Do You Speak A Second Language?

I have been studying Cornish for a year now - I just sat my first Kowethas Kernewek exam, and was astonished to discover that, under pressure, I can actually now carry on a proper conversation, yn Kernewek, rag deg mynysenn!

I speak Irish pretty well, I'm a little rusty cos it's hard to find fellow speakers, but I was close to fluent a few years back, and I did a radio show in Irish for a few years in my earlier 20s. could easily chat with someone at length.

I speak German well enough to get by on a day to day basis while there and definitely to carry on a 10 minute conversation though it wouldn't definitely not be grammatically perfect. Basically I understand most conversational German and can speak it well enough to make myself understood. Dad from there and his family all still lives there. Despite my mom also being fluent, we did not speak it at home. What I know I learned from listening to him speak with friends and from when we've visited relatives. I'm confident that if I spent any real length of time living there I'd be fluent fairly quickly. I just wish I had some conversational partners here.

Oh sorry and for the qs... I learned in school, but my command of it was helped mostly by going to the Gaeltacht areas in Ireland for a few weeks every summer. This is sort of a rite of passage for Irish teens, you go and stay with native Irish speakers along with other kids, and (in theory) speak the language and no English.

A lot of the time it's sort of a doss of underage drinking and snogging but the school I went to was borderline IRA and made you salute the flag every morning (only remembering how weird this was.)

They used to be in the news every now and again for sending a kid home when he sneezed and said "excuse me" in English, or similar. One sentence and you were gone.

As harsh as that sounds, I learned Irish rapidly there and it totally exposed how badly it was taught in schools.

A lot of Irish people can't really speak Irish I guess, but one of my close friends in London has a good grasp and if we want to talk about English people or say something privately it's quite handy.

x-post - I really really wish my parents had raised me bilingually. :(

Lol, same here, my Portuguese lies dormant - oddly can understand but I couldn't speak the words themselves for any chunk of time.

Thinking of signing up for a class..

As an added bonus, if you do speak another language, I think it'd be great if you could say "I can speak ::your language" or something like that in the language. So we have an interesting record of the ILX polyglots.

e.g. My a wra kewsel Kernewek!

I would love to do an intensive learning session, like Local Garda describes - problem is, there are so few Cornish speakers, let alone native ones. (The language has only been revived since the 1920s.) They do Pennseythun Kernewek about once a year, where you go to a hotel in Cornwall and everyone speaks nothing but Cornish for a weekend, but I missed it this year as I was unemployed and too poor to go.

I have to say, my class has been very good at getting you up and chatting. Language teaching has changed so much since I was at school, and they'd throw months of grammar and declensions at you before you even learned to say "hello, my name is..."

It's funny, my parents both speak Afrikaans as well as English - they used to speak it to one another when they wanted to discuss stuff "not in front of the kids" - not realising that we picked it up pretty quickly. I used to be able to understand it if it was spoken - my aunt and uncle spoke it pretty exclusively in their house (my aunt is a native speaker) so I'd get a lot better every time we stayed with them - but I think it's probably gone by now, it's been so long since I heard it. Do kinda wonder if that early exposure helped me develop my weird interest in obscure languages.

I could probably converse on a message board in French or German, but couldn't speak them well enough to have an actual out-loud conversation, so will go for the monolingual Anglophone answer. Which I am not proud of. I love languages, and have quite an ear for tracing etymologies, but can't keep enough grammar in my head to make them flow. And I hate hate hate gendered linguistics.

If by gendered linguistics, you mean languages that have masculine/feminine/neuter cases, I'm completely fascinated by them. Like, how inanimate things get assigned to which case. (Why is chi (house) masculine and eglos (church) feminine? What's the thinking behind that?) Makes you think how random concepts of gender really are.

I speak Spanish well enough to have a ten minute conversation...had fun a few months ago at a dinner party in Paris where we had no languages in common collectively: some Italian, English, Spanish & Portuguese speakers; but we all spoke enough Spanish to have a three hour good time; & I felt great afterwards, to know my abilities are still intact. I'm the child of an immigrant from Latin America who didn't want his children to speak Spanish natively, so I was raised monolingually, but heard Spanish all the time since it's my father's first language & he spoke it with his family, so when I started taking Spanish in school I was fluent-ish very quickly, like within a year or two of ordinary USA Spanish courses.

this is why I was so happy to send my kids to public school in France a few years back; even if they forget it whilst in the USA due to inaction it'll have altered their minds enough so that it'll come back quickly when they're next immersed, hopefully soon.

I can carry out basic conversations in Spanish no problem, but don't feel I know it well enough to count as knowing another language. I would love to speak it fluently though.

I have had long conversations in it, but full of mistakes and me asking the other person to repeat themselves.

The thing is, gendered objects are basically arbitrary - there is no sense to them, you can't learn them through any deep understanding of symbolism etc, they switch between languages (case in point: the moon is feminine in French, masculine in German), and they make up heavy parts of your testing even though they are pointless.

xpost to WCC

My dad's first language is French but I only absorbed tiny bits and pieces from him. He watches hockey games and some other TV in French but never really spoke it around the house unless relatives visited. My parents considered putting me in French immersion from kindergarten onwards but then we moved across the city and it was no longer an option.

In our school system we were made to learn French for a few years (starting around age 9/10) and after that it became optional. I stopped taking it because the pacing was slow (first three years were spent learning vocabulary and only the most basic sentence structure, like 'il porte un chapeau rouge') and I wanted to use my options for other things. In the end it made no difference: friends who took French immersion or studied French from grades 4-12 and haven't used it as adults have mostly forgotten all of it. I went back to French as an adult and I try to keep up with it so I don't lose it. I'm glad I'm at a point where I can converse in French, read in French, etc. Wish I had more people to speak it with though.

Getting the genders of things right is still a struggle. A lot of them in French are just based on what the ending of the word is, like '-ion' is often feminine, '-age' is usually masculine.

The "speaking it with other people" is so urgent and key. Apparently, even though my school only offers 4 years of Cornish, there is a meet-up in the pub afterwards where people get together and converse that some people have been doing for, like 11 years now. I really hope I can get to that level.

Yeah, it's interesting, the structure and spelling of gender in languages, and trying to work out - things in Cornish are feminine if they're -enn a lot of the time. But new words when they are invented or imported, usually they are made to be masculine because feminine words often mutate in really confusing words.

The other thing you have to remember in Cornish is if things are considered "people" or not. Yet another set of mutations are based on whether the word is a person or a thing - but the Cornish consider horses to be people, and also stones are considered to be people for the purposes of mutation. My teacher reckons that definitely speaks to the "Celtic" mind-set, in terms of standing stones etc. are considered to have spirits in them or whathaveyou. Either way, it's interesting.

Also, before anyone asks, no - Basic, COBOL, C++, SQL etc do not count as second languages.

I decided a goal of mine is to learn Spanish, it's just dumb as shit living (and teaching) in Arizona and not knowing how.
SO THEN what is the best way to learn a language? Private tutor? Community college? Other? The nice thing is I'll have plenty of people to practice with very easily.

I understand Spanish p well (can read novels and stuff),and can converse in it,tho with a fair amount of errors and hesitation.my dad is a native spanish speaker but never spoke to us in Spanish when we were kids.

i also understand some basic Portuguese,Italian,and Catalan.

i remember local garda's radio show,sounded like some free flowing irish to me.

Community College is definitely the way forward, I think. It's much easier to pick up a language in a group of people - so long as the class size isn't too large, so you can actually do group speaking. Our class started at 14, which was too big, but these days there are only ever 4 to 6 people in the group, and we sit round a table, and it's the perfect size because everyone gets a turn.

I studied Spanish for several years in high school, but not much of it ever went in, mainly because I had too much Latin in my head already.

unless these guys are your study group:

http://screencrave.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/community2.20-studygroupconfused-04-14-11.jpg

you'd learn everything except Spanish.

also, English is my second language - I speak Malay fluently, and can understand and carry out a conversation in Indonesian.

Also, before anyone asks, no - Basic, COBOL, C++, SQL etc do not count as second languages.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Saturday, June 23, 2012 3:55 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Loooool, they should, though. And symbolic logic (I might be able to tick the second box in that case).

Also, I *love* that stones are grammatically people in Cornish. The old ones really are the children of the stones.

Has everyone on this thread heard about Duolingo by now? http://duolingo.com/. It's a free language learning service that aims to translate the web at the same time...

There was an old Cornish fairy-tale, I've forgotten the details, I'll have to look it up, which was about this old giant couple, and the stones literally were their children, and the giantess used to carry them around in her apron. But when you see the rock formations on, like, the far coast of West Penwith, they really *do* look like people! Whole tribes of people just hanging out on the side of the cliff, staring out to sea. Which reminds me, I have more sketches I have to finish and upload.

I do wish people would provide examples of the languages they speak! Especially things I don't get to hear/see that often, like Irish and Malay! (I don't think Indonesian is in Latin script so maybe that's not possible?)

no. p shameful. spanish classes in HS and college, but i didn't put much into it and it never clicked. i had a hard time with the particular kind of frustration of language learning, tbh.

I do like to troll the Rosetta Stone booth ppl at the airport by telling them I will buy one of their packages when they release one for papiamento.

<3

WCC, actually Indonesian and Malay are pretty similar - same structure, just different words, pronounciation and speech rhythms.

I can speak Malay = Saya boleh bercakap Bahasa Melayu
I can speak Indonesian = Saya bisa berbicara Bahasa Indonesia

Oh yeah, I can read Arabic too (thanks to four years of Quranic classes) but I don't remember what most of it means.

Thank you! That's really cool, I can see how closely they seem to be related. This kind of thing is fascinating to me, how you can sometimes see similarities between languages which must have diverged a long time ago.

(I really like comparing Cornish with Welsh speakers - which is very similar - and with Irish speakers - which is not that similar, but still shares similar things if you know which letters commonly changed.)

ABBS - I am a language teacher (TESOL) and agree that structured classes (comm coll or other, just make sure you have a good teacher) are best for getting grammatical foundation and sea legs in listening, speaking, writing (reading is usually easiest if you already highly literate, which most of ILX is). After a good while of that, immerse yourself in situations that will enable you to use your newfound skills.

The best language learners have a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for learning. (That is to say they are both able and willing to use their new language). A willingness to be uncomfortable helps, as does a low "language ego" (high language ego usually translates to a fear of making errors/looking stupid and strong clam-up)

I speak Spanish but should definitely practice more.

I didn't know that term before, but I think I have the acme of all language ego.

Ha ha ha @ language ego.

I think that I am one of the worst students in my class because I just blurt random Cornish things out in class all the time, regardless of whether it's the right answer or even appropriate sometimes. My teacher, OTOH, thinks I am one of the best students because I produce loads of actual Cornish, all the time, regardless of whether I'm saying "cabbage soup!" or "Gary has the key." Language is one of those things you have to be just not afraid of getting it wrong.

Ha, I don't think that's a problem for me – I have this awful Peggy Hill pronunciation style (just on account of picking up vocabs from signs, from conversation, etc, and never learning anything formally) but I still try to use Spanish words all the time. Universal reaction from my students (about a third of whom have Spanish as their primary language) or from my brother (who went on a mission to Chihuahua and is fluent) is "what are you saying? why are you saying that? godddddd" and it just makes me lol. But when I understand a Spanish word here or there that a student says they think I am a total badass. I think it would really help make me a better advocate for those kids, and able to talk to their parents, which would be super helpful. Plus it's just a cool language. I've never been able to figure out how to roll my Rs but everyone says if you speak it long enough it just happens eventually.

If by gendered linguistics, you mean languages that have masculine/feminine/neuter cases, I'm completely fascinated by them. Like, how inanimate things get assigned to which case. (Why is chi (house) masculine and eglos (church) feminine? What's the thinking behind that?) Makes you think how random concepts of gender really are.

Well, not that random, assuming you're talking about grammatical gender:

sci.lang FAQ - How did genders and cases develop in IE?

I took a few German classes in high school and college, as did my roommate, and we'd hang out at home and go shopping and speak the most garbled, fucked up, silly blend of German and English. But any excuse to try on all the fun different words! Why not! Languages are cool.

Yeah, it's just a physical thing your tongue has to learn, there's nothing mysterious about it. I started a Spanish speaking thread on the sandbox to practice once...maybe la hora ya llegó.

One of my personal complications is that I work with Spanish speakers from all over the Spanish speaking world, and there are very different vocabulary and pronunciation conventions from one person to another. I decided a long time ago that I would not attempt to ape my conversational partner's style (la española, la puertorriqueña, etc) and would just speak the dialect I learned the most from -- español bogotano.

also i knew f hazel would show up before too long!!

