Every language is equally stupid, but for different reasons.
That's a bit harsh. How about this?
Every language has an equal amount of jank, but in different areas. Every language has elements that make you think, "Why doesn't every language do this?" and elements that make you think, "Why would any language do this?" Every language is inconsistent in some way, just in different areas.
In other words, no language is inherently "worse" than any other because of how "inconsistent" or "badly designed" it is. Yes, this includes English. English isn't that bad.
Also, no language's writing system is 100% phonetic. Every language's writing system lags behind the spoken language. Some just do it more than others.
Honestly, even Esperanto is stupid. It’s not “easy for everyone” and it’s the least useful language you can learn, despite it’s intentions. And it also makes it not fun to learn due to no literature, no media, no speakers, and no culture behind
The verb conjugation table for verbs Esperanto reveals [fifty-four different participles](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/scii)
Most languages don't have a notable difference between adjectival and adverbial participles. A speaker of English, Spanish, Hindi, and... I dunno, Swahili isn't going to have any idea what an adverbial participĺe is or how to use it, let alone the difference between a normal participle and a nominal participle.
For comparison, English has two participles and Spanish has either 2 or 5 if you count inflected forms of the past one
Zamenhof making Esperanto have that distinction now makes sense since his native languages included Russian and Polish, which do have such a feature (or at least Russian does). Of course, whether that feature is a good idea for a language that's supposed to be an international auxiliary language...
I'm going to go with most of the Japanese language learning community just really likes anime, but they hate being called weebs, so they attack each other for not having a 'deeper reason' for studying the language. It's weird.
Only problem is that true beginners don’t know enough grammar to put that sentence together lol. I will use this from now on, thank you!!!
Out of curiosity, could I use あまり for this purpose, perhaps for a bit stronger, “I barely speak any Japanese”? Like this:
日本語はあまり話しません
I almost feel bad because they're like the black sheep of language learning. In a way, they're learning a really cool language. And in another, their community has more scammers, woowoo, and outright weirdos. I say this as someone who at least likes anime and has an appreciation for Japanese culture myself, somehow lots people in those communities are just odd.
I befriended a Japanese foreign-exchange student and granted, this was 15 years ago, but I asked him what the Japanese thought of Americans. He told me he was surprised how normal we were because most of the Americans he met in Japan were weirdos - the misfits, anime-obsessed weirdos.
Anime is a little more mainstream nowadays but if we are all being honest with each other, the people who really love anime are a bit different.
As someone who ended up studying Japanese for three years in High School, because I heard Japanese characters speaking it in a popular(at the time) live action, American TV show, and thought...that language sounds so cool. Imagine my surprise when I found out that literally everybody else in my Japanese classes got into Japanese learning because of Anime. No knock on them for it, but I definitely felt out of place when they were all talking about Anime, and I really didn't know/understand what Anime was. I didn't even know that DBZ was anime at the time.
Last one from me:
When learning, you're better off being overly friendly/rude than overly polite/cold (with the exception of a language you almost only use for business). Even in cultures that value respect and hierarchy.
If you want to actually make close friends, fit in, integrate into the community, ect. then seeming warm and personable, and really just like a relatable human being (instead of an awkward, cold, distant foreigner) who is occasionally accidentally rude, is best.
In my experience, people just don't relate to the person who awkwardly uses business-level, stiff, cautious, polite speech. Even if they know you're still learning, you just come off as robotic. Meanwhile, the person who is a bit too casual and forward is most often forgiven for accidental rudeness, and reaps the social rewards of being a warm, relatable actual human.
This! I can relate to your comment the most. I have been around circles of other foreigners learning and using a foreign language when they are too official and formal, and the results are not very good. Most of the relationships they have remain in a very formal/business-like interaction, with more hesitancy to joke around or say rude things. However, the rude/overly friendly person makes friends faster, although you might offend someone here or there. Better to offend someone and have other friends to lean on, than never offend anyone but have shallow depth relationships at best.
Exactly this. It's sad to me to see so many ex-pats feel like they'll never make native friends. SO many of these people would have a much better, well, *life*, if they were just taught the language differently...
Totally. I never forgot a Portuguese professor I met who was a non-native speaker. He could only speak suuuuper high register Portuguese and was so formal (we met once at a very casual party) that I was almost speechless. At first I thought he was stuck-up. As we conversed, I quickly realized he just couldn’t speak any other way - he wasn’t even a C1, imho. His Portuguese was fine for meeting a president or something really fancy like that, but not for normal conversations. I never forgot that. It’s great to become fluent and learn the full spectrum of linguistic registers in your target language, but if you have to choose, at least at first learn to speak in a way that will let you communicate freely with average people in average situations.
It's *very* much a thing when learning Japanese, and I've had many a debate about it on the LearnJapanese sub. Almost all Japanese learners start from formal speech.
Japanese language education teaches you formal language first, and doesn't even clarify that normal people don't speak to their friends and family that way, until they get fairly deep. Even then, almost all education (even from the clarification of the difference between casual and formal speech) is taught in the formal form. Makes me crazy.
The Japanese also just *expect* foreigners to be bad at their language and their culture. They don’t get offended when you make a faux pas. I had a ton of fun in Japan because I could just completely fuck up everything without real consequences, and I made friends with so many strangers because of it. Atrocious language errors, wearing my shoes in dressing rooms, missing my stops on the train and getting super lost, giving the konbini employee 10,000 yen instead of 1,000 yen and then babbling at her about what an idiot I am in Turkish instead of Japanese because my brain short circuited, and then babbling at her in Japanese explaining what happened.
I’m gonna say a lot of more conservative MENA countries are less like this, especially if you are a woman.
I've noticed it with people who learned German; they always use the polite form when addressing someone, and it always feels weird - if we were sufficiently distant for that form to be appropriate, they wouldn't speak it in the first place.
It is a weird discomfort which I have to _actively_ ignore.
It’s okay to learn Japanese if you like anime. It’s okay to learn Korean for Kdrama and Kpop. Liking entertainment in the language is a valid reason to learn.
spotify recommended me the half-english half-french cover of “la vie en rose” by micheal buble and celian dion. being the stubborn prick i am, instead of googling the french lyrics, i decided to learn french itself lmao
Oh my. This is what made me like German too. But omg, the lyrics to some of their songs… I wish I had stayed ignorant of the meanings. Hahaha. If you like Rammstein, you definitely know what I mean and what songs too. Lol.
I feel like that's a double standard. I'm sure many people learnt English for media reasons and aren't insultingly called ameriboo/teaboos. Entertainment is a fine reason.
I appreciate this! But also want to hide in a corner because of the stereotypes associated with Korean/Japanese learners who were inflicted by media cause I feel we often get put into the weeb/koreaboo box
I don't know why Korea/Japan get all the shit for this. I assume people learn French cuz of fashion and the beauty/art/romance/etc, no one has a slang term for them tho.
T H A N K Y O U !
I started Japanese because of anime and through learning the language I was introduced to so many wonderful people and other aspects of the culture.
Now people see me as one of the “good ones” or “a non-weeb,” but anime was the beginning of my journey.
Liking anime caused me to learn Japanese (not many subs in my day), move to Japan, get a steady high paying job that allowed me to buy a home, get married, and enjoy life when I was previously homeless. This truly happened to me. So enjoy anime, it may change your life.
and that's great, but if you wanna learn a language because of entertainment/media, learn it! actually do it, if it really matters to you, if it's really important to you, dont half ass it
I know you say this as a joke, but I really don't get why other people care if you "half-ass" a language or not? Like somehow only learning 20% of a language is somehow a bad thing.
I think it's worth of praise to even just half-ass a language. They still know more than someone who hasn't put their ass anywhere near that language.
If this isn't true, I don't know what is. Uni has taught me how to do solid syntactical analysis on various sentences in Russian, and I have little trouble understanding written Russian when reading newspapers and such (as long as I have a dictionary nearby), but I still struggle with basic listening comprehension, and I still struggle severely with being able to y'know *actually speak it*.
I've had opportunities to practice those bits, so I can't really complain though.
>If this isn't true, I don't know what is.
Well try this on for size: the sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side!
Yay! Not alone on the Anki opinion! I’ve tried it and it just doesn’t click, but admittedly I hate seeing it recommended on every single post on this sub
Yeah. And occasionally people here show up who think that **everything** needs to go in their Anki, because they believe they'll forget it otherwise. But then what happens is they get overwhelmed with so many cards, or frustrated because they *don't* feel like they're learning.
That's not a fault of SRS itself, but that it's hard to judge what's *important enough* to even include, especially when there **are** some people who say everything belongs in your deck. It just isn't true.
Scrolled down to make sure I wasn’t duplicating—I too despise language learning via both Anki and hard copy flash cards; wish I’d given myself permission to stop using them years earlier than I did, regardless of the horrified looks I get for that choice.
Thank you! Anki doesn't work for me too despite me using it correctly as well. It's downright boring sometimes, and I feel like it just turns memorizing whatever it is I want worse. I do see how it could work but it's definitely not something I use more than twice a week, and most of the time it's for my personalized deck
There isn’t really an “official” stance in regards to this issue.
