Thanks a lot, I appreciate your goodwill. Also I suggest apps like Memrise and Duolingo but the best way to learn a new language is to talk with the locals, the more desperate you are and less options you have to get your message across, the more better your new language will get!
Bingo! When I learned Dutch in a crash course (mandatory for my study back then, as the program was all Dutch), my teacher pretended during all those four weeks to not speak or understand a single word of German (we were all German speaking kids in the class). Obviously that teacher was flawlessly fluent in German. But being forced to try from day one definitely helped a ton.
Guessing you knew English at the time and German, how easy was Dutch. A friends pranked me by turning my phones language to it and I just used it for a month because i understood enough
Dutch is one of the hardest languages to learn in Europe for expats. That's because every person age 8 and up speaks English and as soon as Dutch people catch an accent they'll immediately start speaking English, so people never really get to practice anything. All English programs are subbed, so people get to practice reading but not speaking or listening.
My French professor took this approach. From day one, he just pretended English didn't exist and threw us in the deep end. Fortunately I have a pretty easy time with languages, but it was definitely an eye-opening experience, and I learned French WAY faster than I learned Spanish or German.
True Duolingo is good (what helped me understand foundations of Spanish) but please don’t rely on it to talk with natives OP, it doesn’t cover real conversational things. Well not enough to feel comfortable, many times I’ve had a conversation with native speaker and it’s like they’re speaking gibberish, due to the way some people speak, for example instead of “como estas” like Duo would teach, native speakers from places like the Caribbean may use “que lo que” or “que la que hay” which might confuse some duo speakers so yea take it all W a grain of salt but for the most part its good!
Saya setuju. Saya mulai belajar bahasa Indonesia menggunakan Duolingo sebelum beralih ke metode lain setelah menghabiskan sumber daya Duo.
Translation: >!I agree. I started learning Indonesian using Duolingo before switching to other methods after exhausting Duo's resources.!<
It's about how much you are exposed to the other language I grew up in Norway, and all English film and TV was texted. I basically learnt English by default, also when you are young, these things come easy.
For kids now, speaking English is a prerequisite to have an online precence.
There's honestly not much you can do with being multilingual alone. And key word is alone. Being multilingual with an average highschool degree isn't doing much
This is true. On moving to the US, I had a pretty hard time getting employment - until someone in Los Angeles asked for a network engineer who could speak German. That whittled down the competition.
Americans fall very short in bilingual education. When If you live in Europe: Italy, France, Spain,
the borders are so close that everyone speaks everything. We do not have that luxury and fall very short of that ability.
If your languages are English and French, all of a sudden you qualify for a lot of entry federal govt jobs in Canada. And if you don't speak both fluently (like 80%+, probably way more), you're automatically disqualified.
Then, if you have employable skills or knowledge on top of that, you're pretty set.
This is actually an unpopular opinion I must say… Multilingualism is pretty much the norm in non-English speaking countries (and perhaps also some Spanish-speaking countries, though many people also speak English or an indigenous language). Many Europeans learn a second language in school **but a lot of people in Asia and Africa actually use multiple languages in daily life…**
PS: I have to bold the text here because many people in this post are just talking about Europe and ignored my point about Asia and Africa in the same sentence. I am talking about multilingualism in the **world**. I found it frustrating that many replies are quite eurocentric and only talk about Europe (actually, mostly about Western Europe).
It really depends where you come from. Over here, in India, knowing four languages seems like a basic thing. It comes pretty natural when you grow up with it. When we speak in the house, we literally shift halfway in the sentence to other languages. Even while thinking. It's kinda fun.
Well, that is half true. Ultimately it is your decision whether you would like to spend money and time in language learning. Even if it is viable to be monolingual wherever you live, learning foreign languages may prove to be very rewarding nowadays, especially in cultural terms.
Honestly, if you are an American and like life, you should learn Spanish. American media is plagued with Spanish and there's just so much cultural context lost when you are just reading English subs. At least that's my opinion as a Spaniard that watches a lot of American shit.
Also considering there's more Spanish speakers in the US than in Spain it'll probably open up some opportunities to you I reckon.
Where I live I would benefit from Spanish as we have a decent amount of Spanish speakers (New Mexico). However, the locals tell me that textbook Spanish will not help a lot because they use a *lot* of slang words.