Well, what I mean by random is... what Emil.y pointed out - why is moon masculine in Germanic languages and feminine in Romance languages (and also Celtic languages, apparently)? Why is ship feminine in some language groups and masculine in others? It doesn't seem nearly as neat a division as that link suggests.

i have high language ego! that's my biggest obstacle to speaking spanish on the reg because i am v conscious of saying things correctly in my native language and like to think i can express myself v well in english. i get super bummed when i realize how limited i am in spanish and then i start thinking "how can i express this really great idea in english using the 5 words i know in spanish?" then i'm like, "wait i know more than 5 words!" and by then i've been sitting there for 10 seconds hemming and hawing and i pull up google translate while i'm on the phone with a parent and hoping that it works. this was very difficult when trying to tell some mom that her son smelled like weed but didn't have anything on him.

My parents are bilingual Cubans and brought us up the same. I speak as much Spanish as English these days.

Well, what I mean by random is... what Emil.y pointed out - why is moon masculine in Germanic languages and feminine in Romance languages (and also Celtic languages, apparently)? Why is ship feminine in some language groups and masculine in others? It doesn't seem nearly as neat a division as that link suggests.

Oh, it isn't neat, but it isn't random either. There's definitely an arbitrariness in the way languages change over time, but if you had the entire history of the Indo-European language laid out before you, you'd see that differences like E.mily pointed out that seem bizarre and random in the present are in fact the result of a set of systemic and to some degree predictable historical processes of language change. Noun classes in Indo-European languages seem random now because they are semantically empty, pretty much. You can bet that in their original form they were not, and made useful, non-random distinctions.

Yes, and those non-random distinctions reveal much about the cultural narratives of what constitutes "masculine" or "feminine." They have meaning and context within that culture - like a lot of narratives about gender and what it means - but compared one to another, it reveals the arbitrary nature of deciding what it means to be "masculine" or "feminine."

I realise I'm not explaining myself very well.

Something like... the gender of nouns within a language is something which reveals something about that specific culture, and how they conceive of masculine as opposed feminine. But it reveals nothing about either the actual Moon - or indeed about actual, individual men or women. *Why* they draw the distinction is not arbitrary at all. But the actual distinction is arbitrary when compared to the distinctions that other cultures make.

Seriously, let's not make this about gender, though.

I really just want to see how people say "Yo hablo Espanol" or "parlez-vous Francais?" in as many languages as people on ILX speak.

(Sentence 1 being v v v out of character, sentence 2 being v v v in character)

Anyway, native English speaker, but I can get by in Spanish. Although if I don't get my ass back to South America in the next couple of years, I'm going to lose it. Only immersion will do it, and I'm too lazy to do it here in Texas.

I have great regard for polyglots. I am purely an Anglophone with mere fragments and smatterings of about three other languages. None come even close to fluency. To slave my pride, I tell myself that at least I have total mastery of english. Total mastery, d'y'hear me?

er, slave should have been salve

Total mastery.

had a six-week french-immersion course in quebec 20 years ago, after which i would have claimed to be capable of a child-like 10-minute conversation. (i even had a few dreams in french!)

that ability went away v. quickly

Mastery of my typing fingers, not so much.

i was good enough to converse in french and irish ten years ago but not no more

Native English speaker, used to be able to converse in some other languages. Let's just say I couldn't decide who to root for in today's match

I have limited conversational French and Russian but have always been too fickle to dedicate any length of time to learning a language properly. I'll be studying one for a few months and suddenly get the urge to learn Polish or Swedish instead. As long as i can get the gist of foreign-language pop songs i'm usually happy but i should make more of an effort to pick one and stick to it.

I speak Irish pretty well, I'm a little rusty cos it's hard to find fellow speakers, but I was close to fluent a few years back, and I did a radio show in Irish for a few years in my earlier 20s. could easily chat with someone at length.

I never spent as near as much time in the Gaeltacht but my spoken Irish isn't bad and would be good if I had someone to speak it with. I could still carry on a conversation though, but am always regretting that I never attained fluency. Still, I can read it and write it to a decentish level, and watching a programme in Irish will bring it all back.

I learned French from various places from about ten on and should really try to bring it up. I find it relatively easy to read and follow French newspapers etc. My issue again is practice.

I gave up German at 15 but have retained a lot of the vocab & grammar.

I'd love to learn a new language, Russian especially, but it would probably be better to work on the ones I (in theory) have.

100% correct on how it's taught in schools. It's more an academic subject with an almost obsessive focus on grammar and mechanics than something you speak. I was more confident speaking French at 13 than Irish at 16.

I have to say, my class has been very good at getting you up and chatting. Language teaching has changed so much since I was at school, and they'd throw months of grammar and declensions at you before you even learned to say "hello, my name is..."

Really? At my school (England, comprehensive, 80s) it was completely the opposite for French: months of phrases before going anywhere near grammar.

i grew up in btwn connacht/ulster gaeltachts but wasn't ever fluent, teaching of irish so poor- in a different way to the way other languages are poorly taught imo, browbeating and guilttripping shovelling of entire essays down the throat and somehow hoping it sticks.

I'll be studying one for a few months and suddenly get the urge to learn Polish or Swedish instead. As long as i can get the gist of foreign-language pop songs i'm usually happy but i should make more of an effort to pick one and stick to it.

Parlo italiano abbastanza bene, ma sono dieci anni da quando sono tornato in Inghilterra e ho dimenticato tanto.

i know German well enough to be the local go-to person when the odd deutsches Dokument comes our way and has to be translated. so a 10-minute conversation is a piece of cake. (I R BRAGGART)

i used to know French well enough to converse for 10 minutes, but my French language skills are rusty now so even if i still can i'd be way too self-conscious to even try.

i can get by reading Dutch (to the point that sometimes i try to read the Subjektivism board). Dutch is kind of a half-way linguistic station b/w English and German, though it differs enough from both to be a bit tricky. but i cannot understand spoken Dutch AT ALL so no 10 minute conversations.

my paternal grandparents were both fluent in Polish, but they never taught my father (or his siblings). they were old-school immigrants who felt that it was better for their children to integrate by speaking only English (plus they learned the advantages of speaking Polish when they didn't want their children to know what they were talking about). however, both of my grandparents came to regret not teaching their kids any Polish -- and my father also regrets not learning any (though it has no practical use for him these days).

I never learned French. Did a bit when I was about 9, then a year aged 12, was so hopeless at the pronunciation and spelling I never went near it again. The bulk of my language learning (4 years!) was Latin and let's be honest, there is no such thing as conversational Latin. It's all grammar.

I'm glad I did it, mind! But it was v v different from how Cornish has been presented. But there is a deliberate attempt to revive Cornish, which focuses on making it a conversational language.

It's paradoxical that having a "high language ego" will keep you from becoming proficient in a language. I use a lot of Spanish at work and am always correcting myself as I am speaking . . . ( like I will realize I used a masculine form when I should have used a feminine form and I will go back and repeat it the right way for some strange reason) when it doesn't really matter cause I am getting my point across and if I am not understandable it will become apparent by a blank and perplexed look. I guess this is why speaking while drunk and/or talking to kids is always going to be easier . . . because there is a lower level of inhibition. I also love the community I work because if you stammer and stumble around enough while searching for the right word . . . they will just jump in and say it for you.

It's not paradoxical really -- high language ego means that you value (even prize) your language skills highly. Value them too highly and you find yourself unable (or at least experiencing psychological difficulty) to express yourself naturally in L2 (3, 4, etc) because your expectations are very very high -- often so high that you can't dream of reaching them, so you give up (preemptively or subconsciously.)

It's just a theory -- nothing regarding SLA is 100% "true", it's all speculation because we don't really know EXACTLY how the brain's machinery works -- but it's one that resonates with me as a language learner and teacher.

In sum, according to this theory, your language ego is not interfering with your ability to communicate, therefore it is not "too high."

Maybe not paradoxical, but crippling and not-self-serving? I taught English in Japan, where students had an innate fear of looking stupid/standing out, and no one would ever say anything in English (during English class) except for the few outlier/outcast types who didn't conform to the silent-student type. It made teaching converstational English very difficult, if not impossible. It also didn't help that the native Japanese teachers favored a call and response approach to language-teaching . . . they would read a passage from the textbook, and the students would repeat in en masse.

an excellent way to ameliorate language ego is by getting roaring drunk.

Right -- language ego sounds like it would be a good thing, but it is extremely self-sabotaging.

I taught English in Japan, where students had an innate fear of looking stupid/standing out, and no one would ever say anything in English

As you can see, there are many psychological/cultural/identity aspects to learning languages that people don't often think about until it's related anecdotally.

That's super common.

It's funny, this thread has got me thinking about why it has been so engaging learning Cornish. And part of it is, that it feels like this special project, this reclaiming of a cultural heritage - and this is not done in a guilt-inducing way, like some people have described learning Irish above (which it could quite easily be) but more as, here is this exciting, special thing we are doing together. And people are so enthusiastic about it, because of that. But also because it's a language that pretty much no one is a native speaker, there isn't so much the pressure to get it perfect. No one's going to shout at you if you mutate a word wrong. People are, for the most part, just so ridiculously pleased that people are learning it and speaking it.

But also, it helps that we have a fantastic teacher who is just unwavering in his belief that we all can and will learn it - that he kept saying "so long as you put something, in Cornish, on the paper, you WILL pass the test" when we were freaking out. And the power of other people's belief that you can do something is often a great help to make you actually do it.

When I compare that to my disastrous attempts at learning French - with a teacher who spoke at you in nothing but French, who shouted at you, in French, if you got anything even remotely not-perfect, and generally took the most condescending attitude in the world, like, how dare we mangle their beautiful language with our British tongues?

It's like, no wonder I got the complete fear so badly that I cannot speak French to this day, yet I will just spew Cornish if given half a chance.

Psychological component is totally important. Always think that there is a big subgroup of people who can't learn a foreign language because they don't know how to translate the persona they hide behind into the target language, the "language ego" you speak of. Not saying people don't have a right to hide behind a persona of course, but...

Whereas when you are on a roll speaking a foreign tongue, it feels like you are acting, playing a new part, doing improv- "Let me see what I can do playing the part of me, in this situation, with the constraint of my language skills such as they are." Of course if you are not feeling up to it, you may not be able to perform, like Charles Laughton sulking in his dressing room while the cameras are waiting.

communicative competence -- another theory, i'll let this explain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_competence

entire field of study related to the question at hand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-language_acquisition

Thanks for links, La Lechera. There is also what seems to be an army of "language hackers" out there blogging their experiences and opinions on the subject

please pardon me if i say that "language hackers" makes me want to barf

They do seem to be a little obnoxious, don't they?

I have just enough French from a distant "Four years of high school + one quarter of college" education that I can occasionally understand French film dialogue without resorting to subtitles for about 5 minutes or so. That's it. We lived in Germany for three years when I was a child (ages 7-9) and I came out of there speaking it at an appropriate age level, but lost it very quickly because I had no opportunity to keep speaking it or learning it when we moved back to the States. (I can count to ten in Russian and say привет, до свидания, спасибо, and меня зовут Филип.)

i wonder if plumbers feel this way about plumbing hackers
language teaching gets no respect! there, i said it.

I respect you

When LL first told me about language ego, I was like "So THAT'S why I can understand spoken Spanish but can't speak it!" I've got such a big old language ego that I got tongue tied trying to communicate while vacationing in London because I was afraid of saying something weird or wrong or incomprehensibly American.

Anyway, took years of Spanish. Got to a point a few years ago, thanks to a job at an non-profit serving Spanish-speaking immigrant community, that I could understand conversations just fine but was never able to get over myself enough to speak it. Took a year of German once and really enjoyed it but never followed up. It's frustrating because I like the puzzle of languages and I think if I could get that ego in check I'd be pretty good at them. Also I am embarrassed to be a stereotypical monolingual American.

A person learning a new language needs a certain degree of comfort not being entirely authentically true to her/his perceived "real" self. Language is a tool used for communication (just like body language, behavior, etc), and communication does not have the same simple set of rules that grammar does. Some people are very grammar-bound in their studies precisely because they fear the leap into potentially dangerous social territory.

Not to be all mememe but I have taught students from all over the world, more countries than I can name and remember off the top of my head, and this is a very different problem from culture to culture. People who do this for a living (and not just to teach themselves new languages and pat themselves on the back for it) are concerned with larger trends like the pitfalls of communicative language teaching, etc. It's a whole field of study that generally gets no respect. Writing about it feels like work but I guess it's in the service of the professions, so w/e.