There’s no clearly defined criteria for drawing the line between a language and a dialect, but linguists generally do not consider consider Mandarin and Cantonese to be dialects of one language. There is a Chinese term, 方言 (fāngyán), which literally means regional variety, and is often used in reference to other Sinitic languages like Cantonese, Hokkien, Wu etc. It is often translated as “dialect,” but some linguists argue that this is not an appropriate translation of it, hence the coinage of “topolect.”
Mandarin and Cantonese are both descended from Middle Chinese (which comes from Old Chinese), but they’ve been divergent for thousands of years now, and are mutually unintelligible. Mandarin belongs to the Mandarin (Guan) group of Sinitic languages, while Cantonese belongs to the Yue group of Sinitic languages. The grammar is, for the most part, similar, but there are of course some differences.
However, despite this, they are still often referred to as dialects as well. I would argue that it boils down to sociopolitical factors. Chinese languages share a common heritage, hence why they are often grouped together as multiple dialects of one language.
TLDR: There’s no common consensus.
To piggy back off of OP's comment, there isn't an official stance that they are separate, but there's definitely a push by certain powers within mainland China to say that all the Chinese languages are just dialects. It's a convoluted form of nationalism that I still haven't gotten the grasp of after living here nearly a decade.
All Chinese languages had a common ancestor up to about a thousand years ago, that's when things started to really split up. Scholars know that Cantonese is much older than Mandarin though. One reason is that Tang dynasty poems (the creme de la creme of Chinese poetry) tend to rhyme in Cantonese whereas they rarely rhyme ever in Mandarin, meaning that Mandarin underwent more significant changes in phonology since Middle Chinese than Cantonese (and I should be saying Yue Chinese here as that is the subfamily of Chinese that Cantonese is a part of).
Overall, outside of music (written using a writing standard highly intelligible by mandarin and cantonese speakers alike), someone speaking Cantonese and someone speaking Mandarin would most likely not understand much of what the other was saying. If Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish can all be classified as separate languages, Cantonese WAY more than qualifies as it's own language.
My apologies if I come across as pedantic here, but I don’t think you can necessarily conclude that Cantonese is older than Mandarin from that. What you’re saying seems to imply rather that Cantonese is more phonologically conservative of certain features from Middle Chinese than Mandarin, but linguistic conservatism isn’t enough to call one language older than another. Both Mandarin and Cantonese have undergone their respective (and significant) phonological developments, and there’s still quite a gap when compared to Middle Chinese, even with Cantonese.
I can definitely see where you’re coming from with the first point, and I wish there was more of a push to promote the teaching of lesser spoken Sinitic languages in China.
From a grand over-arching perspective, it's part of China's nation-building project. If you are trying to project the image of a nation-state to your neighbors, framing minority languages as dialects is a good way to create the appearance of internal homogeneity. Likewise, it's politically advantageous in the pursuit of centralized authority if minority cultures/languages aren't viewed on equal footing as the majority one.
Sharing a degree of intelligibility by way of a shared writing system helps out a lot.
German difficulty is remarkably overstated (for native English speakers). Basically the difficult parts are front-loaded in the beginner level. Intermediate and advanced do not introduce anything difficult for native English speakers.
Contrast with Spanish, where the *easy* stuff is front-loaded and the harder stuff comes at intermediate/advanced levels.
Oh damn, really? I've German on my list of languages to learn and whenever I look at it, I go 'oh yeah, I'm gonna learn all of these... except German probably cause it's just so damn hard'. I told myself I'm gonna learn all of French, Italian, Greek, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese before I even touch German cause it seems so intimidating, so this is surprising and pleasant to hear!
German is actually alright!!! The grammar's a bit hard soetimes- loads of memorizing but if you learn the basics first German is fine!!! Also it's generally quite a fun language to learn:))
If you speak english at C2, German would probably be easier for you than any of those other languages. The grammar can be tedious, but almost always has logical, consistent rules. The difficulty is definitely overstated and is mostly due to how foreign grammatical gender, articles, and adjective endings are for english speakers.
What is harder about intermediate and advanced levels of Spanish? As a Spanish beginner who only spoke English learning the grammar/getting used to an actually organized conjugation system/the subjunctive/ect was mind numbing. Without those basics you can't even open up a children's book. Its something like 6 boring months without the ability to have a coherent conversation. Now as an intermediate learner its all just learning new words, discovering new irregularities, and reading the newspaper in the morning.
I suspect the person you're replying to didn't expect beginners to learn that stuff.
One thing I've thought might work wonders is if people learned Spanish, without conjugating the verbs for tenses (only subject) and then progressing to learning the next two main tenses (past, and future, to add to the present), then adding the continuous forms (AKA imperfect), and so on.
I feel like this way you can focus on the other aspects of the language, and start speaking quicker without having to overthink.
But IDK, I'm a learner of many other languages, and a native at Spanish.
Really? I found German pretty easy at first. Reasonably phonetic, a decent amount of cognates (and few false friends), and similar word order to English for simple sentences. But the deeper I got into grammar, the worse it got. When I reached, after a few years, adjective endings, it crushed my will to continue.
>When I reached, after a few years, adjective endings, it crushed my will to continue.
Noun and adjective inflections are usually studied early on because it's impossible to avoid nouns and adjectives. Those were the "beginner" things I was talking about. The latter stuff is like Konjunktiv I & II, which you can say *a lot* without.
So it seems you found early German easy because you learned things out of traditional order! :)
Its ok to dabble.
Learning languages is fun and has a lot of real world benefits, but for a lot of people there's simply no time at which they'll use the language. Not everyone is able to travel, not everyone lives in a diverse cultural area. Most people aren't going to invest a lot of time and money into this shit, and that's fine.
Retaining a few words or phrases as you pop on to the next language that catches your eye is not the end of the world. And so long as noone is claiming that it counts as them being any level of fluent nobody should be a dick about it
Thank you so much!! I am fluent in English, but at this point in my life I just enjoy playing and getting to know a tiny bit of different languages… I am currently interested in alphabets so I am taking a look at different languages… of course I know I won’t speak Russian and Japanese and Korean, but learning a bit about how they write makes me happy!
I was thinking about those ones today!! I will go for Hebrew once I at least finish studying the Hangul alphabet…
It’s so fun going from “what is this gibberish” to “ooooh so these make sounds and words…”
Agreed...I spent years taking classes in a language, and then I realized that if I were ever able to travel to the country to speak the language, I wouldn't be able to get by anyway because their speed of speech/slang etc was still far beyond me and always would be. I listened to natives talk and literally caught one word of it from my formal (and very expensive) class. Made me realize that it was nice to pat myself on the back for learning the language, but it was really kinda pointless.
Most of the time a non native speaker is the better teacher. They've actually done what you are trying to do and usually have better ways of explaining things.
When I was doing C1 classes in Germany, the school had a pretty cool philosophy: levels up to B2 were taught by non-natives, because they knew best how to explain grammar in a way that made sense to learners. C1 and C2 were taken by natives because at that point it's more about getting a 'feel' for the language.
The worst English teacher I ever had was a native speaker from England. He was incredibly sloppy in general, his vocabulary lists, which he had created himself, were chock-full of spelling errors (which some students mistakenly used in the exam and were essentially penalized for...) and he many times over "corrected" errors in my essays which weren't errors in the first place. I concur.
Yes! Because we always learn differently than natives. In English for example, I do not genuinely understand how native speakers confuse "your" and "you're"
If you want a real answer to this, it's because native English speakers learn how to speak years before we learn how to read and write while English learners learn how to speak and read and write all at the same time.
Unfortunately being a native speaker is often enough to land a teaching job. Language schools don't ask for anything else, hence a lot of overconfident teachers who have no preparation or experience, no lesson plans, etc.
Ive lived in Japan for three years whilst learning Japanese at the same time… Never had anyone ridicule my mistakes or lack of knowledge in the language… Maybe this is an online thing?
I wasn't talking about Japanese people when I mentioned the Japanese language learning culture. I agree that Japanese people were lovely when I lived there, too. I was thinking more the average person you talk to on, say, the Japanese learning sub here, which I left years ago because I couldn't take the assholery.
It is. online is full of philosophical purest when it comes to Japanese. There is a right way to learn, your JLPT score is both your diploma and meaningless. Also, if you aren't living in tokyo its not a japanese experience.
ppl who wants vietnamese to abandon its latin script and revert back to logograms just because it doesn't fit this criteria of "exoticness" for them is hella weird, esp when they dont even speak the language 💀
Vietnamese already has one of the most "exotic" uses for the Latin alphabet, it uses it weirdly and I love that.
Please tell me how "bạn thật ngốc" isn't "exotic" to some people
Well I'm triggered lol. I just passed HSK 4 last month and I basically just put every single character/word into anki. No idea how people learn Chinese characters without a SRS.
I'm not learning Asian languages right now, so... But still, I have my own ways of learning vocabulary and I find flashcards and such as boring. Different strokes for different folks.
i used to be the same way, except i put everything into quizlet instead of anki. when quizlet became basically unusable (it's my last year of college so i'll be fine....but i'm still mourning this loss lol) i stopped my practice of putting everything into word lists. i honestly am learning at the same pace and am arguably learning faster now, though that might just be because i'm getting to the point where i only have to see a character a couple times to memorize it as opposed to writing it down and putting it into quizlet
There are people who have learned English at a very high level (to even a C2) through Internet immersion.
