Learning a new Language

[ethel5691]

I want to hear your experiences with learning a new language or dialect, whether that would be English, French, German and all the rest. Were there any difficulties or any particular aspects of it that you liked or disliked such as vocabulary, grammar, accent, etc. Any awkward moments in your journey of learning that language that you still look back to this day and cringe at these moments or laugh? Has it proven to be useful in your daily life (work, school, living, etc.) or was it a complete waste of time? I'll share some of my experiences as a Greek person learning English.

Growing up, I never had much of an issue with the language as I was exposed to it young from different media and such. Most of my issues with it were with advanced vocabulary, some words had such an odd pronunciation and writing that I couldn't believe they were real words, some I thought were just made to piss off people, like the word "queue" being pronounced as just "Q". My only other issue that still bothers me is my accent, sometimes I just hate to speak in English because of how bad it sounds at some parts, the word "literally" has been a pain in the ass to pronounce correctly.

 

I remember when I like 10? I had gone to my Godfather's house, who's from Scotland and needed to put somewhere my jacket, so after a good 3 minutes of constructing my sentence, I ask "Where is the hooker to put my coat in". This made perfect sense to me as a kid, a hooker is something that you *hook* your clothes at, not a sex worker. Of course he understood what I was trying to say and corrected me by telling me it was called a Coat Hanger, once I learnt the definition, I laughed my ass off, that's probably what the adults were laughing at back then... I don't blame them one bit.

That's it for me, I would love to hear your difficulties, experiences and moments with languages you were learning!

 

[MFG38]

I studied German back in high school. Had some trouble remembering some of the grammatical quirks of the language, but I enjoyed learning it regardless. Haven't had many chances to speak it lately, so I've become a little rusty.

[Master O]

23 minutes ago, MFG38 said:

I studied German back in high school. Had some trouble remembering some of the grammatical quirks of the language, but I enjoyed learning it regardless. Haven't had many chances to speak it lately, so I've become a little rusty.

 

In fairness, not many countries speak German.  The ones that immediately come to mind are Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, and Austria.

[elf-alchemist]

I learned english almost by accident, too. Being exposed to the language over the internet, playing flash games, watching Youtube videos and definitely a whole lot of other content I forgot, so I consider myself "fluent" since I entered highschool. Thanks, Steven Krashen's Language Acquisition hypothesis, very cool!

 

What I hated about learning in every other way, however, is how forced and needlessly hard it felt. In my highschool, in Brazil, we had both english _and_ spanish, and I hated spanish. It is very similar to brazillian portuguese, yes, but I had zero practice on it at all. Meaning that I got full grades on english, but otherwise struggled in the language of my fellow latinos, sad.

 

Other than that, I wanted to learn japanese, because of course watching anime would do that to me, but that was when I was not aware of Language Acquisition, and dropped it because I felt like I was going nowhere, but once I get to watching anime again, I will do so without english subtitles.

Edited May 23 by elf-alchemist
I should correct myself, it is a hypothesis, not a theory :p

[ethel5691]

21 minutes ago, MFG38 said:

I studied German back in high school. Had some trouble remembering some of the grammatical quirks of the language, but I enjoyed learning it regardless. Haven't had many chances to speak it lately, so I've become a little rusty.

Ah German, I was always fascinated by that language and its use of constants being so absurd that some words sound like you are choking. 

[ethel5691]

17 minutes ago, elf-alchemist said:

What I hated about learning in every other way, however, is how forced and needlessly hard it felt. In my highschool, in Brazil, we had both english _and_ spanish, and I hated spanish. It is very similar to brazillian portuguese, yes, but I had zero practice on it at all. Meaning that I got full grades on english, but otherwise struggled in the language of my fellow latinos, sad.

 

Same with me except replace Spanish with French and Italian. I never really liked the French language because of its accent and some of its weird words. I'm doing Italian now in school and I was interested at first, but now I don't bother with it at all. Don't think I will bother either learning another language for the time being, English and Greek are fine for now.

Speaking of Greek, in school, you are forced to learn ancient Greek, a lesson I despise because of how hard it is, there's so many stuff you have to learn and remember by heart and I wish it wasn't mandatory, there's nothing I have been able to remember and I never will. Luckily for me, this lesson goes along with Euripides's Helen, and since I get good grades with this, it saves me from the bad grades of Ancient Greek.

[ethel5691]

30 minutes ago, Master O said:

 

In fairness, not many countries speak German.  The ones that immediately come to mind are Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, and Austria.

Isn't Dutch also a bit close to German?

[elf-alchemist]

13 minutes ago, ethel5691 said:

Isn't Dutch also a bit close to German?

They are related, so yeah, somewhat similar.