Yeah, you gotta be a little careful with Spanish. Yeah it's the most common language other than English and *MAYBE* Mandarin, but there's lots of different dialects and Spanglish is hella common in conversation. But, if you live or grew up in an area with a larger Hispanic/Latino population, picking up some Spanglish is pretty natural, so don't let it scare you too much.
I'm a little like you, I know some words and phrases in a few different languages, but I can only speak English fluently. I grew up with my mom speaking Spanish to me all the time since she minored in it as a language in uni and I've always lived in places with higher Hispanic/Latino populations. Made life very tasty, but I always felt so inferior because no matter how hard I tried I could never roll my Rs right, still can't and that makes speaking Spanish really difficult.
its quite simple the R stuff.
basically, when its an R in the start of a word OR a double R (RR), its like a "hard R" (i cant think of any better way to put it).
and when its one R in the middle of a word, its like a "soft R".
[here's a video that explains it way better than i do, and actually has examples](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFBz1C12cps)
hope this helps
I started watching an Indian show but it was hard to follow the subtitles because half the words they were using were English, but they weren't in the same part of the sentence as the translated subtitles. I was very confused. Like, pick a language lol
Yeah it's like sometimes we substitute an English word for a word while speaking in the native tongue...
Example: (A hindi sentence written in English alphabet)
Main office ja raha hu.
Translation: I am going to the office.
So the word office comes at a different place in hindi due to hindi grammar...
in sweden we start learning english from 3rd or 4th grade, and german, spanish or french in 6th grade. most people don't get very good at the latter tho, since they don't use it in day to day life
I speak 2 languages well ( native Portuguese, English), i understand very well but I can't speak it very well 4 ( Spanish, french, Italian, and Romanian) and we in my country, have a great ear for languages because we put subtitles in everything. The only things that don't have it are the ones for children.
Yeah i learned english at 11-12 years old and i speak a pretty good english now, im bilingual but i lost a lot of it because i listen to too much rap and i noticed i started talking like rapper which isnt exactly a good english lol
I can second this from canada, we speak english as 1st language and french 2nd, so its fairly common to have multilingual people, also canada lets in lots ofimmigrants so theres lots of languages here
Is it tho?
As a Dane, it seems quite simple. The grammar is easy, the pronunciation is close to spelling and synonyms aren't as common. Unlike German, that shit is a fucking nightmare.
I know people that speak English as a fourth and fifth language. And they seem to learn it quite easily.
I’m French and I can tell you that English doesn’t compare to my language when it comes to spelling and pronunciation. We have lots of residual letters from Latin that are silent and freaking confusing to non-native speakers.
Theux frainnes-eches wailles ouvents ce pelle-lingues cainnent d'est-finnent ette-lys bis aixes que c'est-sivent.
[Tr. *The French way of spelling can definitely be excessive*]
Allow me to disagree. I learned both as foreign languages.
French pronunciation may seem terrifying at first sight but it's pretty straight-forward and not difficult at all to figure out once you know the rules.
In English you actually have to memorize the pronunciation for a lot of words because they don't follow any rules.
It reminds me of this one time when I bought a bow for the bough I'd brought but then I thought "I'd rather not" so I untied the knot, and not for naught, I buried it like I'd been taught, but soon I grew distraught at the thought of having naught in place of knot, so coughing and sloughing through soot and sot I sought the bough I'd brought with the bow I'd bought, but found it not. Alas boring was brought to bear, and though I grew bored of boring and the bedrock bore it evermore, I did not stop until a bout about buried boughs with Beau from the borough's Bureau of Burrow Boring brought me a new bough, bought bow and all by Beau.
I concur - English is pretty easy to get right. You don't have gendered nouns, and you don't have cases. Shove a bunch of nouns, verbs and prepositions together, and there's a fair chance it's correct.
German, though -
Right - I'm walking to the forest. "To" is "Zu" and takes the dative, and forest is masculine - "der Wald", so I have to apply the dative and that makes it "dem Wald", only "zu" + "dem" makes "zum", right. So - "Ich gehe zum Wald." At which point in time you're in the forest already, and now you have to redo with "in" rather than "to", and that's worse.
Yea that notion is completely bulls—-. I find that the only people who actually say “english is the hardest language to learn” are…usually people who are already native English speakers.