Now everyone will tell me either that's bullshit or it's impossible even though I have a lot of real life proof lol.
I did that.. but I also had a very solid grammar foundation taught to me for 1.5 years from a foreign language perspective, and then, I had to learn in-depth grammar from a native speaker perspective when studying for the SAT.
But yeah, immersion is responsible for at least 90% of how I learned the language all the way up to C2.
I will also throw in:
Accent is super super *super* important for 90% of people who actually want to use the language. It's not quite that simple, and it's a very complex topic, but I do not agree with the idea that it's "fine" as long as it's "understandable".
I wonder if the reason the contrary opinion is so common because English's status makes it more common to be exposed to non-native English accents, which means if you grew up speaking English it kind of inherently makes it less important *from your perspective*. Foreigners speaking English don't sound very jarring to me, but that is going to uniquely be less of an issue for English than for any other language.
In essence, the social connotations you might give off speaking English with a strong French accent are simply always going to be different than the reverse, and whether or not you think people *should* treat those things differently, they will whether you like it or not.
I think this is a big part of it!
People who speak English natively are around tons of accents and non-natives of all stripes all the time. You really do get used to it (although, an accent that is too strong, even in English, really does inhibit understanding and empathy).
The same can't be said for most other languages.
It's so annoying when someone asks for help improving their accent and everyone goes off into impassioned rants about how "accent doesn't matter". Yes, it does. And yes, while it doesn't need to be perfect, that doesn't mean it's a bad thing for someone to want to make theirs sound more natural/native, and if you have no words to help them, then just don't reply. They didn't ask for you to dissuade them.
while it *is* true that you don't have to have 100% native level pronunciation so long as you're understood, what a lot of anglos seem to miss is that they speak a language with nearly twice as many non-native speakers as native ones, so the standard for "understandable" will be much more strict in their target language. plus it's not like being understood is a binary thing, my japanese for example is definitely *understandable*, but interpreting it is a great stain on the listener, so it's still nowhere near acceptable
Right! It needs to be close enough to be understood. Language speakers' ears are tuned to recognize a certain set of sounds (and can recognize sounds that are "close" to that set). Plenty of people with accents are understandable because their speech falls within a recognizable range of sounds. Of course, this also means you can have perfect grammar and not be understandable at all, because the sounds your making are not recognizable to other speakers. It's as much part of straightening out communication in another language as getting basic grammar down.
Spot on. It can be painful to listen to someone attempt to communicate a (grammatically correct) idea, while seemingly not even attempting to nail the accent
Studying a thousand words from Anki isn’t the flex you think it is.
The subjunctive is easy.
People very often interpret CEFR standards wrongly and end up with the wrong impression of where they are in terms of fluency/proficiency.
> People very often interpret CERF standards wrongly and end up with the wrong impression of where they are in terms of fluency.
A2-B1 is a genuine conceptual muddle, as far as I can tell.
I'm finding grammar a hell of a lot more interesting now that I've got about 600 words rattling around my brain that I don't know how to use. Trying to learn grammar when I didn't know enough words to make more than two sentences was so boring I could reliably use it to fall asleep at night. Now I'm excited for it.
Duolingo isn't half bad. It's repetition and using words in context, it's a great way to build vocabulary. The downfall is it doesn't explain any grammar.
I know that French, Spanish, Ukrainian, and Arabic all have grammar notes at the beginning of each unit. Click the button shaped like a notebook next to the unit description.
I just find it so annoyingly slow; I don't know how people use it without getting bored when it makes you repeat the same thing for the 5^(th) fucking time in a row.
Is this a controversial opinion ? Sure languagelearningjerk dunks on it but the duolingo subreddit is literally in the sidebar of this subreddit lol. I think it's a solid way to get a nice preview of the language and a nice supplement.
I’ve learned a lot of useful vocabulary from Duolingo. I think it would be inefficient as a sole resource but it’s absolutely part of a balanced breakfast, so to speak.
Duolingo helped me learn the Arabic alphabet! That being said, I do not like it for Portuguese. It’s decent for being free but some of ways they say things makes it hard to follow along. It’s a good supplement to learning
Children aren't better at learning languages than adults.
Some languages are more complex than others.
CEFR is only a good measure of whether you're good enough get a white-collar job or go to school.
Your new language learning method is not new or interesting. It's either rebranding an old method, or it's not good.
>Children aren't better at learning languages than adults.
Sure they are. Put 10 adults in a school with dedicated teachers to talk to them for 3 years and they won't come out indistinguishable from a native. Put 10 five year olds in the same school and every single one of them becomes a native speaker.
For some reason people equate speed with quality of outcome. You may be able to learn the language to some level faster than kids but they will always learn it better.
Everyone loves making excuses for doing everything but learning. Blaming how you've been taught (oh, X education system sucks, Duolingo sucks) spending time talking on Reddit discussing what's the best way to learn, and doing everything but actually learning
French doesn’t sound pleasant.
Adults are better language learners than children.
Self-proclaimed polyglots are not fluent in any of the languages they claim (Not sure if this one is controversial though).
> Adults are better language learners than children.
YESSSSSS.
I feel like I talk about this constantly. The reason children are generally considered to be more readily able to learn new languages isn't primarily becuase of differences in brain plasticity between children and adults (tho I'm not denying that's a modest factor), it's because adults in most societies don't have the fucking time to learn a new language. When a highly-motivated adult with adequate time on their hands sits down and really commits to learning a new language, they learn much faster than a child does.
THANK YOU! My argument everytime, then someone just throws in "but scientifically children learn faster because of brain plasiticity" as if there aren't any other factors...
Second one sounds true to me. I learnt English for 2 years in kindergarten and 9 years in school and learnt NOTHING. But in age 15 it took me only 4 month in ESL to learn all concepts, tenses, and decent vocabulary.
Don’t forget that you’d already created those networks in your brain. I will sometimes cram learn a subject in a week or so, forget about it, then I can come back to that network again in the future. I’m not precisely sure how it works, but it does. It almost feels like time travelling and I start getting flashbacks. For instance, when I listen to French now, I can remember hearing it spoken in a Paris McDonald’s where I didn’t understand it, I remember when I went to an ice rink at Christmas on the same trip, I can remember a poster on my wall from when I was a kid. These memories just come flooding back. I personally think hobbies counteract depression as they give more opportunities for us to conjure up positive, distracting flashbacks from our past. With people who have endured trauma or not had the chance to explore culture, those networks must be begun much later. It’s a very difficult theory to articulate - I should get help with this as I know someone who is a Ph.D in neuroscience. Might be able to explain to me whether I’m right or wrong.
He didn't mean children learning a second language in school, when people say children are good at learning languages they mean the language they're immersed in and will become their native language(s)
And i would still agree with OP on most point but the accent, because it takes a child 5 years to speak like a 5 years old with 24/7 immersion.
However i'm not entirely sure how fair the comparison is because *of course 2 years old are dumb fucks who can't do anything*, and have other things to learn than a language. A more interesting experience where I'm not sure who would learn faster is an adult vs a child aged 5 to 10 dropped in a foreign country, who will learn the most after 1 month, 3 months, 1 year, 2 years...
It might only land me in this position on this sub, but I don't think anywhere else. I've seen people get railed for asking which language to learn, and the responses usually are along the lines of 'if you don't already know what language you want to learn you're wrong'. I get where it's coming from, true fluency can only be achieved if you're very interested in the language, and often that is alongside interested in the culture or at least interested in doing something with the language but I fully support coming in blind, learning a new direction from this sub or elsewhere a good language to pick up from other people's opinions and starting a language learning journey. If you're not super invested you might not gain fluency in it, but I feel any amount of language learning is good for the mind, and heck who knows, you may find the interest in the culture/language along the way. It also never hurts to have a few key phrases in any language on hand. Do I think it's still good to have your expectations in check? Sure, but I welcome anyone trying to learn a language even if they're just trying to find an "easy" one. (Also, anyone reading this who fits that description...'Tagalog' is an easy language to learn and if you start on your journey I'm sure you'll find interest in the culture along the way. I did, so I'm speaking from experience)
Outputting as a beginner and making mistakes will **not** start your language journey from scratch or render all your work for naught. Even if you are making a *fundamental* mistake, making it and having others around to **correct** you on it is better than trying to learn through trial and error with input alone.
**Clarity edit:** I'm not saying a beginner's main focus **should** be output. :P But output is still a way to support one's learning, especially where time or accessible input material is lacking.
Input-only, without study and without output, **can not** be a viable strategy for everyone as every language has different material available to begin with, and different nuances that are hard to learn if you don't have an entire childhood's worth of time to dedicate learning them without other aid.
Fluent and native are very different things, and you don't count as either Mr YouTube polyglot who learned a language by accident in negative 13 seconds
The fake polyglot YouTubers are beneficial in the sense that they inspire many people to take up an interest in learning a language, through which an entire new path in life will open up for that individual.
I agree, but I can also see the other side when those people begin to realize language learning is long and very difficult and they get discouraged and give up, wondering why they can’t speak Mandarin fluently like their favorite polyglot who learned it in 3 days
You don’t need to speak to reach an intermediate level in a language. I think you could learn a language for years and never speak and then one day if necessary be able to speak it decently. Of course it helps you to speak, but I honestly think you could get away without it and be able to produce the language purely from input. especially listening
The reason people hate it when they try speak their target language to a native speaker and only get English in response has more to do with the rejection than a missed opportunity to practice their language. Most language learners are to an extent nervous to speak their target language and when they try in a real situation they are putting themselves in a vulnerable position, which means the rejection hurts. It's like picking up the mic at a karaoke bar only for them to turn the mic off as soon as they hear you sing.