 

Simplified historical linguistic relationship:

 

Actual comparison:

Spoiler

 

 

[Gmg]

I'm currently learning english, that's why I'm afraid to make long posts on internet to prevent misunderstanding. Is too annoying because of the high amount of homophonous words, but is easier than my native language.

[sptz33]

Despite being born in the US, I was growing up in Ukraine as a kid. Due to the region I lived in, Russian was my first and main language. Now the school I went to they did teach us both Ukrainian and English. For some odd reason the English class was very easy for me, of course with the use of dictionaries, but I managed to ace it. The Ukrainian class for some reason was really difficult even though the language is just a bit similar to my native Russian, so to this day I can barely read anything in Ukrainian if my family sends me a message or an article to read. Odd thing is though, if someone speaks Ukrainian, then I can easily understand what they're saying. As far as English goes, I still had to relearn everything once I came back to US as a pre teen, but even so I still got used to it fairly quickly and now I am a fluent speaker.

 

In US schools though, I absolutely struggled with Spanish and French - just wayy too difficult for me to learn. The way the sentences are organized and pronounced is just unreal. That's just me though.

[ethel5691]

16 minutes ago, Gmg said:

I'm currently learning english, that's why I'm afraid to make long posts on internet to prevent misunderstanding. Is too annoying because of the high amount of homophonous words, but is easier than my native language.

I feel you, I was also afraid to speak English thinking I would be judged

[TwelvNighn]

2 hours ago, MFG38 said:

I studied German back in high school. Had some trouble remembering some of the grammatical quirks of the language, but I enjoyed learning it regardless. Haven't had many chances to speak it lately, so I've become a little rusty.

you learned german in your school? i did too! it was not really that hard for me, but at the same time it wasnt easy.

still had fun swearing at people in german tho

[ethel5691]

5 minutes ago, sptz33 said:

The Ukrainian class for some reason was really difficult even though the language is just a bit similar to my native Russian, so to this day I can barely read anything in Ukrainian if my family sends me a message or an article to read.

I've heard the languages are pretty similar. If they send you an article, are you able to understand the gist of it or non at all?

[sptz33]

18 minutes ago, ethel5691 said:

I've heard the languages are pretty similar. If they send you an article, are you able to understand the gist of it or non at all?

Honestly, just barely. Depends on the topic, but some words can catch me off guard and I am like "Huh??" :)

[Noiser]

This forum has been a great place to learn and improve my english, so this place has been my main experience with the language. I'm here since 2015 :-)

[Milkeno]

I've tried learning languages on my own volition but I've always been caught up with other stuff outside of my control like studying, I know how to spell banana in cyrillic though and I know like 10 dutch words.

[ethel5691]

1 hour ago, Noiser said:

This forum has been a great place to learn and improve my english, so this place has been my main experience with the language. I'm here since 2015 :-)

I did the same with you but with discord servers instead, interacting with people more familiar with the language than me was what helped me most to learn the language fluently!

[TheCarsEdge]

i have quite a few stories about learning a new language

starting off, my main push towards speaking english (which in turn led me to getting a cambridge certification) is fnaf

back in 2014 the italian community was very small, so i had no choice but to watch english videos on the subject, which ranged from videos like those from markiplier, to those awful animations with off-model characters

most other languages i've studied don't have as much of a fun backstory, i learned french because it was mandatory in middle school, i've been learning spanish and chinese because they're mandatory now in high school

though learning spanish made me realize why some words in my dialect are the way they are, which is fun

 

[ethel5691]

30 minutes ago, TheCarsEdge said:

i have quite a few stories about learning a new language

starting off, my main push towards speaking english (which in turn led me to getting a cambridge certification) is fnaf

back in 2014 the italian community was very small, so i had no choice but to watch english videos on the subject, which ranged from videos like those from markiplier, to those awful animations with off-model characters

most other languages i've studied don't have as much of a fun backstory, i learned french because it was mandatory in middle school, i've been learning spanish and chinese because they're mandatory now in high school

though learning spanish made me realize why some words in my dialect are the way they are, which is fun

 

Same was with me but with the Minecraft community in 2020/2021, now in 2024 I've got my Cambridge Lower certification, which is for common English, and in Sunday I'm going for the Michigan Certification in Proficiency English also known as the ECPE (Exam Certification on Proficiency English).

[fai1025]

I don't really learn any language before I study linguistic, since I'm born at into a trilingual household, and only language I need to learn is English. I don't exactly remember how I learned English, all I know is that I binge watched bunch of documentaries and over the time I just learned it. After I got into the field of Linguistics and my hobby of ConLanging, I learned like couple more languages, I know some German, some Finnish, terrible French, Tried to do Navajo on Duolingo but I gave up after two lessons.