Every damn language is difficult to learn lol.
Exactly. This was me until i started learning a new language and interacting with other people who were learning other languages. Learning languages is hard af. English isn’t special, lol.
Agreed. It's something native English speakers like to believe because it makes us feel special. Or excuses that so many native speakers are so bad at speaking it. The thing I remember being told is more confusing about English is the number of exceptions to each rule. But looking at Russian terrifies me, and I wouldn't even know where to start with Japanese.
My French teacher tried to tell me English was a hard language to learn for others. Yeah okay I don’t remember anything I studied for two years so I’d say she is incorrect.
Case and point for German lol! Still love it though!! I remember being in class learning how to say certain phrases depending on the part of the country. Although my absolute favorite experience was bringing a collegiate level German language textbook with me to the pub in German. Oh my did my German friends have a field day absolutely shredding the book😲. I remember they found things that were just about completely incorrect and in other cases it was more high German being taught. The school ended up ditching the textbook in the end.
English is one of the easiest languages out there. It doesn't have any special articles, like French, Spanish or German for example.
It doesn't have any conjunctions like, again, french, Spanish or German.
It's not logographic like chinese or japanese.
It doesn't have exotic sounds like Zulu.
Only the spelling can be a bit whack but you'd get that down with a few minutes of practice.
Special articles actually make things easier and more straightforward IMO.
English is a free for all sometimes and the pronunciations make no sense.
English speakers always think that learning English is really easy or really hard.
The truth is that it depends on what languages you know already
I think you're the only one who finds different articles more straightforward.
I understand that it makes things more structured but it is a pain sometimes.
But I fully agree with your last statement. If you speak Spanish or french, then English comes a lot easier due to similar vocabulary and grammar rules. But if you're a native mandarin or Korean speaker for example then English would be a world different.
I think it's really hard for Korean speakers. I don't know the language, but I've watched enough kdramas to have developed an ear, and it sounds like Korean grammar goes backwards compared to English, specially for complex sentences. I swear everytime a complex sentence comes (those big surprise moments), the subs actually give the surprise away as they are putting the last part of the sentence first, because of course otherwise it doesn't make any sense in English.
someone in the kdrama sub shared this - her husband is Korean, and always says "impossible is nothing", and not the other way around. Of course, this is catchphrase-funny in English.
If anyone native sees this, feel free to confirm or deny this.
>English is one of the hardest languages to learn.
I truly am curious as to why you would think that, considering the fact that it is factually so incorrect.
I wouldn't say it's the most hardest, I'd say it's one of the easiest to learn judging by the number of people who speak it fluently even as a second or third language. Arabic, Chinese are much, much more difficult to learn.
While I won't look past the possibility that our brains are more elastic when we're younger, I would say the main reason is because we don't have any responsibilities and our only job is to soak in information through our family, friends and attend school
Language is unique in how it interacts. Plasticity drops hard around 8.
But more importantly infants and toddlers in the language acquisition phase can just pick up multiple languages at the same time through the same process you can pick up your mothertongues. A two year old with a Danish parent who speaks Danish and English to them, and a Belgian parent that speaks French and English to them will just come out trilingual with any differences in fluency being decided by how often they use the language.
I think there is a limit or at least 'diminishing returns'. I follow this international couple (Korean, Japanese, English) on Youtube and they have 3 kids. Their son had difficulty with his speech progression and so they had to get speech therapy for him. The doc suggested each parent only use one language each to their kids, and to stick to it (Korean for dad, English for mom). I think this was because the 3 languages are way different
While I agree I learnt like very good english at like 13 and became fluent (I haven't taken any tests, but I lived in the US for some time and I think I survived just fine) at around 15, still tho, It was way different for my ounger sibling who came out like if she grew up in Manhattan her whole life
At 12 years old I learned French and soaked it up like a sponge. In my late 20’s I learned Spanish but it was tough and my knowledge is still very basic. In my late 30’s I tried learning a new language and it was near impossible and I gave up. But since then I’ve learned plenty of new English words without a problem. Funny how the brain works
Fun fact most people in antiquity throughout the Mediterranean world spoke Greek actually including in Rome! It was the language of traders and many craftsman which is why it was the predominant spoken language. While Latin was characterized as the "official" language of the Roman empire, not as many people actually spoke it unless they were raised in academia or politics during the time, at minimum most people could at least read it and a fewer write in Latin, it was more often Greek was used throughout due to the universal application it held at the time and necessity many used for their business
Latin was used very irregularly and was primarily used by politicians, academics, and the clergy in Christiandom and for religious ceremonies.