Feeling really kinda ouch about that whole "teach themselves new languages and pat themselves on the back for it" aside. I'm gonna ask you to explain that rather than try to unpack any assumptions in there?

Oh, I meant nothing personal by that whatsoever -- it was merely a reference to aforementioned "language hackers". I think learning a new language is always great no matter how one accomplishes it; what I tend to bristle at is when someone has a language learning experience ("I taught myself Spanish by watching Sábado Gigante!") and then assumes that everyone else will have the same experience ("Learning Spanish is as easy as regular watching of Sábado Gigante!") without considering the multitude of factors involved in learning a language. Ie, nothing anyone in this thread has done iirc?

I go in peace!

LL otm throughout this thread

just came back from the supermarket and somebody told my dad "it's so cool how quickly you can switch to english from your language"

¯\(°_o)/¯

Not sure whether this is what LL was getting at, but there must be a big difference in the experience of someone who has decided to take up a language for fun/holidays/personal development and has nothing to lose but the course fees and that of someone who *needs* to learn a language they might not have otherwise chosen for reasons of family/job/emigration.

Anyways: I used to be fluent in Irish at secondary school but haven't really used it since (it's still in my head somewhere), my German peaked at university but I guess I'm still fluent, I speak French well enough but find myself making stupid jokes all the time to distract from my vocabulary/grammar limitations (as LL pointed out, sometimes you find yourself inhabiting a different personality when you squeeze into another language). I'd like to pick up something more adventurous (Arabic or Chinese or something) but without concrete reasons I doubt I'd have the motivation to stick at it long-term.

Both my parents are Swiss and I grew up speaking the Swiss-German dialect. I learned English mostly from watching Sesame Street and other television shows. All my schooling was in French and that is the language I speak the most in my everyday life.

I don't really speak enough German anymore and find myself forgetting the language slowly, which sucks. I really need to make an effort to keep speaking it.

I live in Quebec, probably should have mentioned that

there must be a big difference in the experience of someone who has decided to take up a language for fun/holidays/personal development and has nothing to lose but the course fees and that of someone who *needs* to learn a language they might not have otherwise chosen for reasons of family/job/emigration

Huge difference! One is personal edification (voluntary) and the other is borne of necessity (and fully loaded with heavy political and personal issues). The difference is usually represented in my mind as the difference between teaching EFL and ESL. I am a lot more into teaching ESL because there is the element of necessity involved (students are motivated by a real desire to learn) and the psychological components of an ESL student's language learning experience are heavier but they're also more interesting to me than those of your typical EFL student. I haven't had nearly as much experience with EFL, at least not in the last 15 years.

Also I would like to note that few things impress me more than people who have a nativelike facility with all components of a language and have been entirely self-taught. I wish it were always like that, but alas it's not.

i speak mandarin chinese. university degree in chinese lang/lit. lived in china for pretty long periods. speak it for work everyday. i liked to think i could understand cantonese reasonably well and was cracking the pronunciation/tonal puzzle of it, but after leaving vancouver, i think i lost my touch.

i can speak french. i spent about 12 years learning it but i go from days where i think the only thing i remember is the notre pere and some days i can get by sort of in conversation. reading french is easier. i can understand parts of têtes à claques. there's a large francophone population in western canada, including many francophone immigrants from africa. nice talking to people in french again.

my best friend's parents were in the us foreign service, so he grew up all over the place. he first learned french in mauritius (and was compelled to take a german course taught in french when he knew neither), then lived in paris and brussels before going to west africa in the peace corps.

we hung out in paris a while ago and with some frequency ppl were like wtf are you?

he still had some issues in montreal, tho lol

I only speak English but learned French, Spanish and Italian...enough to read but not enough to converse that much. Plan on brushing up before I visit Europe again, though.

I used to know French well enough to dream in French.

I learned Spanish, French, and German in school and college. I got good enough in French to make phone calls and interview people in it. I have only retained what I have probably from listening to French music.

I hear lots and lots of foreign languages at work, but I don't try to speak any that often. I can understand if people think something is pretty in Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Yiddish, and Russian.

I speak French, German, Italian, Spanish, Romanian and Hungarian in addition to my native English - all to the point where a ten-minute conversation wouldn't be a problem. I have also taken classes in Russian, but I'm weak in that. I can pretty much make myself understand in Portuguese and Swedish, though only on an emergency basis. I can understand about 75% of spoken Yiddish, but would greatly fumble if I tried to speak it. I'm at my limit, I think, but I'd really like to learn Welsh as my final language.

Ich kann Deutsch, aber meine Vokabeln sind furchtbar. Ich moechte mit jemand sprechen ueben, ENBB wir sollen uns einander helfen!

i speak english + hebrew (not nearly as well as i speak english, but enough to qualify under thread guidelines, and a few different dialects), read + speak yiddish just below qualifications of thread (but always getting better!), read (and understand pretty fluently) but don't speak Judeo-Aramaic.

also native anglophone

x-post YES!! I am the opposite, btw. My vocab is pretty good. It's the rest I struggle with. Also, it doesn't help that when I am with my family I do this which is to say that they'll talk to me in German and I respond in English because I get nervous. I didn't read the whole thread thoroughly but that is probably something to do with the ego thing. Anyway, I think we should do this.

And to answer WCC's question: Ich spreche ein Bißchen Deutsch.

incidentally from the wiki page about Jewish Babylonian Aramaic The language has received considerable scholarly attention, as shown in the Bibliography below. However, the majority of those who are familiar with it, namely Orthodox Jewish students of Talmud, are given no systematic instruction in the language, and are expected to "sink or swim" in the course of Talmudic studies, with the help of some informal pointers showing similarities and differences with Hebrew.[4] <-<- this is how i learnt it!

a purely comparative approach, interesting!

ich bin ausländer und spreche nicht gut deutsch
ich bin ausländer und spreche nicht gut deutsch
bitte langsam, bitte langsam
bitte sprechen sie doch langsam
ich bin ausländer und spreche nicht gut deutsch

does anyone know anyone who speaks Klingon?

xp I was shocked to discover that "Ich bin Ausländer..." is unknown in Germany.

i can still say the alphabet in german

h-k is monstrous

Another bizarre "learning aid" seared in my memory:

Wie heisst das auf Deutsch?
Das heisst Salat
Wie heisst das auf Deutsch?
Das heisst Spinat
Und das hier ist Milch
Und das ist Tee
Und das sind zwei Eier
Das ist Kaffee

(to the tune of the Blue Danube if that wasn't selbstverständlich)

I got an A in German GCSE but can now remember nothing at all of the language except for one poem I wrote when we had to write a poem. It went like this:
Ich habe eine Schlange
Meine Schlange hast viel Durst
Er geht in zum Kafe
Er hat Getranke und eine Wurst

I may not have remembered the proper grammar.

― Tom, Monday, August 20, 2001 8:00 PM (10 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Je parle Français mais pas très bien. :-( Ich spreche kein Deutsch.
Ik spreek natuurlijk Nederlands, omdat ik opgegroeid ben in België.
Of liever ik spreek meer Vlaams dan echt Nederlands.
I speak English from the age of about nine, I guess
Apparently Belgian teenagers rank third when it comes to speaking English as a second language (in Europe).
Nihongo benkyo shimasuta demo sukoshi dekimasu yo Nihongo wa totemo kirei desu yo.

"I don't really speak enough German anymore and find myself forgetting the language slowly, which sucks. I really need to make an effort to keep speaking it."

I wonder if this is a Swiss problem (there are so many of those), because of the really sizable gap between the various Schwyzer Düütsch dialects and the standard written form. I have been outside the Anglophone world for well over a decade, and although I have my moments of weirdness in English, constant access to written English that closely resembles what I used to speak on a daily basis seems to me to make forgetting English impossible.

I did 5 years of French and 1 of Spanish at school, but that's all. With a phrase book and a bit of practice I can get by in either in terms of shopping, eating out, etcetera, but I couldn't have a conversation, and certainly not 10 minutes. My pronunciation is pretty good but my vocabulary lets me down - in Spain I often find I get replied to by Spanish people in French, which I take as indicative of a lack of any attempt at speaking other languages by most british tourists.

My Mum's French, so I ended up speaking 75% French until I was old enough to attend school.

Unhappily monoglot, by thread criteria. I can read French well, but am moronic in conversation - very high language ego. I think maybe a month of being in France might get me up to ten-minute conversation level.

Fragments of Russian and Polish knocking around my brain, but they're jumbled together and basically useless. I'd like to get one of them working properly (and working properly as a spoken language - push myself away from hyperliterate tendencies) but I can't see fitting it in anywhere for a bit. tbh, my real lang ambitions run more towards the dead ones - been teaching myself Ancient Greek, wouldn't mind trying to get latin (telling myself I'll do it in my 40s).

On paper, I probably know enough German for a rather boring ten-minute conversation, but that language ego thing gets in the way. I think I've managed a couple of very stilted and painful five-minute conversations outside class but I'm not sure I'm quite ready to tick the "ten minutes" box.

Similarly I learnt French for 6 years but I could never have managed an actual conversation as my accent was always too bloody terrible. Speaking German with an English accent doesn't seem quite as bad as speaking French with an English accent. I can't even hear what the vowels are doing or remember which consonants go silent when in French, never mind reproduce it.

I wish I could speak some languages as they're so much fun to look at. tbh I'm not entirely sure I could manage a 10-minute conversation in English that didn't leave me looking stupid - even in English I like to think for a while about what order to put which words in, and by then it's usually too late to say anything.

ah but you write beautifully tho

What's the watermark for this thread? I can converse in basic Chinese if I'm allowed to pause and think for 10 seconds before responding. Don't want to tick 'I speak language(s) other than English as well' when my training wheels are this brightly coloured.

xp lol zing etc. I suppose there is a certain irony in writing like an unedited and longwinded stream of consciousness while fussing so over editing my thoughts before speaking that I often don't do it at all, except they don't actually come out concisely edited (or even in the right order) when I do. They more just sort of... fall out. Until I realise people are staring blankly. Much like ILXing, then.

french & english no problem. spanish i can get by and have conversations with people but it's definitely peppered with grammatical errors and wrong verb tenses. spanish is weird because as a high schooler, since its veryy much like french you tend to coast along and just add -o and -a to the end of words hoping its correct. which is what i did. then i went to mexico for six months and my spanish was good but now since i never get to use it i'm a bit rusty.

yeah my French is like your Spanish & I'm at a conference now in the center of France which is naturally p much all native French speakers except for me & so I'm having to get over the ego thing & speak French & I find myself mixing the languages on the fly, like some kind of Mediterranean soup.

gonna give my talk in English, though, alas.

Having read the questions properly (yes I cannot speak English) I'm ticking option 1, because despite knowing a conversation's worth of Chinese there's no way in hell I'm fluent enough to do it naturally.

voted the first option - i know french well enough to read it but not well enough to hold a conversation in it

Dog Latin - What happened when you had French lessons at school - did you speak French better than the teacher?

Our French teacher was married to a Frenchman, and their sons were 1&2 years below me at school; they were totally bilingual, sat their French GCSEs at about age 12, aced them, and then did Spanish instead, as I recall.

dog latin, how good is your sister at french?

― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Monday, 25 June 2012 14:52 (10 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh lolz
When you watched things on television as a child, did you care much about the plot?

NBS: I spoke French in England till I was about 4 or 5, but quickly caught up with English within the first year at school. It's incredible how adept the human brain is at learning languages at that age. Used to go to France for 4-5 weeks each summer, so that kept me topped up but on the whole our household became fully Anglophone by the time I was 6 or 7. So by the time I was actually learning French at school, yeah I was way ahead of the class and ended up doing my GCSE a good few years earlier. I'm told my accent is pretty much spot on when conversing. I can read the language fine. Writing is a bit trickier, as the only time I've really had to do much of it was at A-level, and all the verb endings and spellings are confusing. I do make a number of grammatical errors, even when speaking, but on the whole I'm pretty capable in French. I could survive there and not have to rely on English.

My sister teaches French in Egypt.

native anglophone. Learned French in high school from y7 through 9...made a halfassed attempt to teach myself Gaelic from a book in y10 and gave up in disgust...took an adult-education course in Italian but didn't follow through on the immersive side of it and lost the knack pretty quickly.

I love languages, I'm just not very committed to learning them I guess. Haha.