Learning languages is fun I would say, just need more understanding of Linguistics to have it as hobby.

 

[elf-alchemist]

44 minutes ago, fai1025 said:

since I'm born at into a trilingual household

I'm extremely envious.

 

46 minutes ago, fai1025 said:

After I got into the field of Linguistics and my hobby of ConLanging

You are now officially in my top 5 doom players of all time.
 

44 minutes ago, fai1025 said:

I don't exactly remember how I learned English, all I know is that I binge watched bunch of documentaries and over the time I just learned it.

I personally subscribe to the hypothesis of "comprehensible input" by Stephen Krashen. It very much reflects a lot of my personal experience, and what I hear others describe, such as @ethel5691 or youself. Exposure to a small amount of easily understandable information gets stuck in the head of the listener/reader and never leaves, i.e. they acquire new vocabulary or grammar. Slowly building up a solid foundation of the new language until you become completely fluent in it.

 

 

[taufan99]

I'm Indonesian and actually grew up learning English by myself, with the help of popular media at the time (mostly video games and TV shows/movies but also some not-too-bad edutainment games my parents bought me). Most Indonesians are atleast bilingual in both Indonesian and a regional/ethnic language (depending on the region). Granted, most of English's aspects are kinda similar to Indonesian (not to mention some Dutch loanwords are similar to English, either of Germanic or Romance word origin), hence why nowadays it's not too hard to find Indonesians who at least has some grasp at English, even though not as large as, say, India or even Malaysia.

 

When I was at the 4th grade, I tried learning Japanese but didn't go anywhere because of school activities. Eventually I got to learn it again because I picked it up for my undergraduate degree. My first years sucked, but as time goes by people have called me fluent enough, although I still feel like I have much more room for growth.

 

At junior high school up to vocational IT high school, I learned Spanish and Portuguese with Duolingo out of curiosity. I remember also learning other languages (occasionally using Memrise as well), but not to the same large extent as the two languages I mentioned before.

 

Nowadays, I'm interested in learning Arabic and Hindi-Urdu (even though there can be only so much progress I show because real-life matters, yadda yadda) and also considering learning other languages (again).

[Murdoch]

Have picked up a little German after getting obsessed with German Folk Rock and Metal bands. I also discovered not long ago I am 8% roughly German by descent but unfortunately the genetic connection doesn't appear to be helping. It's a fascinating language to study, because you can see how it provided much of English. Sieben became seven, hier became here, and some words are even closer or identical like scharlatan and restaurant, albeit sometimes pronounced differently. However, it's also crazy complex, with certain combinations of words rendering different literal translations, and certain combinations of words meaning you're supposed to change the order you write them out, and the whole feminine/masculine/neuter with certain nouns is just like... wha? No doubt it comes naturally to native speakers, in the same way English has many different words that sound the same but are spelled differently and other such silliness but native English speakers understand it from context. Well... in theory they do...

Edited May 23 by Murdoch

[DJVCardMaster]

Languages closer to your main one in terms of language-family may be your goto. I've found German surprisingly easy to learn when speaking Spanish as a mother tongue, and also knowing some English, as declinations in my language are even worse than German, and this language has a syntax as easy and similar as the English syntax.

Being Spanish is a blessing for sure when learning new languages, as you are half-way done when trying to learn Italian, Portuguese and French, as most of them are really similar, at least in a written form, and not only that, but those are even easier in grammar at times. The only problem would be that Spanish, in terms of pronuntiation, is one of the easiest and most simple languages to learn. Natively speaking Spanish with a pretty limited phoneticality, will make it really difficult to learn how to pronounce foreign words, specially from English and French (Talking about easy to access languages).

I don't want to pay or take 3 hours of my day going to an academy to learn new languages, so I use Duolingo and the internet these days, but I did study two years of German because my university offered me A2 level of any available language for free in a local insitute (English, German, Italian, French, Greek and, for some reason, Chinese). I'm technically A2 in German but at this point I forgot everything because I don't mantain any conversations with it.

Edited May 23 by DJVCardMaster

[fai1025]

6 hours ago, elf-alchemist said:

I'm extremely envious.

well that said my vocabulary is limited in two of my native language as I never had proper education on either of those

I went to schools in Taiwan so I'm confident in my Mandarin vocabulary, Taiwanese/Hokkien is one of my other native, it's a part of curriculum in Taiwanese public school but no teacher bother to take it seriously because it doesn't count towards your grade, and it's often seen as just a dialect, so I have limited non-causal vocabulary, and frankly quite terrible proficiency in speaking. Same with my Japanese, only person I could speak my Japanese to is my mother, so I only know how to say informal japanese, things like keigo is out of my knowledge.