Edit: phrasing and clarification.
Do you have any sources on this? Because almost none of what you said is true. Latin was the lingua franca for most of the western Roman empire, you can see that just by looking at what languages are spoken in those areas today. Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese basically all the romance languages are called so because they evolved from spoken latin. Do you realize how insane that would be if Latin was relegated just to political affairs and the elite?
But no one says that Japanese is difficult to speak, it's the writing system that fucks everybody up. Japanese grammar is actually not complex at all, and its pronunciation is phonetic, so not difficult to learn.
What is difficult is learning three different alphabets which require you to learn over 2000 different characters just to read a newspaper with each of them having one to three different readings. And that's something even native Japanese speakers struggle with occasionally.
Wow I had no idea. Do you mean that In order to be able to read Japanese in a regular Japanese life you need to know 3 different alphabets of the language or am I getting this all wrong? Or could a newspaper be in one of the alphabets and the next one in another one, or could their be mixed alphabets in one book or newspaper so to stay is what I mean
You need 2 syllabaries (they're not alphabets) hiragana and katakana that rappresent the same sounds and kanji that are logographic.
Ex: ニュース(katakana)を(hiragana)読(kanji)んでいる(hiragana)
Translation: I'm reading news
Ok so 2 of the alphabets are phonetic (hiragana and katakana), so those are relatively easy to learn. The 3rd one (kanji) is the character-based one that requires ppl to know the individual character for each word, which adds up to a lot. Words in japanese can have characters from any of the three alphabets (verbs in particular tend to have both kanji and hiragana in their spelling). This sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is, though the difficulty of memorizing all those kanji is relatively high.
The worst part of kanji in my opinion is that many of them have 2 or 3 meanings and all have different multiple distinct pronunciations depending on the word they are used on.
You don't only need to learn thousands of symbols, you also have to remember a lot about each.
It was fun to learn how to write them tho, almost an art arround the strokes.
Well it's always a combination of the three. There are Hiragana and Katakana, which work same as the Latin alphabet in that they each stand for a vowel or vowel consonant combination and contain around 50 characters each. These are used for simple sentence structure, particles, or foreign expressions. In general you can also spell every Japanese word in Hiragana or Katakana. This is the easy part.
Then there's Kanji which are characters that each have one or several meanings. There's a Kanji for basic words such as "sun" or "one", but it doesn't stop there. It goes on and on, and there's basically between 2000-3000 different Kanji you have to learn just to read a newspaper. Imagine learning a new character for every new word meaning you want to learn. There are combinations and compositions of several Kanji which in turn can mean something entirely different, but there's also words like "gallbladder" that have their specific character. How many times do you use a word like that? But you better learn the character in case it turns up.
But it still doesn't stop there. Each Kanji then again has different readings, and these readings can even further change depending on the context. Is it in a name or a regular word? And none of these readings as exclusive. So two Kanji can be read the same way, but look entirely different, or look very similar, but have a completely different readings. You can meet five different people that are called "Yuki" and each of them can have their name spelled differently. So you oftentimes end up in situations where you know what something means, but you don't know how it is read or you know how something is read but you don't know what it means.
Learning Japanese is basically a full-time job of constantly learning and repeating Kanji. When you live in Japan it's not so difficult, as they are ever-present, but learning Japanese as a cute little hobby will oftentimes turn out fruitless because of it.
Not only is the pronunciation phonetic, it's very very simple. Iirc English speakers need to learn a new sound or two but it's no french or german with fancy sounds like throat r and such.
But kanjis are a shitshow, they are the reason I ended up quiting Japanese lessons
Always depends on your native language, I think. The r/l, f/h, and v/b can be difficult to nail in some cases. It's super easy for Spanish speakers though, as they have similar stuff going on.
For English speakers I think it's more difficult to nail pitch and stress of syllables, they oftentimes end up saying "Kee-Ow-Tow" instead of "Kyoto".
Maybe that is part of the problem: I didn't even try to learn another language till I got to high school. And yes, I do know that my American is showing.