(xp) Towards the end of my time in Italy (teaching English) I had to do one-to-one lessons with this boy who was 9 or 10 (or thereabouts). His father was English and his mother was Italian (but spoke fluent English). He spoke English fluently with a rather plummy southern English accent and scarcely made any errors at all. He was really keen on Harry Potter (this is around the time the first film came out) and had read all the books, seemingly understanding almost everything in them*. Despite this, his spelling was really poor. Italian is largely phonetic (and the bits which aren't phonetic are very regular) and he couldn't get his head round the way the letters made different sounds when used in English, never mind the way the same letters could make lots of different sounds or often no sound at all.

*occasionally he would ask me for the meaning of a relatively obscure word, e.g. "What's an ox?", and I would think to myself "What exactly *is* an ox?" before reaching for a dictionary to translate it for him.

nothing is more frustrating that attempting to define a word in its language as opposed to just translating it; really exposes all of your vocab weak points

lexicography is hard!

i don't mean that to sound bratty -- it really is difficult to define a word accurately and concisely

What IS an ox?

It's a giant cow

Why is it so hard (for me) to distinguish in my mind between speakig various foreign languages? I feel like I only have the capacity for English and non-English, which is whatever other language i am speakig. When I leaned Spanish, I kept inserting French words. And now, when I need to speak Spanish, I will occasionally knee-jerk a command in Japanese. I feel like there's not enough room in my brain for all these languages to exist at once.

I finally felt smart enough to read f. hazel's link:
sci.lang FAQ - How did genders and cases develop in IE?
and it is amazing!

At least, it explains a couple of things that puzzled me abt ancient Greek (which I found quite hard work and do not remember any of at all) and then doesn't explain the giant new mystery that those explanations open up. I feel like my head has a new crack in and light is flooding in.

A person learning a new language needs a certain degree of comfort not being entirely authentically true to her/his perceived "real" self.

This is the one sentence I wish I had recognized the significance of before embarking on an adult second-language immersion experience. There is a huge (and justifiable, of course) emphasis on learning vocabulary and grammar, but coming to terms with the fact that your personality, as represented to those around you by what you say, is going to be massively different... that has such a huge impact on becoming fluent, because if you're a certain type of person it can really depress you and sour you on the language-learning experience. It's especially a mind fuck when you start dating a native speaker and have to navigate more serious personal interactions. You're typing with oven mitts on and you cannot take them off, even for a second or two.

I guess it's the aspect of language ego that isn't about speaking "properly" or being embarrassed, but literal ego... recognizing that if you're the type of person who places a lot of value on writing well, or being verbally witty or eloquent... things are going to be rough for at least a couple of years. You are not going to be you in your L2, you are going to be some new distorted version of you, and on top of a raft of other cultural upheavals, that's a big deal.

totally.

and if you're the kind of person that conducts entire conversations by quoting pop culture references, having to speak another language can make you feel like you have nothing to actually say.

then again the lovely emma b tells me she likes me better in french; "you seem more thoughtful"; i like to think it's because i actually AM more thoughtful, but it's usually because i'm like "wtf are they talking about"

(possible answer: they are quoting pop culture references)

you can't even keep an ear out for simpsons voices 'cos they dub that shit into native tongues.

The strange joy of (mis)translating pop culture references into other languages?

I got a kick out of managing to make a "nag difunell, nyns marthow meur ras" joke at the exam (that no one got, but I'm used to no one getting my jokes and references in my native language either.)

I guess I'm just completely used to being misunderstood. That the subtle differences among UK, US and SA English and trying to negotiate them have already destroyed my language ego, so why be scared of getting it rong in another language.

In fact, when speaking a second language, the chances are better that someone will think "oh, foreigner, she doesn't speak this language very well" and less that they will think "Jesus Christ she's clearly batshit/psycho/an arsehole" which I've come to expect in English

an ox is britain's new hope and arsenal's brightest star, after jack wilshere and kieron gibbs

is that english, ken?

ken c otm

lol "after Kieron Gibbs"

partly because of this thread, but mainly because i've been talking about it off and on for the last few years, i enrolled in an introductory Mandarin class last night! tbh this first course is probably going to be too easy for me (i lived in china for a few months a few years ago and still remember some mandarin, and definitely still have an ear for picking out tones), but it'll be great to bust out the workbook and begin learning it in earnest. last time around i was just picking up things as i lived there, which was nice, but i often felt like i was missing really essential components of the language.

Putting this here because it seemed like a good idea:
http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/

That reminds me of a passage in this Roger Deakin book I'm reading, about an extinct Australian Aboriginal language - which had 3 different forms of the imperative! There was 1 for issuing straight commands, another whole tense for being insulting or patronising, and ive forgotten the third. My mind just boggled, like, what a fascinating way of looking at the world. And that's something that's been lost already, and more languages are vanishing.

With 6000 languages (and decreasing) there's so much out there for the collector of linguistic curiosities. Different grammatical forms depending on whether you actually witnessed the event you're reporting! Languages with 16 genders! Languages without numbers!

If anyone's looking for a challenge, two stalwarts of entertaining Linguistics 101 lectures are the Australian languages Dyirbal and Guugu Yimidhirr: Dyirbal has the (relatively) famous gender category containing "women, fire and dangerous things" and used to have a crazy taboo language inside a language:

There used to be in place a highly complex taboo system in Dyirbal culture. A speaker was completely forbidden from speaking with his/her mother-in-law, child-in-law, father's sister's child or mother's brother's child, and from approaching or looking directly at these people[citation needed]. In addition, when within hearing range of taboo relatives a person was required to use a specialised and complex form of the language with essentially the same phonemes and grammar, but with a lexicon that shared no words with the non-taboo language. This phenomenon, commonly called mother-in-law languages, was common in indigenous Australian languages. It existed until about 1930 when the taboo system fell out of use.

Meanwhile, Guugu Yimidhirr uses geographic directions for everything:

Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.”

^ From this rather lovely article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html

Jawel, je spriche several toal'n.

(dutch french german english west-flemish)

women, fire, and dangerous things is also an excellent book by the excellent george lakoff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu-9rpJITY8

I know that sapir-whorf is looked down upon but imo if we're being honest with ourselves, it's probably true

I just started with a new doctor and we did half my exam in Italian as it turns out he studied medicine in Bologna.

I find my faculty for languages has improved as I've got older, my Italian is still pretty strong and I can converse in french better than I could and even follow conversations in german pretty well, I can catch the flow in catalan and spanish as well. Maybe it is not being told I am rubbish at languages by teachers that has improved me. (it's exposure more than anything).

Depends on what interpretation. Strong Sapir-Whorf is decidedly not true.

xpost

I remember reading about a study or a theory that said that children aren't more natural at learning languages, rather, since all that happens to the kid is being exposed to that foreign language 24/7, the kid is forced to pick up the language - sink or swim, as it were

I'd like to think that if one of us were air dropped into the middle of mauritania and we made every effort to pick up arabic, devoting nearly every waking hour to it, we'd become fluent in a year or two, no matter our age

One of my best grad professors worked half the year in Puerto Rico and half in AZ. He said another prof at the University in PR had been going on an attempt to pick up Spanish through straight immersion and absolutely no instruction of any kind, and hadn't gotten anywhere with it after living there for six years.

perhaps it would work if you did it Billy Madison style

Modern Sapir-Whorf-esque research naturally steers clear of statements like "the Hopi have no concept of time", looks more like this:

There were also observable qualitative differences between the kinds of adjectives Spanish and German speakers produced. For example, the word for "key" is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. German speakers described keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful, while Spanish speakers said they were golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny and tiny. The word for "bridge," on the other hand, is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. German speakers described bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty and slender, while Spanish speakers said they were big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy and towering.

www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/gender.pdf

I'd like to think that if one of us were air dropped into the middle of mauritania and we made every effort to pick up arabic, devoting nearly every waking hour to it, we'd become fluent in a year or two, no matter our age

This folk hypothesis was the rationale behind the amazingly named bill English for Children, sponsored by wealthy businessman Ron Unz, who tried to build a political career out of bilingual education. It mandates that kids can learn English in a year in a classroom immersion setting. Naturally, because it's Arizona in the 21st century, it's played out in some very bizarre ways. But in grad school I had to read a ****lot**** of research about how it's nearly impossible to attain academic proficiency in a second language in a year, though conversational L2 is doable.

So what it means is kids in AZ only get one year of focused English education (and how that's been mandated has been really controversial), with the basic understanding that no L1 support is allowed.

That's horrible bs. Sorry kids in AZ.

Yeah it's really awful, no L1 support makes absolutely no sense.

aw that's terrible. anyway like abbott said I'm just spouting off folk psychology and I apologize in advance if I'm stepping on the toes of anybody itt :/

An NPR piece on the "four hour block" that ELL kids get in Arizona.

Anyway that's basically the reason I want to learn Spanish. SO many of my students are marginalized by this! Just knowing a teacher speaks Spanish really makes those kids see that teacher as an advocate. All I can do know is stop asking them to say "chinga" in class, which really knocks their socks off, and that's just one swear word.

stop asking them to say "chinga" in class,

haha I mean ask them to stop saying "chinga," yikes!

hahaha

qué asco!

iirc most of the research says that second language development will be stunted based on your development of your native tongue. the idea that you could drop in the middle of country x and learn their language is dependent on how well you have mastered a language to compare it to.

i will defer to our ESL experts on this one, but this is something my wife the school psychologist with a billion special ed referrals from kids who have nonenglish native languages has told me from conferences on such matters.

also, abbs, I think our kids will stop saying chinga whenever their teachers stop saying "chingao!" at various surprising/upsetting events
which is to say never
ay chingado

yeah that makes sense to me, based on personal experience. but I still hold out hope! foolishly xp

the big problem in PK12 Ed is that conservatives and other like-assy politicos promote full English "immersion" for strictly political reasons (don't want to recognize Spanish as a language being spoken in the US in mass quants). so rather than mandating comprrhensive bilingual education, we (Texas) get it cut off after elementary (I guess Spanish is cute when your little but scary when you're adult sized and might say bad Spanish words about me that I can't understand bc I'm a monoglot pig). all ths does is deny our kids a sense that their culture is important and that they're big dumbos if they can't speak English right. which makes me irate obv.

A lot of students in my community are in a dual language program in their elementary school. They learn half the day in English and the other half in Spanish. I've seen 5th graders writing advanced essays in Spanish on dinosaurs.

The ones who aren't in the dual language program are fluent in conversational English and Spanish, but only really know how to read and write in English. They look at simple written Spanish and have trouble with it, I suppose because they have no experience in formally learning to read or write in Spanish.

Some years ago, the large organisation for which I work instituted a new graduate trainee scheme*. Among the stipulations were that candidates must speak one other language in addition to English. However, the language did not need to be a national language. It could be an unspoken language music, or it could be command of a specific vocabulary, or it could be fluency with verse. Honestly. I was one of those who screened applications. My favourite was from someone who claimed to speak the language of the music industry: "I am able to 'blag" my way on to the 'list" before 'ligging' at the 'aftershow'." Curiously, one of the applicants was the singer in a band whose just-released album would be voted the 58th Best British Album Ever soon afterwards in a major UK music magazine. I clearly did him a favour by not putting him through.

* The man who oversaw it was appointed with the brief of ensuring fair and transparent recruiting. He was offered the job after the head of the organisation met him at a dinner party. The appointee told me this story with no awareness of the irony – or the paradox – at its heart.

Hey - I'm starting a beginner's course in Mandarin soon too! :-) I figured it would be interesting to tackle something that was entirely out of my comfort zone, as being fluent in a Germanic and Romance language, I can just about work out what signs and various nouns mean in languages like Italian, German etc.

I've seen 5th graders writing advanced essays in Spanish on dinosaurs.
Surely easier to use paper?

*internet high fives dog latin*

oh how i lol'd

Z S - I think there's a Mandarin thread on ILX.

sadly I only know school/college-level german and french. Ich heisse Kirsten und ich bin dreizen jahre alt. Wie komme ich am besten zum Bahnhof bitte?
Oh and I can say the first few words in mandarin(?) and last few words in Spanish of 'please reserve the front seats for seniors and people with disabilities', thanks Muni.
Would kind of love to speak Japanese.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

On the off chance that there's anyone near central London with a free morning or afternoon who would like to pilot a new English-language proficiency test, ILX-mail me. You'd need to be a native speaker of English and you'd get a £30 Amazon voucher for your time.

saya bisa bicara bahasa indonesia - tidak seratus persen lancar, tapi cukup untuk momong2. darimana* roz?