Edited May 24 by fai1025

[Doom64guy]

On 5/24/2024 at 5:05 AM, taufan99 said:

I'm Indonesian and actually grew up learning English by myself, with the help of popular media at the time (mostly video games and TV shows/movies but also some not-too-bad edutainment games my parents bought me). Most Indonesians are atleast bilingual in both Indonesian and a regional/ethnic language (depending on the region). Granted, most of English's aspects are kinda similar to Indonesian (not to mention some Dutch loanwords are similar to English, either of Germanic or Romance word origin), hence why nowadays it's not too hard to find Indonesians who at least has some grasp at English, even though not as large as, say, India or even Malaysia.

 

When I was at the 4th grade, I tried learning Japanese but didn't go anywhere because of school activities. Eventually I got to learn it again because I picked it up for my undergraduate degree. My first years sucked, but as time goes by people have called me fluent enough, although I still feel like I have much more room for growth.

 

At junior high school up to vocational IT high school, I learned Spanish and Portuguese with Duolingo out of curiosity. I remember also learning other languages (occasionally using Memrise as well), but not to the same large extent as the two languages I mentioned before.

 

Nowadays, I'm interested in learning Arabic and Hindi-Urdu (even though there can be only so much progress I show because real-life matters, yadda yadda) and also considering learning other languages (again).

Wow, that's a lot of languages to study. Great effort tho.

 

 

About me, at least I'm quite fluent in Indonesia and English, with some dose of local language and Arabic.

 

Beyond that, I study Japanese in SHS, even tho I'm not fluent enough in it.

 

I also used to try to learn German, French, and Russia, but didn't go far enough because of the lack of immediate use for my activities.

[jupiter_ex]

I learnt english on my own, had italian at school, and started learning german and french from a "self-teaching encyclopedia" I borrowed from a friend. Sadly had to return it before completing my self teaching journey.
Of all those, the most difficult was by far german. It's something sometimes (some of us) take for granted that words form the plural with an s at the end. I failed to grasp all the ways the plural can be formed in german.
 

After learning a bunch of european languages anyway you start half-guessing words and half-understanding much once you drank from both the anglo-saxon and the latin roots, so I was trying to learn russian and japanese some years ago, and lately I'm really interested by slavic languages, more specifically polish.

Good for people who are trying to learn a new language though, it's an interesting thing to do!

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

I'm honestly really glad that I had to switch from learning German as a second language to learning English. 

As a kid, we could choose if we want to study English or German, and I was strongly recommended to go for German because it's allegedly better for dyslexic students. That's utter bullshit by the way, they just needed to fill the German class when a majority chose English.

So I studied that for a few years, and when I changed schools, they said "look, we only got like three kids to continue German, that's not viable. So you'll be joining English classes with everybody else, and there's going be after school study if necessary." I was very anxious about that because i wasn't doing all that bad in German. But then I found out that i already know English better than many of my peers. Before then I had to learn that this NPC wants me to bring three pounds of badger meat or whatever. There's a few badgers around and a big glowing arrow, and when you kill and loot one, the indicator says "1/3 badger meat collected". So this is a badger, and this is meat. Isn't that cool? So it turns out I've been learning English for years without realising. Turns out you can just figure stuff out from context. Way more effective way than writing boring lists of words in Czech in one column and English counterpart next to it. Has anyone ever learnt anything doing that? I never have. 

 

Edit: so yeah, learning German feels now like pretty much wasted. Well, maybe not "wasted" but not nearly as important as English is. I just can't think of a good reason to learn any other language as a second. It's basically the universal language at this point, and is only going to become more so with the increasing adoption of technology and world-wide culture and what not. I cannot imagine living without being fluent in written English today. Spoken, that's not a big deal. But you really wanna be able to read an article or at least a summary. A bunch of products aren't translated beyond what's mandatory like the contents for example. For people who are English native this may come as a surprise but it's entirely common to just walk into a grocery store and pick up a bag of something and if you can't read English, you wouldn't know what it is. 

Edited May 29 by Sneezy McGlassFace

[Gez]

32 minutes ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

I'm honestly really glad that I had to switch from learning German as a second language to learning English. 

As a kid, we could choose if we want to study English or German, and I was strongly recommended to go for German because it's allegedly better for dyslexic students. That's utter bullshit by the way, they just needed to fill the German class when a majority chose English.

That German would be better for dyslexic students does make sense to me, because the link between spelling and pronunciation is much, much, much stronger in German than in English.

 

In fact in English there are absolutely no link between spelling and pronunciation. Spoken English and written English are two completely different languages, with the relationships between phonemes and graphemes being completely random and arbitrary.

[Maximum Matt]

I've tried learning Japanese and Korean but I didn't get very far because I'm easily distracted and epically lazy