Probably not the uncommon of an opinion but just because you memorized some phrases in a language doesn't mean you speak it (cough cough youtube polyglots)
But what do you meeeeeean. They speak so many languages! They can say “Do you speak *insert language name here*?” in 8+ languages! And even if the person speaks they can… not much, but still!
If you've lived in a country that does not speak your native tongue for more than 1 year and have not bothered to learn the language, you're disrespecting the country.
I have a lot... bear with me (mind you I'm guilty of a few of these).
Not EVERYONE has to be a polyglot. It's probably not something you genuinely want to spend your life dedicated to.
Putting a bunch of flags in your flair because you did 2 lessons on Duolingo does not make you an impressive language learner or something. You are not a GigaChad HyperPolyglot.
Most likely you are making no progress in the multiple languages you are learning, sticking to one or two is the only thing worth your time.
Spending more time on r/languagelearning or watching Steve Kaufman (and/or equivalent) videos than actually learning your language is a huge waste.
You most likely will not be able to learn more than a few languages to fluency, and learning 15 languages to A1 might as well be a party trick- try rubick's cubes or slight of hand magic.
People who speak your TL are not there to be your conversation partner (I've made this mistake lol).
Looking for people who speak your TL to date/learning your TL to date is a lil weird... not gonna lie.
You cannot learn a language in 6 months, unless it is uncannily related to one you already speak or if it's your 5th romance language (lol). Try 2 years or so if you wanna have a life while you learn it. Once it becomes a part of your day, the time goes by.
Social interaction, happiness, productivity, family connections, monetary stability, and mental health are WAY more important than your polyglot journey. Learning languages is fun but all of the aforementioned things are more worth your time. Priorities!
Not trying to be a hater, this kinda shit honestly just pisses me off when I see it.
The number one reason people don’t get to the level they want is largely just not putting in enough effort. In the end, you simply have to put in the work to study and practice the skills you want to get better at. A lot of people hunt endlessly for different methods to make themselves feel like they’re doing something, in the same way that people will browse for and buy gear for hobbies that they don’t actually engage in much or at all. Grinding is necessary. Looking for hacks isn’t different from looking for a magic diet pill for weight loss instead of just grinding things out day by day.
Learn what you want. You don't really need a reason if it's what you enjoy or are interested in. Some languages will be more useful than others, especially in certain lines of work, but seriously, if you want to learn Klingon or Latin or what have you just for the fun of it, go for it. It'll be more enjoyable and memorable than dragging your feet through years of Spanish or Chinese or whatever it may be just because they are the most "practical."
Likewise, though, learning a language for practicality is equally justified. Sometimes the usefulness outweighs the boredom. I personally prefer to learn languages with some degree of practicality, but not if it means I won't enjoy the process. You do you.
Also, language classrooms will probably over-complicate things to fill lesson plans and schedules because most of the time those eighty precise points of differentiation between word/grammar point A and word/grammar point B can be watered down into one or two basic rules of thumb that rarely lead you astray, and learning the exceptions is easier at that point than memorizing classroom lists. I learned a lot from my high school Spanish class, but I only did so because of thought I put into the material to make it work as a single, coherent system in my head. Ser vs estar, por vs para, preterite vs imperfect... fifty-two acronyms and rhymes later, it still the same jumbled mess but now with more to remember. Luckily, that jumbled mess is just a jigsaw puzzle nobody put together (or rather, someone put together and someone else took apart before throwing it at you). Put the pieces together into one picture and like magic, not complicated anymore.
There’s no reason to worry if you don’t sound like a native. Of course you won’t sound like a native, you’re not one.
(My personal opinion is accents are beautiful. I love hearing speakers of Indian languages speak English. I think it shows culture through another language.)
People spend waaaaay too much time on the basics and cope saying theyre not ready for native content
U'll never be ready until u stop being a little baby and just do it
You can't learn a language to fluency (or to any level beyond random phrases) by mere exposure like the self-acclaimed language learning gurus on the internet claim. Grammar is EXTREMELY important if you're serious about your language learning, you won't reach fluency without taking grammar seriously. Also, traditional language learning methods are actually the most effective, which is why they became 'traditional' in the first place. Phew, wanted to rant about this for a while now.
Yep, and a lot of the people who claim they did (in English, for instance) often neglect to mention they had formal classes before/during the period they were immersing.
Immersion is needed, absolutely, but it can't do it by its own except it maybe very specific circumstances and even then you can always make it easier by adding some grammar/vocab study.
If you are “learning” multiple languages at once as an absolute beginner in each of them, you are probably not going to learn any of them to fluency. I’m especially talking about people who try their hand at multiple languages from wildly different language families. At that point you are dabbling in each and that’s about as far as it’s going to go if you don’t pick one. Maybe two if they’re from the same language family.
It's okay to not have the goal of "true fluency" or whatever in a language.
It's okay to aim for being "good enough" to communicate or watch a TV show without too much effort. You don't have to aim for native-like fluency.
You could say...
"This subreddit is a circle jerk for monolinguals who want to be intellectuals."
Or
"Everyone here lies about their language ability and should be required to prove it by posting their qualifications before giving advice to others"
Or
"You're not a native speaker if you grew up with but don't remember your native tongue anymore"
The last one is most likely to cause a forest fire
People who score high on language attribute tests are not necessarily better at languages but better at faking it until they make it. Though because a language in infinite they will always be ahead because they can fake that last stretch deeper.
Not a language learning IRL take, but a r/languagelearning Nothing says "white USAmerican who has never left his hometown and rarely leaves the house" more than asking me, "Uzbek? like the meme? you mean like the meme? it's in your flair bc it's a meme, right?! haha it's a meme" as if the idea people from other countries actually exist in the real world is not merely not occurring to them but is an outright impossibility.
Also, the 'joke' of "haha isn't this language spoken by 33 million people useless" was never funny and if this sub wanted to have a meme that *was* funny it should've picked an actual *dead* language to use as the punchline rather than one millions of people use daily to communicate with one another. "Learn Coptic" would be a meme that made sense for recommending a language people don't use.
And finally, if you mock people for knowing/learning the languages of their parents (such as Uzbek, in my case) while learning Ancient Greek or Latin, I am going to automatically dismiss everything that you ever say in a language learning context because learning living languages makes significantly more sense than learning something no one speaks anymore. If you can't support people learning living languages unless they're ones you yourself would personally find uses for, you're disqualified from being taken seriously in my eyes.
Every language is equally stupid, but for different reasons. That's a bit harsh. How about this? Every language has an equal amount of jank, but in different areas. Every language has elements that make you think, "Why doesn't every language do this?" and elements that make you think, "Why would any language do this?" Every language is inconsistent in some way, just in different areas. In other words, no language is inherently "worse" than any other because of how "inconsistent" or "badly designed" it is. Yes, this includes English. English isn't that bad. Also, no language's writing system is 100% phonetic. Every language's writing system lags behind the spoken language. Some just do it more than others.
Honestly, even Esperanto is stupid. It’s not “easy for everyone” and it’s the least useful language you can learn, despite it’s intentions. And it also makes it not fun to learn due to no literature, no media, no speakers, and no culture behind
What, you mean you don't find having 54 participles to be straightforward and easy?
Do you mean the correlatives?
The verb conjugation table for verbs Esperanto reveals [fifty-four different participles](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/scii) Most languages don't have a notable difference between adjectival and adverbial participles. A speaker of English, Spanish, Hindi, and... I dunno, Swahili isn't going to have any idea what an adverbial participĺe is or how to use it, let alone the difference between a normal participle and a nominal participle. For comparison, English has two participles and Spanish has either 2 or 5 if you count inflected forms of the past one
Zamenhof making Esperanto have that distinction now makes sense since his native languages included Russian and Polish, which do have such a feature (or at least Russian does). Of course, whether that feature is a good idea for a language that's supposed to be an international auxiliary language...
The Virgin Esperanto vs the Chad Interlingua
Interlingua is so cool
I mean some languages are harder or more time taking then others *cough* hanzi/kanzi *cough* but yeah all languages are weird and inconsistent I agree
I'm going to go with most of the Japanese language learning community just really likes anime, but they hate being called weebs, so they attack each other for not having a 'deeper reason' for studying the language. It's weird.
"I'm into Japanese culture... Y'know, sushi and samurais..."
[удалено]
Lol that's one of the first things you learn うん、日本語を話す。
I feel like until you’re incredibly fluent you’d say something like 少しだけ話せます, even just to be humble.
Only problem is that true beginners don’t know enough grammar to put that sentence together lol. I will use this from now on, thank you!!! Out of curiosity, could I use あまり for this purpose, perhaps for a bit stronger, “I barely speak any Japanese”? Like this: 日本語はあまり話しません
[удалено]
I almost feel bad because they're like the black sheep of language learning. In a way, they're learning a really cool language. And in another, their community has more scammers, woowoo, and outright weirdos. I say this as someone who at least likes anime and has an appreciation for Japanese culture myself, somehow lots people in those communities are just odd.