(* "darimana: meant in terms of a) where are you from? and b) just as a normal conversational gambit - indonesians don't really say "how are you?" to each other very much. i mean, there's a translation for that phrase ("apa kabar" or "what's news") in indonesian, which indonesians use to talk to tourists (even if you don't speak english, most balinese seem to somehow know that "apa kabar" is usually about the 5th and 6th words of indonesian the tourists tend to learn), or perhaps someone close to them, that they haven't seen in months. BUT: usually they ask either "where are you coming from" or "where are you going" instead. which seems intrusive if you aren't used to it but it's just the equivalent of "how are you" - it's not really like you want to know about someone's inner emotional lives when you ask "how are you", and if you're coming from your mistress's house or something, you don't actually have to say so when asked "darimana?", "jalan jalan saja" is fine.

also, i used to be able to speak crappy-but-enough-to-scrape-by thai, but it's been so long since i've been in thailand that about all i can do is count to 10 as a bar trick. neung, som, saw, see, ha, hok, get, bat, gauw, sip... wait, am i fucking that up?

oh saya juga gak bisa ngomong bahasa indo dengan betul atau tepat, karena saya sebenarnya dari Kuala Lumpur. kamu tinggal di Indo dulu ya?

(this feels oddly formal - when I talk to my Indonesian friends, instead of "saya" dan "kamu" I usually use "gue" and "lu/lo", which is basically just urban/young people-speak (derived from Chinese) for "I" and "you".)

love how plurals in bahasa are just the wordx2

Yesterday Brandon Mably (famous knitter) kept asking if I hadn't lived in England or was a native English speaker. My standard knee-jerk but also honest reply: "Watched too much BBC when I was a child." lol. Also, I am just (or maybe was?) very good at languages, especially accents.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Only one obvious joke-vote. Amazing!

love how plurals in bahasa are just the wordx2

actually it's kinda cooler than that - you can just repeat a word and it means something similar but new. for example: jalan = "road" jalan2 (jalan jalan) = "drive/walk around to some places, whatev"

Roz, gue and ku/lo is, yeah, they call it bahasa gaul ("language cool") though it's so common it's almost ubiquitous. is it from originally from chinese? i thought it was batawi (the jakarta ethnic group, and therefore how hip city people talk on tv)

then again i learned my indonesian in a university setting, so a lot of words i use sound sorta ridiculously formal, but at least people understand me. more or less. actually i wont deny it, my indo is fairly shitty for having been here 9 years! but, a lot of expats in bali barely try, so most people cut me a lot of slack for even bothering to be able to hold a stilted conversation

oh yeah, roz: ngga, yang benar saya tinggal di bali sekarang, sudah simbilan tahun disini...

ha, this is awesome, talkin bahasa on ilx :) small world and stuff.

That's called reduplication iirc? (repeating morphemes to change syntax?)

Yep! Or doubling. Apparently Indonesian makes frequent use of it, which is kind of interesting. I learned to associate it with pidgin/creole languages, of which Indonesian is not one.

Also, when you say the word "jalan" all I can think of is this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyndakiGbaw

Turkish has that doubling thing. One purpose it has is to make an adjective into an adverb. So yavaş = slow, yavaş yavaş = slowly.

Those are interesting results.

In fact this has been a v v interesting & informative thread on many levels.

Roz, gue and ku/lo is, yeah, they call it bahasa gaul ("language cool") though it's so common it's almost ubiquitous. is it from originally from chinese? i thought it was batawi (the jakarta ethnic group, and therefore how hip city people talk on tv)

yep it is Betawi but gue-lu was originally from Hokkien. Gua-lu is also pretty common among KL-ites, but over here it codes not so much as "cool" but urban poor/low class.

Yep! Or doubling. Apparently Indonesian makes frequent use of it, which is kind of interesting. I learned to associate it with pidgin/creole languages, of which Indonesian is not one.

plenty of Malay/Indonesian ethnic languages are pidgin/creoles though - Betawi, for one is creolized-Malay, influenced heavily by the Malay used by Chinese, Dutch and Portuguese settlers.

the doubling of words is interesting. There's changing the meaning of a word (like jalan2), and plurals (teman = friend, teman2 = friends). And then there's words like "masing-masing" which only exists in its doubled form (and is kind of hard to translate. sort of means "individually" or "each", but it's not quite either of those either).

plenty of Malay/Indonesian ethnic languages are pidgin/creoles though - Betawi, for one is creolized-Malay, influenced heavily by the Malay used by Chinese, Dutch and Portuguese settlers.

Oh, yeah... but the presence of reduplication in Indonesian/Malaysian isn't a result of the creolizations. It's a common feature of the Malayo-Polynesian language family. Sorry, I wasn't very clear with that statement.

maybe I'll just keep kicking this thing until it becomes a general topics in linguistics thread.

That would be fine with me. I love to read about this stuff, even though I have no formal education in it.

Maybe we could ask a mod to add "Rolling Linguistics Thread" to the title?

i'd totally post in a rolling linguistics thread - it's a trip growing up american and never even needing or wanting to learn a fergn language, then actually having to. plenty to talk about! plus, holy shit, the trolling that could be done

that's what i'm afraid of
1000 posts to come up with a name for a thing that has already been named for decades
i guess i'll just have to put up or shut up <-- lord love a phrasal verb

I did it again. One of our pages asked me in Spanish if we had any storytimes yesterday morning and I shouted out "nai!" (nothing, in Japanese) to a roomful of expectant families. Why do I do that?

It seems to be a thing. In Cornish class last night, this woman started a sentence in Cornish, got distracted by a word she stumbled over, then finished the statement in German. If you learn other languages as an adult, they get filed in the same place as "other language" rather than differentiated.

Yeah, when I was struggling for a word in Spanish, there were many times when all I could come up with was the Japanese word... like ten years after I'd quit studying Japanese. Where does it come from?

In other news, the newish John McWhorter book "What Language Is (and What It Isn't and What It Could Be)" has some really interesting stuff relating to adult language acquisition and the effect it has on languages worldwide, particularly those used as lingua francas. Also is a good attempt at getting across a concept that is very difficult for an English-only speaker to grasp: English in the context of the world's languages is not a typical language at all, so it is not a great model for getting a sense of how language itself works. Namely that it's comparatively regular and predictable grammar gives the illusion that language is (or needs to be) far more orderly and systematic than most of them historically are.

Is English orderly and systematic, though? When I study other languages, I always am struck by the sense that it really isn't. The only thing that's easy to use about English is how much things like word endings have worn off. That one only needs to grasp for one form of a word to say "with" as opposed to 6 in Cornish.

I think in Europe it might actually be Latin that gives more of the impression that languages are regular and orderly.

But I do agree that English isn't typical at all. That it's a bodged together language itself.

yeah, compared to French the rules for English are incredibly erratic. French has a maddening number of tenses and rules but once you learn them they're incredibly consistent and reliable. English, not so much.

In the context of the world's known languages, yes, English is comparatively simple and orderly. As the McWhorter book (among others) discusses, this is partly the result of a history involving repeated waves of adult language learners adopting the language for day-to-day use. Compare English to Icelandic in terms of history... it is not an accident that the Germanic language spoken by the isolated islanders kept its rich inflection and case systems and the one that faced repeated waves of invasion and rule by non-native speakers lost those things.

So yeah, compared to English, the French verb tenses are complicated. But neither of them have anything on the Navajo verb system. It's beyond the capability of most adults to achieve fluency in at all.

It's probably worth stating explicitly if we are going to be talking about differing levels of complexity in language that all languages are still functionally equivalent. If we are talking about grammar, sound inventories, or lexicon size, we're talking about structural complexity. Higher structural complexity does not make a language or its speakers capable of expressing more complex thoughts or supporting more complex societies, and more importantly, the opposite is also untrue: structurally "simple" languages can express anything structurally "complex" languages can. This false equivalence is so prevalent among people without a linguistics background that generally linguists will just tell you that all languages are equally complex. Functionally, they are. Structurally, some are far more complex than others.

But neither of them have anything on the Navajo verb system. It's beyond the capability of most adults to achieve fluency in at all.

To clarify, most native English-speaking adults with no background in Navajo is who I mean by "most adults"; clearly native Navajo-speaking adults have no problem with it.

I was told as a child that Navajos themselves don't achieve full fluency until they're in their 40s - I have never actually checked this but my mother told me that, and it seems too delicious a fact to want to disprove

wiki makes navajo sound great and head-fking, not feeling like i'd be 100% on this after a couple of weeks of classes:

Like most Athabaskan languages, Southern Athabaskan languages show various levels of animacy in its grammar, with certain nouns taking specific verb forms according to their rank in this animacy hierarchy. For instance, Navajo nouns can be ranked by animacy on a continuum from most animate (a human or lightning) to least animate (an abstraction) (Young & Morgan 1987: 65-66):
humans/lightning → infants/big animals → med-size animals → small animals → insects → natural forces → inanimate objects/plants → abstractions
Generally, the most animate noun in a sentence must occur first while the noun with lesser animacy occurs second.

OYE hispanohablantes -- hice un hilo en 77 para charlar en español
necesito practicar, y uds deben ayudarme en este asunto

私は日本語の一年生です。
Mi studas Esperanton, sed mi estas nur komencanto.
Ego sum ​​Latinis studebat.

this guy
<3 language virtuosos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CWPfZjRatk

huh that is actually impressive. He's talking in a regional dialect that even I can't speak, not without living there for a few years at least.

AND one of my professors posted this re: code switching, also interesting re: general language sniping and its implications
http://www.ebony.com/news-views/when-you-make-fun-of-rachel-jeantel-you-make-fun-of-us-333#axzz2XSN22JRP

This quiz is fun, to the extent that you enjoy guessing global dialects of English based on audio samples (I do!):

http://qz.com/259129/quiz-can-you-guess-the-accent/

I got some of the tougher ones from being lucky enough to work in a job where I interact with people from all over the world all the time and recognizing their accents.

RIYL word salad, funny translations
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2014/09/05/the-case-of-the-sinister-buttocks

That quiz was pretty good! I got stumped by one where I wasn't sure if the speaker was S. African with an RPish accent or Dutch with an RPish accent.

I like it when people post those mistranslated signs on Facebook (usually Chinese or Japanese) because I can then try and figure out the intermediate steps which led to the bizarre translation.

I got 10/12, and the two that I missed I wavered at the last second away from the correct answer choice :(

http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2014/09/dyslexia-chinese?fsrc=rss

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/09/10/is-chinese-the-best-language-for-learning-math/?mod=WSJBlog

https://www.mcgill.ca/medicine/node/160311

http://www.dialectsarchive.com/

Audio recordings of various dialects! Load up the map and pick a region! Hours of fun.

So I finally came around to Pimsleur and now Duolingo.

Duolingo was good enough to get me to the point where I could give research talks in French, a first step toward getting a job in France where I teach, write, go to meetings, etc in French. you're not going to build up conversational fluency with duolingo alone but you can get the basics / confidence to communicate in person, where you will inevitably sound like an idiot and fuck much up at first, but get the needed feedback to improve very quickly.

I always wonder if careful music listeners are better primed to get up to speed in non-native languages.
or singers

Wait when did you start using it?
With regard to music listeners I think there are some kind of similar listening skills that may be related but not sure what conclusion you can draw. For instance, know plenty of excellent musicians who either haven't been able to learn a language used in a style they work in or have a terrible accent or can't learn their spouse's language.

I started duolingo in spring 2014. gave my first research talk in french in autumn 2014, did an academic job interview in french in spring 2015 and won the competition. I went pretty hard. plus I speak spanish so my brain/ear was already adapted to latin syntax. and I had already lived in france for a year before, though I didn't speak any french at that time and didn't work on it all.

Expecting an app to make you fluent is too much to ask, but if it got you as far as you say it did, that is a pretty glowing recommendation.

And I assume it did indeed do exactly what you say. I've never known you to lie- the truth is your job!

I took French immersion all through grade school, and found the Duolingo French course a good refresher. But apart from using it for occasional practice, I feel like I've reached a limit on its utility. I need to move to Quebec or something if I'm going to get to the next level.

yeah I was just ready for it I guess? I spent between 1 and 2 hours a day on it. plus I moved to France at the end of spring 2014 and so had immersion available whenever I wanted. what I recommend the app for, and I do recommend it highly, is to get enough of the basics so that you can put pieces together yourself. like you won't learn all the verbs with it of course but you'll learn the most important ones and how to use them, even tenses and moods. but the key thing is using your new skills daily-ish irl.

Can't go into detail right now, but seems to me that it does as much as an app can possibly do at this point.

I couldn't get into it. My vocab is better than my grammar and it seemed like i had to get through hundreds of entry level vocab tests before i got to any grammar, and once i did i was expected to just intuit the rules, there was very little actual explanation. Probably I was expecting the moon on a stick and trying to learn a language without actually conversing in it is just really hard, and spending 10-15 minutes a day on an app, any app, isn't going to cut it.