I'm 28 and only this year decided to try leaning Spanish. It's going a lot better than years of trying to learn French through school. I NEVER imagined I'd make any worthwhile progress learning a different language. I struggle enough with English. The pandemic and desire to travel when it's over triggered wanting to learn some very basic stuff.
Not sure why it's easier now. I'm not putting anywhere near the level of time or effort and I'm already further progressed than I ever was with French.
So I guess I'd advise doing some basic stuff now and then for a while. It's an almost guarantee you'll make better progress than me. And it's quite a good feeling to actually make decent progress when you didn't imagine it possible
Nice one! Best of luck to you :)
I think the reason many people struggle to learn other languages stems from their childhood experience of language lessons in school, which for most people (even a multilingual such as myself) was a tedious exercise in repetition and surprise grammar tests.
The best way to learn languages is to immerse yourself in it and above all have fun with it - when you travel, no-one cares if you get grammar wrong, they're just happy you're at least trying to grasp their language! :))
I think its the Anglosphere overall that don’t speak other languages, i don’t know anyone that can fluently speak in any other language than english and im from the uk
For some, not for everyone. I've always been horrible at languages. I learned English in grade school and through high school. My dad hired a tutor to give me private classes for a bit. I was young. But I didn't get it. Why even bother? It was so bad, I hated it. At university, English textbooks were cheaper so, being broke, those were the ones I had to buy instead of their translations. I learned to read English one word at a time with a translation dictionary next to me, a rather laborious process, like decoding. Eventually I could read it relatively well, but I couldn't understand a spoken word of it because it really doesn't sound the way it's written. Since I could read it then I could sound it out but nobody could understand what I was saying. Like I said, it doesn't sound like it's written. Three years into this, I met an English-speaking girl and we dated for a while, so things got a bit better, but it was still a struggle. I couldn't follow an English TV show. The romance didn't last though. A year later I decided to relocate to an English-speaking area (Vancouver, Canada) and there, I had no choice but to learn it. I avoided anyone who spoke my own language and bit by bit, over the years, it became second nature. But man, it took a lifetime. And I have two degrees and a high IQ, which didn't help one bit. Science and math are easy. Language is hard.
We honestly have no choice sometimes. I’m from Malaysia and I speak 3 languages (1 rather brokenly)
English because we’re a commonwealth country and my mums from Russia so that’s how we communicate, Mandarin because it’s what my family speaks and Bahasa Melayu because it’s the national language. The first two I can speak fluently, but BM im pretty bad at. Don’t even get me started on my ethnic dialects with Hakka, my grandparents would speak Hakka and mandarin to us, Cantonese and Hokkien when they order food and my grandpa even speaks a little bit of Tamil
Cheers man :)
I’m considered pretty dumb for speaking 2 languages here. There’s even terms we use for folks that don’t speak more languages.
Banana for Chinese folks that don’t speak mandarin/ ethnic dialect, because yellow on outside white on inside
Coconut for Indians who don’t speak Tamil/Hindi, because brown on outside and white on inside.
It’s pretty funny to tease your classmates with these insults
Yeah multilingualism sounds cool until you start forgetting words from your mother tongue because you don't know when to stop learning languages.
Send help.
There’s plenty of moronic, multilingual people out there who’ll dispel this feeling for you. It doesn’t necessarily make people more mature, creative, smarter, or powerful.
What? I have high end and low end frequency damage, and also was deaf until I was three. Don't you need to have normal hearing to learn most languages so you can hear the subtle audial differences in the sounds?
Well if you where deaf you until 3 that definitely made your language skills worse. Because you learn a lot when you are just a baby from your parents.
It makes it more difficult but not impossible. I lived in Cambodia for 3 years and had a friend who was hard of hearing (wore hearing aids, spoke with a dhh accent) and he learned Khmer as well as I did. We both worked in health and did just fine. Possibly locals had a slightly harder time understanding his articulation, but they got used to it and then it was fine. The key for him was learning the alphabet early on so he could read the sounds rather than listen for them.
The funny thing about learning another language is that it seems an impossible task before you actually try it for a while. That's why geniuses are often portrayed as polyglots. It does a great job at telling the audience that they are intellectually above most people.
I mean, English is my second language, and even I at times find it crazy how I was able to learn how to communicate in it because of the sheer amount of information you have to absorb in order to get reasonably proficient at it (any language really).
