Language classes in school are horrible. You’re going for an hour a day for 180 days, with significant gaps every few months, and moving at the rate of the slowest learners in the class.
500 hours of constant, immersive study would likely get you most of the way there, which is not the same as being immersed for 500 hours without study :)
I thought I was doing well with Duolingo once, then realized, 40 hours in, that I had almost no concept of formal/informal, and barely had any verb conjugation or grammar.
I used to agree with you, then I came to Europe where everyone can speak at least two languages. So they must be doing something right in schools here
Je ne parle pas Francais.
I took German in school, then moved to Germany and gained (rudimentary) fluency, then moved back to the US and lost it after a couple decades of disuse.
Ohh, mais non! Je parle le fracais trés bien. Je peut achetee une Pizza avec pas de probleme.
(I’m so sorry, please excuse me my french friends, I had shit teachers on a shit school with shit classmates)
If your main language is English you probably can’t. There’s just little need since everything is so English-centric that almost everyone else has to learn it as a necessity.
Larger countries like France and Germany can often get on without it as there’s enough population to be worth dubbing and translating things to it, but go somewhere smaller like the Nordic countries, and you’re basically stuffed without it.
“Mexican Americans…take Spanish in school…and get a B”
They wouldn’t let me take foreign language classes because my English grades weren’t good enough. It wasn’t that I was even bad. I just didn’t do homework.
Between the ages of 7 and 14 i was taught five languages, at best i could say hello me name is u\manuallybreathing in a grand total of one
you’d amazed what you can teach yourself woth motivated self study as an adult though, don’t fall for that ‘your brain solidifies after 25’, I’ve learnt a lot since i started again after the age of 30
only after meeting someone who’d done the same though, i really doubted myself
That “brain matures at 25” bs is a myth that was caused by a study in brain development losing funding when its subjects (that it follwed from birth) were 25.
Concluding brain development stops there is like assuming the road ends at any point where you have stopped following it.
Speak for yourself: I built on learning 2 foreign languages in highschool to end up speaking 7 languages (granted, only about 5 at a level of easilly maintaining a conversation).
The more languages you learn and the more you use them, the easier it is to add more languages to the pile.
Also, at least for European languages, because they generally are related, learning a few helps with learning others: for example, my speaking Dutch helped me learn German and there are even weird effect like me being able to pick up words in Norwegian because they’re similar to the same words in the other two or when somebody gave us an example of Welsh in a trip to Wales I actually figured out he was counting to 10, both because some numbers were similar to the same numbers in other languages plus there is a specific rythm in counting to 10.
As I see it, the more languages you know, the more “hooks” you have to pick stuff up in other languages plus you’re probably training your brain to be better at learning new ones.
That said, you have to actually try and practice them: for example, most of my French language was learned in highschool, so when I went to France or even Quebec in Canada I tried to as much as possible speak French, which helps with retaining and even expanding it so my French Language skills are much better now than when I originally learned it in a school environment.
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Va fungulo ti, cretino
信じられないよ。
Idk learning Chinese could be really beneficial, especially over the next 50 years.
Probably should start with leaning the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese
I can speak English quite well.
I speak three languages. My native, one learned at school and another self taught.
In my experience, the inability to learn languages is mainly English speaking people problem.
That’s because of the “language tiers”.
People don’t usually learn languages for fun, at least not to a point where they can actually speak it fluently. They learn it because they have an use for it. If you learn a language without having an use for it, you lose it quite quickly.
The highest tier language is the worldwide lingua franca: English. You learn English to talk to anyone, not to talk to English native speakers. For example, my company (a central European one) uses English as the work language. We don’t have a single English native speaker on the team. But if I want to talk to a colleague from Rumania, Egypt, Spain or the Netherlands I will talk English with them.