Love Duolingo and will forever vouch for it. I started with Soranî Kurdish about six months ago. Haven't been fully devoted to it every day, which obv would be best, but I'm already capable of having short, simple conversations with soranî speaking people. In a language previously completely unknown to me, both vocabulary and grammar, which isn't like any language I knew before I started.

I briefly tried extending the French offering by starting the Italian course in French, but I'm not really motivated enough to learn a third language. Not when I can hardly get through a conversation in French.

The "language ego" problem discussed upthread is one I can relate to. In my case, having taken French in school, I constantly feel like I ought to be better than I am, which is demotivating. If I were learning from scratch, then I could regard everything I learned as an accomplishment, as opposed to a belated catching-up.

Where is "language ego" mentioned? Oh, I see. La Lechera. That is a great post.

I like that it is persnickety about the grammar. Just exactly what one needs to build up basic confidence: it corrects you simply and quickly and shows you the proper way to say something and then you move right on.

It happens to a lot of very capable people!

Bottom line: Some people are better equipped to learn languages with these programs; others aren't. The social/emotional component to language learning shouldn't be underestimated.

I specialize in teaching people who have barriers (of many types) to overcome before they can begin to use a new language to communicate, so I've seen a wide variety of types of learners except for the ones who do it easily themselves bc they don't need me. As a language learner myself, I've definitely got issues. It's ok!

I admire immigrants for many reasons, but one is that for most, language ego is an unaffordable luxury: a Somali who moves to Paris or Chicago, say, can't worry about accent / errors when their lives depend on communicating in the new place. I tried to put myself in their shoes when learning French (well, I'm an immigrant now too, but b/c of my privileges I can avoid French more than I do, I want to be a regular person here).

Didn't you take a placement test ahead of time, ledge? Or did you do poorly on that because you don't like grammar?

Euler's last post otm.

Re: language learning and music appreciation, see also math and music. Lots of claims are made about the connection, but there are many hard-to-ignore skeptics.

Arrival's a good film in connection to this subject.

Didn't you take a placement test ahead of time, ledge? Or did you do poorly on that because you don't like grammar?

i love grammar :) but my brain has retained very little from my none too hot at the time schoolboy french and that let me down in the test, yep. fwiw a common complaint of english people my age is that we weren't taught proper english grammar and thus didn't have a solid base to build any other language on.

Do you ever listen to the station France Culture, Euler? I'm finding it a good resource, just for hearing French speakers talk about stuff I find interesting. Lots of cool philosophy programs in the archives.

xp to self - i mean i know duolingo tries to avoid explicitly teaching difficult grammar rules, but if you go into a french class as a kid and start getting told about perfect tenses and subjunctives and you have no idea what those even are in english, you're not going to get very far.

I occasionally follow franceculture on fb & then lose interest, and have repeated this a few times. but I don't generally like listening to podcasts or watching shows or films. it would be good for my oral comprehension though, which is easily the weakest part of my French repertoire now.

re. tenses and moods, yes, it helps that I know spanish already where things are even more complex than in french: we don't use the preterite ("passé simple") except in literary french so you only have to keep track of two ways of forming thoughts about the past, as opposed to three in spanish.

but you can speak simply, in the present tense all the time, at first, and be understood, and then gain the confidence to add tenses and moods later.

my best teacher in grad school was chinese, had rough english, strong accent + weak command of grammar : and yet he got his points across well. he's my role model in language things : allez en avant, et la compétence vous viendra.

It happens to a lot of very capable people!

Bottom line: Some people are better equipped to learn languages with these programs; others aren't. The social/emotional component to language learning shouldn't be underestimated

This is so otm and deserves to be acknowledged as such imho. Especially the latter part. I didn't start to learn Kurdish for the mere fun of it, I am emotionally attached: it's the second language of my lover and the first of her parents. As far as drive and will power go, wanting to learn it because of love is pretty much the top spot, so motivating.
It seemed very daunting when I started out. And still does occasionally, because by learning the simpler things, the harder things seem as hard as the simple things did before. There's always this nagging feeling: "how can I possible advance in this entirely unknown language?' But then the old cliche of practice makes perfect (or rather: half-decent) is true every time, it really is. And I converse with people in a language before completely alien to me.

I found Duolingo's method not perfect (AI will hopefully catch on and learn what I do and don't want endlessly repeated), but it is great way to dip your toe into something formerly completely unknown to me, like Kurdish is.

(Nb. I grew up learning five languages, and am fluent (Dutch, Frisian, Bildts, English) and very ok (French and Catalan) in six now. I had nothing to 'do' with that, most of it was given to me growing up. I still don't know if this multilingual background gave me a head start trying on something as different as Kurdish? But Duolingo helped me enormously, regardless, to get a bite on the basics and take it from there)

what materials are there for learning kurdish? is the textbook in english?

I've been using Babbel to learn Swedish, and it costs me $66 a year - should I switch to Duolingo?

Ha, I just added Swedish yesterday and I would say, yes, definitely, really enjoying it, although maybe I am only saying that because it gave me such a grade grade on the placement test. So, yes, sign up, take the placement report back and if you like maybe we can practice here on this thread or some other. Why are you learning it?

ORDENE SU ROSCA DE REYES CON ANTICIPACIÓN

Y Felisa me muero!

^punchline of an Latin American/Argentine joke, play on "¡Feliz Año Nuevo!"

Och gott nytt år, allesammans!

Bigger languages have bots to converse with. I have learned either to keep typing until it stops saying HELP ME REPLY or else just let it help me reply.

Swedish doesn't seem to have bots, but it does tell you what percent fluent it thinks you are. (Because it is a big little language?)

Why are you learning it?

Just for fun. Plus, that's the ancestral homeland (on my dad's side).

Desktop version is actually a little nicer than the phone/tablet app although of course less convenient when you are on the go.

what materials are there for learning kurdish? is the textbook in english?

― clouds, zondag 1 januari 2017 14:48 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What is available is very scattered and not very accessible. I've a grammar text book, but ever since Duolingo opened up for users to make their own courses I found a good soranî course. Had it checked with a native and it was approved as being really good. Since Kurdish is not very easy to come by (and an oppressed language in several countries) it wasn't easy to find something for me but this one checks out. Xosh!

I'm on Duolingo learning Spanish and am just coming to the end of the tree. I feel like I'm only just beginning with the language, but have enjoyed Duolingo. I'd really welcome some Duolingo friends though, if any ilxors there want to connect.

How good does it say you are in Spanish now, 95%?

Oh no, just 43% for me, which I think is about typical. A completed tree definitely doesn't equal anything like 100%, more like 50% if you're lucky, from my reading of a handful of discussions.

For any language or just Spanish?

I can't imagine it'd be significantly different in any language. I think it's a great app, but it's not going to leave you anywhere near fluency. No idea how they calculate that percentage anyway, so I don't give it too much consideration.

Don't you need to review or something like that, won't that make your percent go up?

After my insane holiday push, which unfortunately I'll have to taper off on, I've got a few languages from 40-60% (studied them before, although one score is laughably high) with plenty of the tree left. Don't expect to fluent from this- almost put the word in scare quotes, maybe should refer to it on this thread as "the f-word," but it does seem to be a great way to tighten the screws, stabilize the base, fill in the bottom half (height-wise, not volume-wise) of the inverted pyramid of language learning. Wondering if you could link to a blog post or direct us to the discussions your are referring to.

I stand corrected in that case. It was just from browsing Duolingo's discussion boards where the topic seems to come up pretty often, nothing specific. Like I say I'm not too bothered by the fluency figure as I struggle to imagine it being particularly meaningful. That's just my personal and entirely unsubstantiated opinion though!

I am taking the figure to mean "you have satisfied x% of the requirements of the course" which is not going to be an extremely rough indicator of real life language ability.

not going to be

Mine was at around 50% after I'd completed the language tree and done a bunch of practices, but I checked just now after not touching Duolingo in a few months and it's down to 33%. So it must be based in part on the strength bars in the individual lessons, which are all pretty low for me. I doubt that it's particularly meaningful.

I'm playing around with it now and I'm reminded of an issue I had with Duolingo. Very often in the multiple choice questions, the wrong options are wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with the subject of the lesson. e.g. Conditional verbs:

Mark all correct translations
We don't know if our daughter would like this idea.
1. Nous ne savons pas si notre fille ferait cette idée.
2. Nous ne savons pas si notre fille aimerait cette idée.
3. On ne sait pas si notre pomme aimerait cette idée.

1 and 3 are incorrect, but not for reasons that require knowledge of how to conjugate conditional verbs to figure out.

Don't mind this so much.

Came to say that when using the desktop/webpage it does have explanations of the grammar that are missing in the app, both directly in the lessons and then through links to the discussion forum or elsewhere

Ah.

Android app also has a thing to click through to see comments and discussion on the particular question you just answered. This does not exist on the iPhone app, haven't noticed on web interface.

Android and webpage both keep giving you the same questions until you get them all right, not exactly so on iPhone.

Webpage doesn't have little "word magnets" to choose from, as far as I can tell, almost always you are typing.

Here is someone comparing the Duolingo levels upon finishing a tree. Notice when people post it shows all their levels: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/19989318

The level is merely a measure of the XP points you have gathered, so the amount of Duolingo practice done. Click through to your profile and you'll see your language levels and how many XP you need to reach the next.

Ah I see, thanks. I found the Duolingo pages that discuss that and various other metrics. Maybe will link.

Also, discover duoLingo and Spotify can share the audio output if one wants to "multitask."

https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/209669946-What-are-levels-
https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/205933480
https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/204830160-How-can-I-learn-multiple-languages-at-the-same-time-
https://englishtest.duolingo.com/scores
https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/204641974-How-can-I-skip-the-basics-

Second link is to "What does my Fluency Score" mean?

Anyway, feel like that even if you are at the point in a language that this app will not and cannot substantially increase your overall fluency, as measured both inside and outside the app, it can still help to sharpen some skills and to function as a pilot light to keep the flame burning whilst you are doing whatever else you are doing to improve.

I do think the web version of DL is basically essential. Most people I've suggested duolingo to and who have ended up not liking it have almost all just tried the mobile app. I've also found Memrise to be good for basic flash-card style memorization that you can do in very short bursts--now that it has audio it's even better, though it can be difficult to find the right courses. I liked Lingvist for a while though once I had run through all the words it felt a lot less useful; it has a huge audio section though and if I wasn't trying to learn Quebecois French I would use that a lot. Every once in a while I watch a French in Action video, which was the way I originally learned French in college and is nostalgically charming

Ha, that's how I learned French too, from the man himself. Before the videos were shot though.

Agree about the web interface. Have not tried to learn any language I haven't studied before yet, so the app was fine for a while, but now that I am bumping into the limits of my knowledge I am starting to seek out the extra instruction provided at the site.

There seem to be some Memrise tie-ins with Duolingo courses but haven't tried any yet. Same with Anki flash cards, which I have used in the past but not recently.

You actually took French from Pierre Capretz? I just watched one after posting and the format of the videos is really pretty great even outside a classroom.

I tried doing a Memrise course that consisted of the Duolingo vocab, but perhaps predictably the redundancy made it feel a bit pointless.

It's not wildly helpful since it's just the infinitive forms, but working my way through the "450 Most Common Verbs" felt good. I just started a conjugation one too and have been slowly working on "Intermediate French," which is a random hodgepodge of vocabulary that starts out with a bunch of religious terms for no apparent reason but was kind of refreshing compared to the usual subjects. Reminded me of how Lingvist seemed to draw its core vocabulary from crime novels resulting in my memorizing multiple synonyms for gun, money, and the police, probably none of which are used in Quebec.

He didn't teach the sections every day, but he did teach the big once-a-week class sometimes, yeah.

Yes, those videos are really good. There was a similar German one I used to see on television sometimes called Focus or Fokus or something like that. There was some other German language learning video that people had some kind of ironic appreciation of around here.

Kind of always find the midlevel vocabulary learning tedious and the related precanned lists unsatisfactory. Perhaps should learn memory palace techniques but have resisted thus far.

"I do think the web version of DL is basically essential."

agreed, the interface mobile app just feels so slow in comparison, which can make it boring to use

Yes, you can fast on the web page and it usually forces you to type and spell everything instead of just shuffling tiles.

I like both. I mostly use the phone app, but occasionally visit the site. What I really need is a vocabulary booster (other than, say, cracking open a Swedish dictionary) - I can form simple sentences now, and need to stock up a bigger supply of words to insert into them.

Also like the way on the web you can mouse over the foreign word and hear it pronounced, perhaps on your way to mouse somewhere else, without clicking on it. This may seem trivial but it still seems to add a little speed somehow.

