Do You Speak A Second Language?

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'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.