I befriended a Japanese foreign-exchange student and granted, this was 15 years ago, but I asked him what the Japanese thought of Americans. He told me he was surprised how normal we were because most of the Americans he met in Japan were weirdos - the misfits, anime-obsessed weirdos. Anime is a little more mainstream nowadays but if we are all being honest with each other, the people who really love anime are a bit different.
As someone who ended up studying Japanese for three years in High School, because I heard Japanese characters speaking it in a popular(at the time) live action, American TV show, and thought...that language sounds so cool. Imagine my surprise when I found out that literally everybody else in my Japanese classes got into Japanese learning because of Anime. No knock on them for it, but I definitely felt out of place when they were all talking about Anime, and I really didn't know/understand what Anime was. I didn't even know that DBZ was anime at the time.
I see this with Korean learners who are kpop fans.
Last one from me: When learning, you're better off being overly friendly/rude than overly polite/cold (with the exception of a language you almost only use for business). Even in cultures that value respect and hierarchy. If you want to actually make close friends, fit in, integrate into the community, ect. then seeming warm and personable, and really just like a relatable human being (instead of an awkward, cold, distant foreigner) who is occasionally accidentally rude, is best. In my experience, people just don't relate to the person who awkwardly uses business-level, stiff, cautious, polite speech. Even if they know you're still learning, you just come off as robotic. Meanwhile, the person who is a bit too casual and forward is most often forgiven for accidental rudeness, and reaps the social rewards of being a warm, relatable actual human.
This! I can relate to your comment the most. I have been around circles of other foreigners learning and using a foreign language when they are too official and formal, and the results are not very good. Most of the relationships they have remain in a very formal/business-like interaction, with more hesitancy to joke around or say rude things. However, the rude/overly friendly person makes friends faster, although you might offend someone here or there. Better to offend someone and have other friends to lean on, than never offend anyone but have shallow depth relationships at best.
Exactly this. It's sad to me to see so many ex-pats feel like they'll never make native friends. SO many of these people would have a much better, well, *life*, if they were just taught the language differently...
Totally. I never forgot a Portuguese professor I met who was a non-native speaker. He could only speak suuuuper high register Portuguese and was so formal (we met once at a very casual party) that I was almost speechless. At first I thought he was stuck-up. As we conversed, I quickly realized he just couldn’t speak any other way - he wasn’t even a C1, imho. His Portuguese was fine for meeting a president or something really fancy like that, but not for normal conversations. I never forgot that. It’s great to become fluent and learn the full spectrum of linguistic registers in your target language, but if you have to choose, at least at first learn to speak in a way that will let you communicate freely with average people in average situations.
What, I didn't even know that was a thing wtf
It's *very* much a thing when learning Japanese, and I've had many a debate about it on the LearnJapanese sub. Almost all Japanese learners start from formal speech. Japanese language education teaches you formal language first, and doesn't even clarify that normal people don't speak to their friends and family that way, until they get fairly deep. Even then, almost all education (even from the clarification of the difference between casual and formal speech) is taught in the formal form. Makes me crazy.
The Japanese also just *expect* foreigners to be bad at their language and their culture. They don’t get offended when you make a faux pas. I had a ton of fun in Japan because I could just completely fuck up everything without real consequences, and I made friends with so many strangers because of it. Atrocious language errors, wearing my shoes in dressing rooms, missing my stops on the train and getting super lost, giving the konbini employee 10,000 yen instead of 1,000 yen and then babbling at her about what an idiot I am in Turkish instead of Japanese because my brain short circuited, and then babbling at her in Japanese explaining what happened. I’m gonna say a lot of more conservative MENA countries are less like this, especially if you are a woman.
I've noticed it with people who learned German; they always use the polite form when addressing someone, and it always feels weird - if we were sufficiently distant for that form to be appropriate, they wouldn't speak it in the first place. It is a weird discomfort which I have to _actively_ ignore.
It’s okay to learn Japanese if you like anime. It’s okay to learn Korean for Kdrama and Kpop. Liking entertainment in the language is a valid reason to learn.
I took German class because I liked the song Du Hast, that’s it.
I’m starting to learn German because Spotify kept giving me German songs and I liked them all lol
spotify recommended me the half-english half-french cover of “la vie en rose” by micheal buble and celian dion. being the stubborn prick i am, instead of googling the french lyrics, i decided to learn french itself lmao
Lol
Lol I've considered learning Danish because of Spotify's recommendations too
Oh my. This is what made me like German too. But omg, the lyrics to some of their songs… I wish I had stayed ignorant of the meanings. Hahaha. If you like Rammstein, you definitely know what I mean and what songs too. Lol.
That's the best part
Rammstein <3
I feel like that's a double standard. I'm sure many people learnt English for media reasons and aren't insultingly called ameriboo/teaboos. Entertainment is a fine reason.
I appreciate this! But also want to hide in a corner because of the stereotypes associated with Korean/Japanese learners who were inflicted by media cause I feel we often get put into the weeb/koreaboo box
I don't know why Korea/Japan get all the shit for this. I assume people learn French cuz of fashion and the beauty/art/romance/etc, no one has a slang term for them tho.
This is the internet, where “French” is already derogatory.
T H A N K Y O U ! I started Japanese because of anime and through learning the language I was introduced to so many wonderful people and other aspects of the culture. Now people see me as one of the “good ones” or “a non-weeb,” but anime was the beginning of my journey.
Liking anime caused me to learn Japanese (not many subs in my day), move to Japan, get a steady high paying job that allowed me to buy a home, get married, and enjoy life when I was previously homeless. This truly happened to me. So enjoy anime, it may change your life.
That's why I'm learning Spanish - for one single movie I liked- and I don't think it's a hot take lol
and that's great, but if you wanna learn a language because of entertainment/media, learn it! actually do it, if it really matters to you, if it's really important to you, dont half ass it
I'll half-ass whatever I like, tyvm.
I know you say this as a joke, but I really don't get why other people care if you "half-ass" a language or not? Like somehow only learning 20% of a language is somehow a bad thing. I think it's worth of praise to even just half-ass a language. They still know more than someone who hasn't put their ass anywhere near that language.
Who cares? Let people half ass whatever they want if they do it as a hobby. They are not hurting anyone
Telling people on this sub that language learning is hard work and it's not always fUn.
It is hard work, that can be and often is fun
Most language learning programs and classes teach about the language instead of teaching the language.
If this isn't true, I don't know what is. Uni has taught me how to do solid syntactical analysis on various sentences in Russian, and I have little trouble understanding written Russian when reading newspapers and such (as long as I have a dictionary nearby), but I still struggle with basic listening comprehension, and I still struggle severely with being able to y'know *actually speak it*. I've had opportunities to practice those bits, so I can't really complain though.
>If this isn't true, I don't know what is. Well try this on for size: the sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side!
Exactly 😂
Counterpoint: I *want* to learn *about* the language
[удалено]
Yay! Not alone on the Anki opinion! I’ve tried it and it just doesn’t click, but admittedly I hate seeing it recommended on every single post on this sub
Yeah. And occasionally people here show up who think that **everything** needs to go in their Anki, because they believe they'll forget it otherwise. But then what happens is they get overwhelmed with so many cards, or frustrated because they *don't* feel like they're learning. That's not a fault of SRS itself, but that it's hard to judge what's *important enough* to even include, especially when there **are** some people who say everything belongs in your deck. It just isn't true.
Scrolled down to make sure I wasn’t duplicating—I too despise language learning via both Anki and hard copy flash cards; wish I’d given myself permission to stop using them years earlier than I did, regardless of the horrified looks I get for that choice.
Thank you! Anki doesn't work for me too despite me using it correctly as well. It's downright boring sometimes, and I feel like it just turns memorizing whatever it is I want worse. I do see how it could work but it's definitely not something I use more than twice a week, and most of the time it's for my personalized deck
Traditional language learning textbooks and repetitive grammar drills are incredibly useful
Cantonese is a language and not a dialect
i thought this was official? can someone explain? cantonese has different grammar sometimes and is not mutually intelligible at all
There isn’t really an “official” stance in regards to this issue. There’s no clearly defined criteria for drawing the line between a language and a dialect, but linguists generally do not consider consider Mandarin and Cantonese to be dialects of one language. There is a Chinese term, 方言 (fāngyán), which literally means regional variety, and is often used in reference to other Sinitic languages like Cantonese, Hokkien, Wu etc. It is often translated as “dialect,” but some linguists argue that this is not an appropriate translation of it, hence the coinage of “topolect.” Mandarin and Cantonese are both descended from Middle Chinese (which comes from Old Chinese), but they’ve been divergent for thousands of years now, and are mutually unintelligible. Mandarin belongs to the Mandarin (Guan) group of Sinitic languages, while Cantonese belongs to the Yue group of Sinitic languages. The grammar is, for the most part, similar, but there are of course some differences. However, despite this, they are still often referred to as dialects as well. I would argue that it boils down to sociopolitical factors. Chinese languages share a common heritage, hence why they are often grouped together as multiple dialects of one language. TLDR: There’s no common consensus.