One more thing: iPhone gamificaton is perhaps too punitive. One too many mistakes, fat fingered or otherwise, and you are forced to keep reviewing to Gain Health to go forward. It's good to review but sometimes it nice to go through a few new lessons to get them into your head first.

Just signed up for a 12-week Spanish course at a local private language school starting next week. I'm sure 6 months on Duolingo have done me a world of good, but I need to move beyond it and need some outside structure and motivation to manage that.

Interested to say how that works for you. I can tell you about my experiences with such courses but perhaps it is best to wait and see how it goes and you report back first.

Phil, there is some kind of Cambridge University Press Swedish Grammar reader that seems useful, but dang if it isn't expensive.

A lot of the universities in Glasgow offer evening language courses as well, but my partner went to this particular private school to study English when she first arrived here and had a good experience, so I'm giving it a go first. Whatever it's like, I'm sure I'll learn something if I put the effort in and if it's not up to scratch then I'll try elsewhere for the next level after three months.

Sounds like a good plan.

I get the distinct impression my English is going downhill. :-(

With the app you can study that too!

Question: what do you do when you get to the end of the tree? Just stop? Keep the tree gold for a while? Delete and start again?

I'm trying to do two lessons from the tree and two practice sessions, where it throws random stuff at you, daily. It seems to be working well enough. I can make up sentences in my head and check them with Google Translate, and they come out right more often than not.

I never finished my tree, but in the forums some people recommend starting the English course but with your own language preferences set to French

You signed up for Swedish, Phil?

Yeah.

The reverse tree, as people call it, seems to be a popular advanced option, as rob describes.

Ah thanks. I see that people also do something known as laddering.

This might be handy for Phil and others: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/19825381

That being a list of the Swedish lessons along with their word lists. Did you come across this sentence yet, Phil?

Island är en ö.

Huh. Island is a country.

No, I haven't seen that yet, but it says "Iceland is a country."

It's an island as well

I just remember this whole thing from school whether you're 'in' or 'on' somewhere, whether it's an island or a country or something. On and on and on it went, and I can't remember whether you're on or in Iceland...

Gotta say the Tips and Notes are useful if sometimes spotty. The ones for French are particularly well done.

I finished my Spanish tree on Duolingo last week. The golden owl is pretty impressive. I still have to strengthen a lot of the skills and there are a number that I don't actually have a real handle on at all, despite being able to complete them on the app (in particular the subjunctive, the multitude of past tenses, imperative, conditional), so a lot of work to keep me going on Duolingo yet.

I'm 4 weeks into my Spanish class too and it's going well - I'm way ahead of it grammar-wise, but the speaking and listening experience is useful and it's a fun couple of hours each week.

Still not made any concrete plans for a Spain visit this year yet unfortunately and our calendar is filling up. Really hoping we can get over, even if it's just for a week to visit family.

Good for you. In fact your post inspired me to finish my French tree, which I had been lingering over the tail end of, just to see the elephant owl.

Also, I read the various pages about the Fluency Shield and ultimately agree that it is mostly an annoyance.

Being doing this app for about two months now. Will try to come up with a concise post about my results.

Offline feature is buggy.

Have gotten to the point where I can piece together articles on sydsvenskan.se. Apparently an old man was found dead in the customer bathroom of a food store in Malmö this morning.

paul joseph watson was right

B-b-but Phil, what about the story about the crocodile and his gang of reptiles?

sonned in a Balto-Slavic linguistics beef
http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art264e.pdf

http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-to-make-gold-duolingo-tree.html?m=1

English isn't my native language, but I learned (learnt? feeling slightly self-conscious here tbh) early in life. Funnily I don't really remember it being much of an effort, beyond feeling really pleased with myself whenever I yelled out bon mots like NO IT IS A CAT which I still use in regular conversation today.

I actually feel self-conscious using my native language now, because the only person I ever really conversed with with my father. I don't speak it very often now and on the rare occasions I do, I really beat myself up if I make a mistake.

wait are you a new poster or an old poster with a new name? or other?

Me? I'm a new poster, I only found this place a few days ago

Oh ok that's unusual
How did you find us?

I read Freaky Trigger and I ended up on its wiki page. I went down a rabbit-hole of links and here I am!

Also I'm here to astroturf for 4 Non Blondes

wait are you a new poster or an old poster with a new name? or other?

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Monday, March 13, 2017 12:10 AM (nineteen minutes ago)

So now you have to pony up lingots if you want to test out (now relabeled "Skip") of an individual leaf of the tree.

....and now Japanese is available.

This is fun: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScNGbQseoYKGciA2JcPZgwFmQ7K6Ide2CM2DkZB-5Chxbk5ag/viewform

ha that is neat

favourite blend: questicize

That was awesome. I should have kept a copy of my answers

ha that is neat

favourite blend: questicize

― i n f i n i t y (∞), Friday, June 30, 2017 10:43 PM (two days ago)

Word!!!

eautiful

http://making.duolingo.com/how-we-invented-a-new-way-to-teach-one-of-the-most-difficult-languages-to-learn

aw man i was trying to focus on just my irish and french, but now p tempted to try japanese

Duolingo didn't have a Japanese course already? Or did they redo it? I've been doing the Vietnamese Duolingo to build my vocab since the start of this year (supplementing my lessons) and I'd love to hear about how they put the course together, like that explanation for the Japanese course. there are some concepts in Vietnamese that I think Duolingo does not teach very well and probably could use a new approach

based on my frustrating studies of Japanese, I'm more curious to see how Duolingo implemented their course than try to learn the language again

I'm doing Duolingo Japanese and it is Ok, not brilliant.

The Good
Learning Hiragana
Learning basic phrases

The bad
Sometimes it uses the wrong pronunciation eg. 中 is pronounced なか when the hiragana card says ちゅう
Often it doesn't pronounce syllables at all when you are assembling sentences from syllables
No explanation of grammar at all

I'm doing that, Busuu and skritter whilst looking up points of grammar and getting somewhere.

Japanese is app only so far, no desktop- it is still hatching- and therefore no grammar yet.

How far along are you in Irish, jim?

I worked on Duolingo Japanese during May and June, in preparation for spending July in Japan. I agree with Ed on the good, while the bads are common to other Duolingo languages and thus part of what you're paying for. My main cons for it are 1) it doesn't help with speaking (unlike the French module, even if its speech recognition is corny to null) ; 2) not enough kanji for the common expressions introduced early. Hiragana is super important but irl Japan uses more kanji than Hiragana I find (acc to a Japanese friend, kanji give a bit of distance between speaker and object spoken ; it makes speech something like more formal, less vulgar).

Wondering how far along you two went with the Japanese tree.

Japanese is app only so far, no desktop- it is still hatching- and therefore no grammar yet.

How far along are you in Irish, jim?

― Barkis Garvey (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, August 4, 2017 5:36 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not very, 1899 xp. I'm enjoying it because it's legitimately extremely challenging to me. i am thinking of going to scots gaelic classes in the autumn and thought as they are fairly closely related it might help me a little to have some vocabulary and pronounciation

I stopped just past the second checkpoint. I'll pick it up once my next Japan trip is booked (hopefully this fall)

About to hit the second checkpoint. Wish me luck.

not very, 1899 xp. I'm enjoying it because it's legitimately extremely challenging to me. i am thinking of going to scots gaelic classes in the autumn and thought as they are fairly closely related it might help me a little to have some vocabulary and pronounciation

I guess the term is "verbnoun."

Or "verbal noun."

About to hit the second checkpoint. Wish me luck.

About to hit the second checkpoint in Duolingo. Planning to be in Japan at New year and don't want to be wholly reliant on E again.

I like busuu because they get real live users to check your speaking and writing as well as doing voice recognition. I've been correcting a lot of russian's English to earn brownie points with the system - not free, though.

Hm, seems like busuu has a free aspect as well, is that part too easy?

DL just gave me
あさごはんはいつもパンを一まい食べます。

In Hobby 1, which is where my brane finally brakes.

Because the sentence structure starts getting mildly complicated.

Turned on the Japanese keyboard last night. Not going to tell you how long it took me to type that one sentence.

Too bad Momus isn't around anymore to help us improve our Japanese. Oh wait.

You know, there are some apps specifically to learn Kanji, used to use one called imiwa? years ago, hasn't been updated in a few years though, don't know which apps that are still being maintained are good.

I passed the year mark on Duolingo just the other day. I'm just about keeping up my streak, but am mainly concentrating on a weekly class and, having found an excellent teacher, I hope to add a bit of one-to-one tuition later this year to accelerate things before we head to Spain for a couple of weeks in January.

RIP 中島春雄

Wondering if we should start a thread for Japanese Learners, or find out if one already exists, although I didn't find after a quick search. Am somewhat reluctant to do so, since this language has defeated me before and am afraid to jinx the rest of you.

日本語は話せます 🇯🇵

Still curious what else Euler did to improve his French a part from DL, I mean aside from living and working in France.

a part
You see what I did there?

Nothing else!

As a linguistics person I constantly click on this thread hoping for a discussion of linguistics topics, but it's just about people learning languages, which is a different thing. Can we have an actual linguistics thread? Are there any people interested in discussing linguistics?

Think we should ask mod to edit the word out of the title. There is at least one other thread that is more about linguistics, but maybe you are already familiar with it: A Foreign Language Vocabulary Thread: In Which We Look For Things That Have A Different, Non-Cognate Name in English/French/Spanish/German.

Just talk.about linguistics itt then ffs

There is another linguist, f. hazel, who posts on the other thread a lot, so it seems like that is a better place for it.

Years ago this thread was in fact a rolling linguistics thread, these days it has shifted focus to learning second languages... perhaps we should ask mods to reassign the [rolling linguistics thread] subtitle to the foreign language vocabulary thread that James Redd linked? Linguistic discussion on ILX seems to usually arise as a secondary exchange about some linguistic-y topic that has sparked more general interest, centering the linguistics aspect usually leads to silence.

I just started reading a book called Thinking with Demons by Stuart Clark which is about witchcraft in the middle ages, but the entire introduction so far has been about framing the topic correctly in terms of philosophy of language. Which surprised and delighted me, since I mainly bought it as an excellent book about witches, not linguistics!

The other thread title is so long, and it is not quite a [Rolling Linguistics Thread]. Maybe we should just append [+Linguistics] or something like that.

I'd like top complain that the linguistics language learning thread has got bogged down in semantics.

heh, just change one of them's title to [+linguistics +continuant -tense]

wow, xpost of a semantics AND phonetics joke

Hey, take it over to the [Trilling Linguistics ThRead]

I just started reading a book called Thinking with Demons by Stuart Clark which is about witchcraft in the middle ages, but the entire introduction so far has been about framing the topic correctly in terms of philosophy of language. Which surprised and delighted me, since I mainly bought it as an excellent book about witches, not linguistics!

further evidence that we are twins

*huggles*

How about just calling it The Standby Hermeneutics Thread?

Game of Phones?

A+

further evidence that we are twins

yes and we need to start developing our psychic powers thereby!

Has anyone taken, or worked with, the more formal, certificated Duolingo language tests?

Wazzat?

It's basically their play to generate direct revenue from learners - providing a quasi-formal certificate to you if you pay $49 and pass a test. It has started to take off in the US with universities, apparently.

They do it with English, definitely, and possibly other languages but i'm not entirely sure how extensive it is yet. It seems to be the direction they're going in, though.

Ugh

In theory, it might not be so bad. There would be a value in having something you can put on a CV if you are learning a language that is hard to formally certify in other ways. If they introduced one for Japanese, for example, it would be much more convenient than the JLPT.

The risk with English is that it's already a market that is well catered-to and a cheap-and-cheerful cash-grab has the potential to drive down standards in the wider industry, but that is probably a niche concern.

The English one is apparently not very good psychometrically. I am going to try it out next week if i get the time.

They are going to have to monetise learners somehow if they're going to grow but it sounds like they have been trying / failing with a few different ideas over the last couple of years.

Right. Japanese would be interesting. This guy doesn't like the English test: https://eltjam.com/deconstructing-the-duolingo-english-test-det/

Yep, the critical paper cited in that review trashes the test.

And yet - if you want to go to Yale, it's accepted as an alternative to one of the big three so they must be persuasive!

Yes, saw my alma mater was right up there. What are the big three?

IELTS / TOEFL / PTE Academic.

All three or four hours long vs Duolingo's 30 minutes.

Seems like the academic equivalent of the much-maligned Fluency Shield.