The next tier is the regional lingua franca. That’s e.g. Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Russian or Arabic (and likely a few others, I don’t know the whole world). These languages are spoken in certain regions and can be used to communicate with people from neighbouring countries. You can get around with e.g. German in Hungary, because most Hungarians learn German. It’s also sometimes necessary since TV, books or other media might not be available in the local language. For example, a lot of Albanians speak Italian, because TV shows and movies are rarely translated into Albanian and instead broadcast in Italian. (Also, since Italy was so close, many people watched Italian TV while Albania had communism.)
The lowest tier are local languages. These are languages that are only spoken in their own country. For example: Rumanian, Serbian, Hungarian, Welsh, Gaelic, Dutch and so on. People speak these languages because they live in that country. For someone who doesn’t live in that country, there’s rarely any major benefit to learning these languages.
In general, people only really learn to speak languages that are on the same tier or higher.
If you live in Albania, you learn Albanian as a child, then probably add Italian to understand TV. In school you will learn English and once you go online you will use it. You might also learn Russian to be able to communicate with people in nearby countries and if you are from the muslim part of Albania you might also learn Arabic.
If you live in Germany, you’d just learn German and English. No need for any other languages. If you spend some significant time in France, Spain or Italy, you might pick up one of these languages.
If you live in the US or GB, you start with English, and there’s hardly any point to learn anything else. By default you can already communicate with everyone, read everything on the internet and watch all TV shows and movies (pretty much everything is translated into English, if it isn’t even refilmed in English). If you try to learn another language and try to use it with native speakers of said language, chances are pretty high they just switch over to English.
That makes a lot of sense and is pretty much why I speak three languages.
In my experience when I lived in Holland, compared to me my friends and colleagues from English-speaking countries had the additional problems in trying to learn Dutch that people would tend to switch to English when they heard them speak in Dutch (probably because they picked up from their accent that they were native English speakers) plus their own fallback when they had trouble expressing themselves or understanding others in Dutch was the “lowest energy” language of all - their native one.
Meanwhile me - being a native Portuguese speaker - suffered a lot less from the “Dutch people switching to English when faced with my crap Dutch language skills” early on problem (probably because from my accent they couldn’t be sure that I actually spoke English and they themselves did not speak Portuguese) and my fallback language when my Dutch skills weren’t sufficient was just a different foreign language.
So some of my British colleagues over there who had lived there for almost 20 years still spoke only barelly passable Dutch whilst I powered through in about 5 years from zero to the level of Dutch being maybe my second best foreign language, and it would’ve been faster if I didn’t mostly work in English-speaking environments (the leap in progression when I actually ended up in a work environment were the working language was Dutch was amazing, though keeping up was a massive headache during the first 3 or 4 months).
That said, some other of my British colleagues did speak good Dutch, so really trying hard and persisting worked for them too (an interesting trick was when a Dutch person switched to English on you, just keeping on speaking in Dutch).
It is still very good brain exercise to learn new languages. It’s a way of keeping your brain muscle in Shape. Just like math exercises and reading books.
I mean, I took Spanish and use it, but I’m New Mexican and work with Cubans elsewhere.
Speak for yourself. You’re probably a native English speaker and have it easy.
I am the world’s shittiest polyglot. I lost a lot of my native language, turkish. I can get by. I speak english, but my accent is getting worse. I studied german in school for 5 years and forgot most of it. I live in the river plate, so the shitty amount of intermediate spanish I can speak has one of the worst accents for spanish, just behind tied first of caribbean and chilean. I can READ cyrillic, but not understand it, except few words whichever language has in common with languages I know. I can recognize some chinese glyphs, and understand some words.
I have no idea about any grammar words except the obvious ones (verb, noun) and get as much use of IPAs as I do IPAs (the pronunciation guide/the beer)
I have seen the vowel chart a billion times and still don’t understand it.
But did you use AI for this post? … otherwise your English is pretty sound (to me as a non-native speaker) :D
English is my primary language. I said my accent is getting worse, which is only a spoken thing
Don’t forget that you can also understand beginner level Azerbaijani and Gagauz but not speak either of them.
mən çox eyi Azərbaycanca konuşorum. /s
I probably speak better portugese than azerbaijani. / Eu problamenche falo melor portugues que azerbaijani.