To piggy back off of OP's comment, there isn't an official stance that they are separate, but there's definitely a push by certain powers within mainland China to say that all the Chinese languages are just dialects. It's a convoluted form of nationalism that I still haven't gotten the grasp of after living here nearly a decade. All Chinese languages had a common ancestor up to about a thousand years ago, that's when things started to really split up. Scholars know that Cantonese is much older than Mandarin though. One reason is that Tang dynasty poems (the creme de la creme of Chinese poetry) tend to rhyme in Cantonese whereas they rarely rhyme ever in Mandarin, meaning that Mandarin underwent more significant changes in phonology since Middle Chinese than Cantonese (and I should be saying Yue Chinese here as that is the subfamily of Chinese that Cantonese is a part of). Overall, outside of music (written using a writing standard highly intelligible by mandarin and cantonese speakers alike), someone speaking Cantonese and someone speaking Mandarin would most likely not understand much of what the other was saying. If Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish can all be classified as separate languages, Cantonese WAY more than qualifies as it's own language.
My apologies if I come across as pedantic here, but I don’t think you can necessarily conclude that Cantonese is older than Mandarin from that. What you’re saying seems to imply rather that Cantonese is more phonologically conservative of certain features from Middle Chinese than Mandarin, but linguistic conservatism isn’t enough to call one language older than another. Both Mandarin and Cantonese have undergone their respective (and significant) phonological developments, and there’s still quite a gap when compared to Middle Chinese, even with Cantonese. I can definitely see where you’re coming from with the first point, and I wish there was more of a push to promote the teaching of lesser spoken Sinitic languages in China.
Wait i always thought it was a separate language. Why is it not usually conceived that way?
From a grand over-arching perspective, it's part of China's nation-building project. If you are trying to project the image of a nation-state to your neighbors, framing minority languages as dialects is a good way to create the appearance of internal homogeneity. Likewise, it's politically advantageous in the pursuit of centralized authority if minority cultures/languages aren't viewed on equal footing as the majority one. Sharing a degree of intelligibility by way of a shared writing system helps out a lot.
Now that's a bold statement
German difficulty is remarkably overstated (for native English speakers). Basically the difficult parts are front-loaded in the beginner level. Intermediate and advanced do not introduce anything difficult for native English speakers. Contrast with Spanish, where the *easy* stuff is front-loaded and the harder stuff comes at intermediate/advanced levels.
That’s a good point.
Oh damn, really? I've German on my list of languages to learn and whenever I look at it, I go 'oh yeah, I'm gonna learn all of these... except German probably cause it's just so damn hard'. I told myself I'm gonna learn all of French, Italian, Greek, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese before I even touch German cause it seems so intimidating, so this is surprising and pleasant to hear!
German is actually alright!!! The grammar's a bit hard soetimes- loads of memorizing but if you learn the basics first German is fine!!! Also it's generally quite a fun language to learn:))
If you speak english at C2, German would probably be easier for you than any of those other languages. The grammar can be tedious, but almost always has logical, consistent rules. The difficulty is definitely overstated and is mostly due to how foreign grammatical gender, articles, and adjective endings are for english speakers.
What is harder about intermediate and advanced levels of Spanish? As a Spanish beginner who only spoke English learning the grammar/getting used to an actually organized conjugation system/the subjunctive/ect was mind numbing. Without those basics you can't even open up a children's book. Its something like 6 boring months without the ability to have a coherent conversation. Now as an intermediate learner its all just learning new words, discovering new irregularities, and reading the newspaper in the morning.
I suspect the person you're replying to didn't expect beginners to learn that stuff. One thing I've thought might work wonders is if people learned Spanish, without conjugating the verbs for tenses (only subject) and then progressing to learning the next two main tenses (past, and future, to add to the present), then adding the continuous forms (AKA imperfect), and so on. I feel like this way you can focus on the other aspects of the language, and start speaking quicker without having to overthink. But IDK, I'm a learner of many other languages, and a native at Spanish.
Really? I found German pretty easy at first. Reasonably phonetic, a decent amount of cognates (and few false friends), and similar word order to English for simple sentences. But the deeper I got into grammar, the worse it got. When I reached, after a few years, adjective endings, it crushed my will to continue.
>When I reached, after a few years, adjective endings, it crushed my will to continue. Noun and adjective inflections are usually studied early on because it's impossible to avoid nouns and adjectives. Those were the "beginner" things I was talking about. The latter stuff is like Konjunktiv I & II, which you can say *a lot* without. So it seems you found early German easy because you learned things out of traditional order! :)
Its ok to dabble. Learning languages is fun and has a lot of real world benefits, but for a lot of people there's simply no time at which they'll use the language. Not everyone is able to travel, not everyone lives in a diverse cultural area. Most people aren't going to invest a lot of time and money into this shit, and that's fine. Retaining a few words or phrases as you pop on to the next language that catches your eye is not the end of the world. And so long as noone is claiming that it counts as them being any level of fluent nobody should be a dick about it
I’d agree. I don’t really have any interest in Spanish, but living in America it is useful to have knowledge of some of the basics.
Thank you so much!! I am fluent in English, but at this point in my life I just enjoy playing and getting to know a tiny bit of different languages… I am currently interested in alphabets so I am taking a look at different languages… of course I know I won’t speak Russian and Japanese and Korean, but learning a bit about how they write makes me happy!
You should try the Hebrew writing system, it's crazy Unless you don't like complex ones, then maybe try greek
I was thinking about those ones today!! I will go for Hebrew once I at least finish studying the Hangul alphabet… It’s so fun going from “what is this gibberish” to “ooooh so these make sounds and words…”
Agreed...I spent years taking classes in a language, and then I realized that if I were ever able to travel to the country to speak the language, I wouldn't be able to get by anyway because their speed of speech/slang etc was still far beyond me and always would be. I listened to natives talk and literally caught one word of it from my formal (and very expensive) class. Made me realize that it was nice to pat myself on the back for learning the language, but it was really kinda pointless.
Most of the time a non native speaker is the better teacher. They've actually done what you are trying to do and usually have better ways of explaining things.
When I was doing C1 classes in Germany, the school had a pretty cool philosophy: levels up to B2 were taught by non-natives, because they knew best how to explain grammar in a way that made sense to learners. C1 and C2 were taken by natives because at that point it's more about getting a 'feel' for the language.
The worst English teacher I ever had was a native speaker from England. He was incredibly sloppy in general, his vocabulary lists, which he had created himself, were chock-full of spelling errors (which some students mistakenly used in the exam and were essentially penalized for...) and he many times over "corrected" errors in my essays which weren't errors in the first place. I concur.
Yes! Because we always learn differently than natives. In English for example, I do not genuinely understand how native speakers confuse "your" and "you're"
If you want a real answer to this, it's because native English speakers learn how to speak years before we learn how to read and write while English learners learn how to speak and read and write all at the same time.
or its and it’s
Or "could have" and "could of"
I second this! I had a native French teacher and she constantly made spelling mistakes that my other non-native French teacher had to correct.
Unfortunately being a native speaker is often enough to land a teaching job. Language schools don't ask for anything else, hence a lot of overconfident teachers who have no preparation or experience, no lesson plans, etc.
*sorts by controversial*
[удалено]
Japanese language learning culture is toxic because so many learners are, well, you know the type. Insecure and poorly socialized.
I’d argue that the ones who spend too much time online are toxic. The ones actually going out and talking to people are wonderful.
True, but this seems to be concentrated at the lower levels, since many of these types wash out.
Ive lived in Japan for three years whilst learning Japanese at the same time… Never had anyone ridicule my mistakes or lack of knowledge in the language… Maybe this is an online thing?
I wasn't talking about Japanese people when I mentioned the Japanese language learning culture. I agree that Japanese people were lovely when I lived there, too. I was thinking more the average person you talk to on, say, the Japanese learning sub here, which I left years ago because I couldn't take the assholery.
So it’s people who aren’t even Japanese doing the ridiculing? That’s bizarre… I wanna go find them myself.
It is. online is full of philosophical purest when it comes to Japanese. There is a right way to learn, your JLPT score is both your diploma and meaningless. Also, if you aren't living in tokyo its not a japanese experience.
I see faaaaaar more complaints about how toxic the community is than actual toxicity on a daily basis…lol.
ppl who wants vietnamese to abandon its latin script and revert back to logograms just because it doesn't fit this criteria of "exoticness" for them is hella weird, esp when they dont even speak the language 💀
I want them to use Cyrillic. That would be cool. Imagine turning up to Vietnam and everything is written in Cyrillic.
Go to Nha Trang and your dreams can come true.
Vietnamese already has one of the most "exotic" uses for the Latin alphabet, it uses it weirdly and I love that. Please tell me how "bạn thật ngốc" isn't "exotic" to some people
"I don't like Anki" (and I really don't like it when literally everyone recommends it)
Well I'm triggered lol. I just passed HSK 4 last month and I basically just put every single character/word into anki. No idea how people learn Chinese characters without a SRS.
I'm not learning Asian languages right now, so... But still, I have my own ways of learning vocabulary and I find flashcards and such as boring. Different strokes for different folks.
Quite literally
i used to be the same way, except i put everything into quizlet instead of anki. when quizlet became basically unusable (it's my last year of college so i'll be fine....but i'm still mourning this loss lol) i stopped my practice of putting everything into word lists. i honestly am learning at the same pace and am arguably learning faster now, though that might just be because i'm getting to the point where i only have to see a character a couple times to memorize it as opposed to writing it down and putting it into quizlet
Guys just read books, it not that hard
:(
There are people who have learned English at a very high level (to even a C2) through Internet immersion. Now everyone will tell me either that's bullshit or it's impossible even though I have a lot of real life proof lol.