From a purely linguistic perspective, the idea of aptitude testing a language (any language) induces a kind of philosophical vertigo. I mean obviously you need something to place students on a track that helps them the most, but thinking about it induces a nice kind of ASMR tingly feeling.

Tbh, if you can broadly come up with a framework for what it means to teach and learn English you can test against that framework fairly easily until you get to discussion of what is meant by 'fluency' and the wheels fall off.

The fuzziness / appropriacy / biases of the underlying framework is the dizzying bit imo but that extends a lot further than assessment.

Yeah, it's more about what gradations of fluency might be that's dizzying... like some kind of lenticular map that is legible at some angles and impenetrable from others.

Yep, and I think the wild proliferation of scales (CES, GSE, IELTS bands, different TOEFL scales, etc), each with their own contradictory claims of alignment to the Common European Framework of Reference, points to that.

It is interesting that one of the fashionable topics at a lot of recent applied linguistics conferences has been assessment literacy, though - lifting the hood on a lot of these issues and going in to the limitations of testing as well as the mechanics.

finally? accepting that testing has limitations?!?!!? that's good to hear

I stumped up my $49 this morning and took the test. It's absolutely abysmal - the review linked upthread is generous, if anything. You can knock it off in 15 minutes and more than half the test is just identifying real / fake words which, even before you get to the question of how a second-language learner is meant to know for sure that a particular combination of letters doesn't exist in a 200,000-word corpus, is rendered meaningless by the fact that the audio is completely indistinct.

i'm shocked (not really)
sorry you wasted your $49 :(

It is ok. I will expense it!

I am looking forward to getting my score on Saturday.

hahaha, now I want to try! I could probably expense it too.

Think I am just going to stick with screen grabs of my Fluency Shields.

xp, ILX-mail me if you would like to have a go at a different (and hopefully more robust) computer-based test.
.

For (learners of) English?

Yep.

Will you be reviewing your experience in any way, SV, or was it just to satisfy your own curiosity?

I'm following this closely, also because my native minority language consists of just 6,000 speakers right now and is slowly declining. There's a digital course set up last year. I don't think it's very good, but then it's so so hard to get it right imo.

(^^ probably better for a true linguistics/language thread)

I can't really publish anything as I work for a competitor so it was more to get a sense of their approach and how it differs from others.

I should say that I like Duolingo as a fun learning platform - with some caveats. This just feels like overreach.

^this

Ah I see.

It does feel like overreach, though it seems like a logical next step, to take it from 'fun' to something more meaningful in a practical way. My gut says they've a long way to go yet, but I do commend them for trying.

xp

What is your native minority language, LBI?
Are you interested in feedback from native English speakers, SV?

It's B1ldts. It's listed as a dialect, sadly. Linguists have proven it to be a language (there's English reports about that online but I'd have to look for them), but the government needs to formally acknowledge it as such and turned down a request last year (it's all about money, it's cynical).

It's not true that I did nothing but use duolingo to learn French---I'd been fumbling with dictionaries and automated translators in order to read and sorta kinda write-ish French for years, and I was already competent in Spanish. But I'd never tried to learn to speak nor grasp any of the grammar until duolingo. Plus I was bold---after three months of heavy daily duolingo use, during which I moved to France for what was at the time just a one year fellowship, I elected to give my first public presentation of the year in French. My friend @ndr3w G31m@n had given a talk in French here the year before, bc he was like wtf sounds like a fun challenge, and I wasn't gonna be shown up by him! After that with daily interactions in French & lots of professional emails in French I reached a productive level quickly.

Now I need to test at B1 level for my citizenship portfolio here. I took an online one and got C1+ but I need an "official" one.

The data science guy is your friend?

It's listed as a dialect, sadly. Linguists have proven it to be a language

Do linguists regard this as a real distinction?

your friend
Okay, I get it. I actually exchanged emails with him once, about a completely unrelated topic.

No we and our families occasionally hung out when we were both in visiting positions in Paris a few years ago

Are you interested in feedback from native English speakers, SV?

It's more if anyone wanted to do it out of interest / a perverse sense of fun, tbh. This one has been road tested for years.

We do feedback sessions / field tests with native English speakers for new products though (with some form of compensation) so I will bear the ILX linguistics cru in mind if that comes up.

Do linguists regard this as a real distinction?

Linguists would probably say language is more accurately nothing but dialects, and the lines you draw to divide up all those dialects into languages have no objective reference... they are always drawn with respect to some purpose, not always a linguistic one. Linguists define language families based on linguistic features of the dialects (sound inventories, syntax, lexicon) because they're interested in how language works and changes. But people define languages with respect to stuff like establishing or maintaining territory, identity, community, gaining (or withholding) government funding, etc.

It's sometimes hard to grasp since the folk beliefs about what language is are different from how linguists think of language. I'd say people (implicitly, mostly) think of a language as something that exists outside of the mind and each speaker is an instance of the language who uses it with varying degrees of skill or corruption. But a linguist thinks of language as a fiction that is useful for talking about an aggregate of dialects, and the dialects themselves are aggregates of idiolects, each crafted by one person from birth. Which gives a better foundation for envisioning how messy the reality of a language/dialect distinction is. English speakers have a tidy conception of the difference, since English dialects don't vary that much and the leap to other languages crosses a big and obvious gap. But it's a lot more common for a region to have a bunch of dialects with a continuum of small differences and it's not easy to say what "language" they are all part of. Like you have language A, B, C, D, and E and while speakers A and B can understand one another, and B, C, and D can, and D and E can... but A and E can't. Are these dialects of language A, C, or E?

emailed you SV!

f hazel you're gonna wind up doing so much free education its :)

oops that was supposed to say itt
in this thread
haha!

Totally agree with LL, loved reading that Hazel

the folk beliefs
accurate AND charitable choice of words

Somewhat hesitant to reveal to LBI that on a recent vacation I dipped into the DL course of what I presume is his majority language.

Ha, echt? Leuk! How far did you come? Was it difficult for you?

So far just past the first checkpoint. How would you feel if I told I am enjoying it and not finding it especially difficult?

I'd feel great :) That's very good to hear. Are you planning on using it in any other context than racking up DL points? Do you have friends you could speak it with?

I wish

Well, did meet some Brazilians in the neighborhood recently, one of whom is half-Dutch and works for the Consulate, I think. Don't know if I will run into anytime soon, but always good to be prepared, I guess.

Actually already have a question for you. So "een tweeling" is a *pair* of twins? And also one single twin? And you can just tell by context which one you mean, with the first case being the default, or...

Also seems to me that "children" can be translated as "kinderen" but also "kids," but singular is only "kinder," no "kid" afaik.

Sorry singular just "kind" like, um, some other language.

"Een tweeling" is a pair of two people who are twins. It can never be one person of a two people who form twins. You do say 'mijn tweelingbroer' (my twin-brother), but you can't say "ik ben een tweeling" (I'm a tweeling), because that would literally mean you are two persons. Rather, you are part of a "tweeling". If that makes sense.

Children is 'kinderen', not 'kids' (though loads of Dutch ppl do say kids, taking it from English). Singular is 'kind'.

Perfect sense. Thanks!

Digging the Dutch word for clogs.

Other words besides "kids" that look like English: sorry, water.

Looks like we got the word "water" from you, and "sorry" came from us.

Alstublieft

Dankjewel

The two words of Dutch I remember from broadcasting hey Arnold and spongebob to the Netherlands and flanders 15 years ago. (I used to be able to sing the spongebob theme in Dutch)

wat heb jij lekker kontje!

(the expression I learned in Holland some years ago)

Flattery will get you nowhere Euler :)

nu in de bioscoop

My Dutch tree seems to have changed behind the scenes so I only have partial credit for various leaves and have to redo many lessons. Guess it is not a big deal except when I lose health have to switch to another tree to regain.

De schildpadden eten boterhammen

Finished Stressed Pronouns although I can't keep them straight yet

Ja! We hebben geen bananen.

lol: https://thegeekygaeilgeoir.wordpress.com/2017/09/06/even-racists-got-the-blues/

... and DL just added Korean.

A week and a half into Duolingo Spanish and i can say "la mayoria de la gente cree que estoy loco" and "estoy en el programa de proteccion a testigos" but couldn't honestly ask what time it is.

It's difficult because so much Spanish is mutually intelligible with English and French i can get most of the answers right without really learning anything. It seems to have a much weaker focus on genuine productive skills (like being able to translate sentences from scratch, rather than selecting word order) than some of the other courses.

haha! telling time/what time is it was a core feature of every Spanish class I took in grade school. ¿que hora es? son las dos y media. it always seemed like we learned the same things every year to the point where i wondered why we weren't allowed to learn more each year instead of learning the same thing. then we got a new teacher who introduced us to verbs and i started to understand.

so since my brother-in-law is German and my niece and nephew are growing up in Germany, I thought it might be time to learn some German. going to try it solely via Duolingo and see how far I can get. I have zero previous schooling or knowledge of German outside of watching Wim Wenders movies.

trying to avoid using any linguist shortcuts like looking up a phoneme inventory of German and just rolling with Duolingo. although I am doing Spanish too, just to make myself feel better.

Was ist der deal mit Flugzeugessen? That's a phrase that's gotten me by in Germany.

My big issue with Duolingo is that it often feels like I am beating the game rather than learning a language. Especially during he pick the boxes translation to English there is often only one way to arrange the boxes.

Nearly done with all the Japanese it has and i’ll be looking for what to follow in from it. I need something with a bit more (any) grammar explanation. Looking things up in a Japanese grammar dictionary whilst doing DL is not reallly cutting it n

Tend to agree with latest two criticisms. For a language that is similar to one you already know, another Romance language if you know French or Spanish, a Scandinavian language if you know German, say, it is relatively easy to guess the answer and not really feel like you actually learned what you were doing. I haven't gone too far in the Japanese course but I can well believe Ed that you could fake it without quite making it and learning that mysterious thing know as Japanese grammar.

Otoh have found it very useful to practice agglutinative languages, which have rules that are logical but abstract and maybe hard to internalize.

for me the fun of doing Japanese in Duolingo is figuring out the grammatical patterns, like, how to negate, how to turn an assertion into a question, how to change a verb's tense. all of those elements have been there. supplementing that with an explicit explanation of the rules seems useful, but in becoming able to use the rules, I like Duolingo's approach.

not sure what a good Japanese grammar book is, though

There are tons of books on Japanese grammar, not sure which are the good ones, if any.

How for along are you in Japanese, Euler?

For a language that is similar to one you already know, another Romance language if you know French or Spanish, a Scandinavian language if you know German, say, it is relatively easy to guess the answer and not really feel like you actually learned what you were doing.

Sort of agree with this, but on the upside, I feel like you can sort of conceptualize the language if you can connect it to English. With Swedish, there are a fair amount of words that are close to English words, and a few idiomatic phrases actually have equivalents in English. For example, the phrase for "agree" is "håll med," which literally translates to "hold with," and then I remembered reading the phrase "I don't hold with that" in 19th century English.

My practice regimen, outside of Duolingo, has been a) attempting to read crime novels in Swedish and b) trying to make up sentences in my head when I'm in the shower or riding on the train or whatever.

But did you study German before, Phil?

not sure what a good Japanese grammar book is, though

― droit au butt (Euler), Monday, 2 October 2017 4:52 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It’s not the Japan Times Japanese grammar dictionary. I’m sure it’s a useful resource if you actually have some grounding but as a learning tool it’s obtuse.

But did you study German before, Phil?

No - I've only ever studied French (in school), Spanish and Japanese. None of the Japanese stuck - I can still maybe count to five, but that's about it.

So your Swedish studies are safe from Germanic interference then.

Yeah, but my wife - who studied German for several years - definitely noticed the similarities, and it has made things easier on her.

Well in that case...

I haven't been working on Japanese lately, since I returned from Japan. I'm still roughly where I was a couple of months ago. I'm going to Tokyo again in January so I'll pick up again in the next month or so.

I looked at the Japanese for dummies book but it's just romani apparently! That is not what I want.

romaji, duh.

I've got a couple Vlax Romani books you can borrow if you decide to take a radically different tack!

I've spent the last week on Italian in Duolingo and I think I want to commit to it as my third language. I only know the basics right now, but I'm trying to plunge in and puzzle through Italian news articles and opera libretti (also watching a Zelda Let's Play). There's enough lexical similarity with French that I can often pick up the gist of what's being said.

This is a fun reference page if you have one Romance language under your belt and are considering another one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity

If you trust these numbers (data comes from Ethnologue/SLI International, who are problematic but probably OK with Romance languages info) JMM chose Italian wisely... it and French have the highest lexical similarity of all Romance language pairs! Well, tied with Spanish/Portuguese actually.