
| equally valid. I think it's possible to develop an intuition
| about whether an activity is more or less beneficial for your
| learning.
|
| Here's the best advice I could write down:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/66myn1/a_...
| JimTheMan wrote:
| We waste a lot of time trying to teach teenagers languages in
| high school. I learnt French, very poorly. Have retained almost
| nothing to this day, what a waste of time.
|
| I believe Latin is still offered in my high school system... A
| guaranteed waste of time.
|
| I truly believe study of foreign language should almost be
| reserved for people who will be living in a country with that
| tongue. Using it everyday and getting good returns on all that
| grind.
|
| More generally, we should be be more economical with our effort
| and time. "Why am I learning this? " Should be asked more often.
|
| I feel the cultural pull for pointless learning on other
| subjects. I am sure we all do. "I should study some physics. Read
| Feynman's lectures." But to what end, I don't know. My life will
| not be appreciably better for learning more about electro-
| magnetism.
|
| There's a yearning in us that pointless education must satisfy. A
| dream of a better life that you can pretend to be working
| towards.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| > We waste a lot of time trying to teach teenagers languages in
| high school. I learnt French, very poorly. Have retained almost
| nothing to this day, what a waste of time.
|
| Does that mean the learning was in vain? I've probably
| forgotten 90% of what I learned in high school other than math.
| Does that mean most of my education was a waste of time?
| maxwell_xander wrote:
| >Does that mean the learning was in vain? I've probably
| forgotten 90% of what I learned in high school other than
| math. Does that mean most of my education was a waste of
| time?
|
| Did the things you learn change you in some other fundamental
| way, that only learning those things could (ie you could come
| to a conclusion and forget the exact process that brought you
| to that conclusion, and thus the process was worth learning
| even though now forgotten)?
|
| If not, then that learning must have been in vain, almost per
| the definition of vain, right?
| guy98238710 wrote:
| To be fair, schools offer a lot of subjects to give you a
| taste of several academic disciplines. You are expected to
| choose one or two you like and discard the rest. If it is
| done well, you will enjoy the process. Having fun is not a
| waste of time.
| guy98238710 wrote:
| > Does that mean most of my education was a waste of time?
|
| Yes.
| jeofken wrote:
| Public school is much a place to dump kids so that both
| parents can work full time - this is how it's utilised in
| reality. Otherwise there would be a cutthroat market for
| parents education spending - but almost everyone leaves the
| child in the closest school they don't have to pay for.
|
| Some would say separating state and school is equal or
| greater in importance, than separating state and church.
| rjsw wrote:
| I felt that learning Latin helped with learning French.
| jeofken wrote:
| For learning Latin the book Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata by
| Hans Orberg is wonderful.
|
| https://youtu.be/_Zt19wzsW-c
|
| Felicem natalem Christi
| maxwell_xander wrote:
| >I believe Latin is still offered in my high school system... A
| guaranteed waste of time.
|
| Quomodo loqueris tu cum daemoniis sine latinam te scire??
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| As an English person living in Portugal, this article makes a lot
| of sense.
|
| The Portuguese (well those under about 45 years old anyway) speak
| excellent English, and seem as comfortable in it as a native
| speaker. They will quickly default to English when they want to
| communicate with me - understandable, but it does make practicing
| harder. The half and half conversations (like the Russians and
| Americans on the ISS) are common (and trippy).
|
| Verb inflections are a nightmare, you can't simply cram a bunch
| of stem words together quite like you can in English. Peruse a
| verb conjugation reference to get a sense of the combinatorial
| explosion going on there. The most common verbs are the most
| irregular, and there are collisions everywhere.
|
| Listening comprehension is the hardest part. I do wonder that as
| a native English speaker I'm used to ESL speakers, so naturally
| slow down and speak more clearly. Perhaps native Portuguese
| speakers are not so used to their language being used as a second
| language, so don't instinctively do that in quite the same way.
|
| Hilariously even the most proficient Portuguese English speaker
| cannot understand a word I say when I turn and converse with a
| fellow Brit, or an American. I don't notice any difference, but I
| guess my perfectly enunciated Queen's English turns into
| incomprehensible gibberish.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Hilariously even the most proficient Portuguese English speaker
| cannot understand a word I say when I turn and converse
| with a fellow Brit, or an American. I don't notice any
| difference, but I guess my perfectly enunciated Queen's
| English turns into incomprehensible gibberish.
|
| As a native English speaker, it's easy to underestimate how
| nuanced and even culture specific our language is, even
| compared to other English speaking countries such as NZ or AUS.
|
| For example, I have learned that when I'm communicating with
| folks in India, who speak wonderful English, that I can't use
| common American colloquialisms such as "shooting yourself in
| the foot" or other similarly colorful language. It has no
| context for them, and the point is lost.
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