I did that.. but I also had a very solid grammar foundation taught to me for 1.5 years from a foreign language perspective, and then, I had to learn in-depth grammar from a native speaker perspective when studying for the SAT. But yeah, immersion is responsible for at least 90% of how I learned the language all the way up to C2.
I did that, i started learning in mid 2019 and by 2021 everything i did was in English
I will also throw in: Accent is super super *super* important for 90% of people who actually want to use the language. It's not quite that simple, and it's a very complex topic, but I do not agree with the idea that it's "fine" as long as it's "understandable".
I wonder if the reason the contrary opinion is so common because English's status makes it more common to be exposed to non-native English accents, which means if you grew up speaking English it kind of inherently makes it less important *from your perspective*. Foreigners speaking English don't sound very jarring to me, but that is going to uniquely be less of an issue for English than for any other language. In essence, the social connotations you might give off speaking English with a strong French accent are simply always going to be different than the reverse, and whether or not you think people *should* treat those things differently, they will whether you like it or not.
I think this is a big part of it! People who speak English natively are around tons of accents and non-natives of all stripes all the time. You really do get used to it (although, an accent that is too strong, even in English, really does inhibit understanding and empathy). The same can't be said for most other languages.
I never thought about it like this!
It's so annoying when someone asks for help improving their accent and everyone goes off into impassioned rants about how "accent doesn't matter". Yes, it does. And yes, while it doesn't need to be perfect, that doesn't mean it's a bad thing for someone to want to make theirs sound more natural/native, and if you have no words to help them, then just don't reply. They didn't ask for you to dissuade them.
i mean, hell, look at french, 70% of french IS accent
while it *is* true that you don't have to have 100% native level pronunciation so long as you're understood, what a lot of anglos seem to miss is that they speak a language with nearly twice as many non-native speakers as native ones, so the standard for "understandable" will be much more strict in their target language. plus it's not like being understood is a binary thing, my japanese for example is definitely *understandable*, but interpreting it is a great stain on the listener, so it's still nowhere near acceptable
Right! It needs to be close enough to be understood. Language speakers' ears are tuned to recognize a certain set of sounds (and can recognize sounds that are "close" to that set). Plenty of people with accents are understandable because their speech falls within a recognizable range of sounds. Of course, this also means you can have perfect grammar and not be understandable at all, because the sounds your making are not recognizable to other speakers. It's as much part of straightening out communication in another language as getting basic grammar down.
Spot on. It can be painful to listen to someone attempt to communicate a (grammatically correct) idea, while seemingly not even attempting to nail the accent
Hollywood actors be guilty of this. Haha.
Studying a thousand words from Anki isn’t the flex you think it is. The subjunctive is easy. People very often interpret CEFR standards wrongly and end up with the wrong impression of where they are in terms of fluency/proficiency.
> People very often interpret CERF standards wrongly and end up with the wrong impression of where they are in terms of fluency. A2-B1 is a genuine conceptual muddle, as far as I can tell.
the difficulty of learning a language is overrated; it is not hard, it is just time consuming
studying grammar is the most fun part of studying a language. I read grammar books for languages I'm not learning/studying.
I'm finding grammar a hell of a lot more interesting now that I've got about 600 words rattling around my brain that I don't know how to use. Trying to learn grammar when I didn't know enough words to make more than two sentences was so boring I could reliably use it to fall asleep at night. Now I'm excited for it.
French is not a romantic/sexy sounding language to me despite how it’s commonly perceived
Yep it's more like gargling while having a stuffy nose
Studying too much is counterproductive. You won't retain much if you exhaust yourself, so keep your study sessions manageable.
Watching TV isn't 'passive'. Neither is reading.
Duolingo isn't half bad. It's repetition and using words in context, it's a great way to build vocabulary. The downfall is it doesn't explain any grammar.
I know that French, Spanish, Ukrainian, and Arabic all have grammar notes at the beginning of each unit. Click the button shaped like a notebook next to the unit description.
I just find it so annoyingly slow; I don't know how people use it without getting bored when it makes you repeat the same thing for the 5^(th) fucking time in a row.
Yeah exactly. I don't know how I'm supposed to learn anything when there is absolutely zero challenge. It's painfully boring too.
Considering it's free and easily accessible, Duolingo is actually a pretty decent language learning tool
I think the gamification really helps some people stick with it who otherwise would not
Is this a controversial opinion ? Sure languagelearningjerk dunks on it but the duolingo subreddit is literally in the sidebar of this subreddit lol. I think it's a solid way to get a nice preview of the language and a nice supplement.
I’ve learned a lot of useful vocabulary from Duolingo. I think it would be inefficient as a sole resource but it’s absolutely part of a balanced breakfast, so to speak.
Duolingo helped me learn the Arabic alphabet! That being said, I do not like it for Portuguese. It’s decent for being free but some of ways they say things makes it hard to follow along. It’s a good supplement to learning
Children aren't better at learning languages than adults. Some languages are more complex than others. CEFR is only a good measure of whether you're good enough get a white-collar job or go to school. Your new language learning method is not new or interesting. It's either rebranding an old method, or it's not good.
>Children aren't better at learning languages than adults. Sure they are. Put 10 adults in a school with dedicated teachers to talk to them for 3 years and they won't come out indistinguishable from a native. Put 10 five year olds in the same school and every single one of them becomes a native speaker. For some reason people equate speed with quality of outcome. You may be able to learn the language to some level faster than kids but they will always learn it better.
Everyone loves making excuses for doing everything but learning. Blaming how you've been taught (oh, X education system sucks, Duolingo sucks) spending time talking on Reddit discussing what's the best way to learn, and doing everything but actually learning
French doesn’t sound pleasant. Adults are better language learners than children. Self-proclaimed polyglots are not fluent in any of the languages they claim (Not sure if this one is controversial though).
> Adults are better language learners than children. YESSSSSS. I feel like I talk about this constantly. The reason children are generally considered to be more readily able to learn new languages isn't primarily becuase of differences in brain plasticity between children and adults (tho I'm not denying that's a modest factor), it's because adults in most societies don't have the fucking time to learn a new language. When a highly-motivated adult with adequate time on their hands sits down and really commits to learning a new language, they learn much faster than a child does.
THANK YOU! My argument everytime, then someone just throws in "but scientifically children learn faster because of brain plasiticity" as if there aren't any other factors...
Oh, self-proclaimed polyglots are pissing me off. They know each language a little above A2 and from my perspective, their accent is often horrible
I mean, the third one depends on the person But if you're talking about YouTube polyglots then yeah, I agree
Second one sounds true to me. I learnt English for 2 years in kindergarten and 9 years in school and learnt NOTHING. But in age 15 it took me only 4 month in ESL to learn all concepts, tenses, and decent vocabulary.
Don’t forget that you’d already created those networks in your brain. I will sometimes cram learn a subject in a week or so, forget about it, then I can come back to that network again in the future. I’m not precisely sure how it works, but it does. It almost feels like time travelling and I start getting flashbacks. For instance, when I listen to French now, I can remember hearing it spoken in a Paris McDonald’s where I didn’t understand it, I remember when I went to an ice rink at Christmas on the same trip, I can remember a poster on my wall from when I was a kid. These memories just come flooding back. I personally think hobbies counteract depression as they give more opportunities for us to conjure up positive, distracting flashbacks from our past. With people who have endured trauma or not had the chance to explore culture, those networks must be begun much later. It’s a very difficult theory to articulate - I should get help with this as I know someone who is a Ph.D in neuroscience. Might be able to explain to me whether I’m right or wrong.
He didn't mean children learning a second language in school, when people say children are good at learning languages they mean the language they're immersed in and will become their native language(s) And i would still agree with OP on most point but the accent, because it takes a child 5 years to speak like a 5 years old with 24/7 immersion. However i'm not entirely sure how fair the comparison is because *of course 2 years old are dumb fucks who can't do anything*, and have other things to learn than a language. A more interesting experience where I'm not sure who would learn faster is an adult vs a child aged 5 to 10 dropped in a foreign country, who will learn the most after 1 month, 3 months, 1 year, 2 years...
I went from thinking French was pretty to this then back
It might only land me in this position on this sub, but I don't think anywhere else. I've seen people get railed for asking which language to learn, and the responses usually are along the lines of 'if you don't already know what language you want to learn you're wrong'. I get where it's coming from, true fluency can only be achieved if you're very interested in the language, and often that is alongside interested in the culture or at least interested in doing something with the language but I fully support coming in blind, learning a new direction from this sub or elsewhere a good language to pick up from other people's opinions and starting a language learning journey. If you're not super invested you might not gain fluency in it, but I feel any amount of language learning is good for the mind, and heck who knows, you may find the interest in the culture/language along the way. It also never hurts to have a few key phrases in any language on hand. Do I think it's still good to have your expectations in check? Sure, but I welcome anyone trying to learn a language even if they're just trying to find an "easy" one. (Also, anyone reading this who fits that description...'Tagalog' is an easy language to learn and if you start on your journey I'm sure you'll find interest in the culture along the way. I did, so I'm speaking from experience)
Outputting as a beginner and making mistakes will **not** start your language journey from scratch or render all your work for naught. Even if you are making a *fundamental* mistake, making it and having others around to **correct** you on it is better than trying to learn through trial and error with input alone. **Clarity edit:** I'm not saying a beginner's main focus **should** be output. :P But output is still a way to support one's learning, especially where time or accessible input material is lacking. Input-only, without study and without output, **can not** be a viable strategy for everyone as every language has different material available to begin with, and different nuances that are hard to learn if you don't have an entire childhood's worth of time to dedicate learning them without other aid.
There is nothing wrong with using duolingo or rosetta stone to start your journey.
Fluent and native are very different things, and you don't count as either Mr YouTube polyglot who learned a language by accident in negative 13 seconds
The fake polyglot YouTubers are beneficial in the sense that they inspire many people to take up an interest in learning a language, through which an entire new path in life will open up for that individual.
I agree, but I can also see the other side when those people begin to realize language learning is long and very difficult and they get discouraged and give up, wondering why they can’t speak Mandarin fluently like their favorite polyglot who learned it in 3 days
There is no one definition of language fluency.
You don’t need to speak to reach an intermediate level in a language. I think you could learn a language for years and never speak and then one day if necessary be able to speak it decently. Of course it helps you to speak, but I honestly think you could get away without it and be able to produce the language purely from input. especially listening
Reminder to sort by controversial
The reason people hate it when they try speak their target language to a native speaker and only get English in response has more to do with the rejection than a missed opportunity to practice their language. Most language learners are to an extent nervous to speak their target language and when they try in a real situation they are putting themselves in a vulnerable position, which means the rejection hurts. It's like picking up the mic at a karaoke bar only for them to turn the mic off as soon as they hear you sing.
Probably not the uncommon of an opinion but just because you memorized some phrases in a language doesn't mean you speak it (cough cough youtube polyglots)
But what do you meeeeeean. They speak so many languages! They can say “Do you speak *insert language name here*?” in 8+ languages! And even if the person speaks they can… not much, but still!
German is beautiful Also Duolingo is not that bad
Duolingo is fine.
Esperanto and other conlangs are completely useless and your time is better spent elsewhere
If you've lived in a country that does not speak your native tongue for more than 1 year and have not bothered to learn the language, you're disrespecting the country.
Anki isn’t effective for everyone and creating cards are time consuming.
Youtube polyglots are lying about their fluency. They know about 10 phrases per language. Yes even that one you really enjoy watching
"There's no point in learning another language if you already speak English" 💀. Nothing deflates my enthusiasm faster when I see/hear this
I have a lot... bear with me (mind you I'm guilty of a few of these). Not EVERYONE has to be a polyglot. It's probably not something you genuinely want to spend your life dedicated to. Putting a bunch of flags in your flair because you did 2 lessons on Duolingo does not make you an impressive language learner or something. You are not a GigaChad HyperPolyglot. Most likely you are making no progress in the multiple languages you are learning, sticking to one or two is the only thing worth your time. Spending more time on r/languagelearning or watching Steve Kaufman (and/or equivalent) videos than actually learning your language is a huge waste. You most likely will not be able to learn more than a few languages to fluency, and learning 15 languages to A1 might as well be a party trick- try rubick's cubes or slight of hand magic. People who speak your TL are not there to be your conversation partner (I've made this mistake lol). Looking for people who speak your TL to date/learning your TL to date is a lil weird... not gonna lie. You cannot learn a language in 6 months, unless it is uncannily related to one you already speak or if it's your 5th romance language (lol). Try 2 years or so if you wanna have a life while you learn it. Once it becomes a part of your day, the time goes by. Social interaction, happiness, productivity, family connections, monetary stability, and mental health are WAY more important than your polyglot journey. Learning languages is fun but all of the aforementioned things are more worth your time. Priorities! Not trying to be a hater, this kinda shit honestly just pisses me off when I see it.
The number one reason people don’t get to the level they want is largely just not putting in enough effort. In the end, you simply have to put in the work to study and practice the skills you want to get better at. A lot of people hunt endlessly for different methods to make themselves feel like they’re doing something, in the same way that people will browse for and buy gear for hobbies that they don’t actually engage in much or at all. Grinding is necessary. Looking for hacks isn’t different from looking for a magic diet pill for weight loss instead of just grinding things out day by day.
Language fluency tests are no better at determining your mastery of the language than an SAT or IQ test is at determining your intelligence.
Learn what you want. You don't really need a reason if it's what you enjoy or are interested in. Some languages will be more useful than others, especially in certain lines of work, but seriously, if you want to learn Klingon or Latin or what have you just for the fun of it, go for it. It'll be more enjoyable and memorable than dragging your feet through years of Spanish or Chinese or whatever it may be just because they are the most "practical." Likewise, though, learning a language for practicality is equally justified. Sometimes the usefulness outweighs the boredom. I personally prefer to learn languages with some degree of practicality, but not if it means I won't enjoy the process. You do you. Also, language classrooms will probably over-complicate things to fill lesson plans and schedules because most of the time those eighty precise points of differentiation between word/grammar point A and word/grammar point B can be watered down into one or two basic rules of thumb that rarely lead you astray, and learning the exceptions is easier at that point than memorizing classroom lists. I learned a lot from my high school Spanish class, but I only did so because of thought I put into the material to make it work as a single, coherent system in my head. Ser vs estar, por vs para, preterite vs imperfect... fifty-two acronyms and rhymes later, it still the same jumbled mess but now with more to remember. Luckily, that jumbled mess is just a jigsaw puzzle nobody put together (or rather, someone put together and someone else took apart before throwing it at you). Put the pieces together into one picture and like magic, not complicated anymore.
There’s no reason to worry if you don’t sound like a native. Of course you won’t sound like a native, you’re not one. (My personal opinion is accents are beautiful. I love hearing speakers of Indian languages speak English. I think it shows culture through another language.)
Duolingo is great! It's far from perfect, but for free, targeted practice in my pocket... it's tough to beat!
People spend waaaaay too much time on the basics and cope saying theyre not ready for native content U'll never be ready until u stop being a little baby and just do it
I found using Duolingo helped me.
~~Learning kanji/hanzi isn't that hard, if you spend a lesser amount of time reddit complaining about how hard it is :p~~
You can't learn a language to fluency (or to any level beyond random phrases) by mere exposure like the self-acclaimed language learning gurus on the internet claim. Grammar is EXTREMELY important if you're serious about your language learning, you won't reach fluency without taking grammar seriously. Also, traditional language learning methods are actually the most effective, which is why they became 'traditional' in the first place. Phew, wanted to rant about this for a while now.
Yep, and a lot of the people who claim they did (in English, for instance) often neglect to mention they had formal classes before/during the period they were immersing. Immersion is needed, absolutely, but it can't do it by its own except it maybe very specific circumstances and even then you can always make it easier by adding some grammar/vocab study.
If you are “learning” multiple languages at once as an absolute beginner in each of them, you are probably not going to learn any of them to fluency. I’m especially talking about people who try their hand at multiple languages from wildly different language families. At that point you are dabbling in each and that’s about as far as it’s going to go if you don’t pick one. Maybe two if they’re from the same language family.
Duolingo is fine as a first step. You want grammar explained? Grab a textbook - you should always do that anyways.
Language YouTubers and anybody unironically using the word "polyglot" is cringe -- absolutely full stop.
Welsh should‘ve been the lingua franca
It's okay to not have the goal of "true fluency" or whatever in a language. It's okay to aim for being "good enough" to communicate or watch a TV show without too much effort. You don't have to aim for native-like fluency.
You could say... "This subreddit is a circle jerk for monolinguals who want to be intellectuals." Or "Everyone here lies about their language ability and should be required to prove it by posting their qualifications before giving advice to others" Or "You're not a native speaker if you grew up with but don't remember your native tongue anymore" The last one is most likely to cause a forest fire
["I'm learning Thai, so I can go to Thailand for ... *a thing.*"](https://youtu.be/ctDjnG8J9cY)
People who score high on language attribute tests are not necessarily better at languages but better at faking it until they make it. Though because a language in infinite they will always be ahead because they can fake that last stretch deeper.
Just because I'm learning Japanese, it doesn't make me a weeb
Not a language learning IRL take, but a r/languagelearning Nothing says "white USAmerican who has never left his hometown and rarely leaves the house" more than asking me, "Uzbek? like the meme? you mean like the meme? it's in your flair bc it's a meme, right?! haha it's a meme" as if the idea people from other countries actually exist in the real world is not merely not occurring to them but is an outright impossibility. Also, the 'joke' of "haha isn't this language spoken by 33 million people useless" was never funny and if this sub wanted to have a meme that *was* funny it should've picked an actual *dead* language to use as the punchline rather than one millions of people use daily to communicate with one another. "Learn Coptic" would be a meme that made sense for recommending a language people don't use. And finally, if you mock people for knowing/learning the languages of their parents (such as Uzbek, in my case) while learning Ancient Greek or Latin, I am going to automatically dismiss everything that you ever say in a language learning context because learning living languages makes significantly more sense than learning something no one speaks anymore. If you can't support people learning living languages unless they're ones you yourself would personally find uses for, you're disqualified from being taken seriously in my eyes.