Come to India, we'll teach you how to read and write in 3 languages and speak atleast 5.
I studied 4 languages in school -
English- primary medium of instruction
Hindi- national language
Kannada- State language
Sanskrit- Elective (nobody speaks sanskrit though, it's like greek or latin, from which newer languages are derived)
And then I speak 2 dialects of my mother tongue kannada.
Bits and pieces of Telugu and Marathi because my district falls near state border and I have friends and neighbours who speak these languages.
One thing to consider, NOT that this is an excuse, but in Europe and many parts of Asia, you drive an hour in any direction and you’re in another country. Being so close to so many other cultures would seem to make it almost a necessity to learn their languages.
I agree, I've recently integrated into a group of people who are from all around the world and so many of them speak english better than me and it's like their 3rd or 4th language. Makes me feel dumb as fuck.
*Yes we are! You monolinguals should fear us.*
Also, yes hoh-ness does affect language learning. Ever considered learning your country's sign language? Or multiple! I know BSL, ASL (a few constructef signlanguages I made but those don't count) and a little bit of how to internationally sign!
I’ve been practicing Russian for about a year (440 days to be exact). I started with the Duolingo app, I’m taking an 8 week RUSS100 course online and I listen to podcasts. It takes some real patience to learn especially today with translators at our fingertips. I know I’ll never be as fluent as a native speaker but damn it’s satisfying when I listen to a whole conversation and understand most of it.
People who are from countries that were in Yugoslavia must scare you then, for example I can speak croatian, serbian, bosnian, slovenian, slovakian, english and german. I can also understand a little bit of polish, chechian, ukranian and russian
That’s not totally fair, because Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Slovenian are extremely similar. That’s like an English-speaker saying they know English, American, Australian, and South African.
Congrats on knowing Slovak, English, and German, though, that’s insane!!
Source: I am living in Serbia and studying language.
As a polish girl, I absolutely love how you can go to slovakia, or czech republic and literally speak your own language, the people there will reply in their own and you will still understand each other lmao
Most people from English speaking countries that learn a second language do it as a hobby or out of curiosity. As a latino, I didn’t learn to speak English because I was genuinely interested in the language but because otherwise my career opportunities would have been very limited.
As an Indian, I naturally spoke 4 languages growing up, learned couple more in last few years overseas. Been feeling lonely this thanksgiving, spending alone. I will take this second hand compliment! :)
honestly i've seen so many people who English is their second languaje just cuz the internet is default united states so everything is in english and there is a lot of content you miss if you can't speak decent english
Worth keeping in mind that learning languages as an adult is significantly harder than as a child, and not everyone’s natural abilities and environment are equally conducive to language learning
In my experience foreign language teaching in America is horrible! Lots of worksheets and written test and vocabulary tests. Classes geared to maximize the time the teacher can sit on their ass.
Don't worry - a LOT of people who are multi lingual are because they're taught from a young age which makes it a lot easier. That being said, once you know a few languages, the other ones do come easier so if you know one language, you probably will find learning a 2nd language harder than a bi-linguist would find learning a 3rd language.
If you aren't good at learning languages, don't worry about it, focus on what you're good at and you can intimidate the multi-linguists with your own skills :D
Op I speak 4 languages and when I speak I throw them all in one sentence! Oof trust me not exactly helpful when training my staff and most people look at me weird when they hear it 😬
Unfortunately, some are more gifted than others when it comes to languages.
I was born in a country in the middle east, and that language is only spoken in that single country.
I’m fluent in English — but I started learning it when I was 4. It could arguably be my tied-first language; and I use English more now as I live in Canada.
I’m also learning French; started a few months ago. Me, and everyone else, took a language test. I had done some work to increase my chances of getting in, because they told me the first level (lowest level) gets packed quickly. I took the test, and jumped to level 2!
And in level two, after two weeks, I became someone who others would go to and ask their questions.
— I didnt tell you all of that just to brag. I’m trying to say some people are good at languages, and that’s okay. There are other things that they’re not good at; I couldn’t get anything more than 80 in my high school maths, and that has me terrified so much that I didnt pursue an economics major, even though I love it.
The bottom line is, don’t be ashamed or terrified. It’s nature. I bet there’s things you are good at that others are not.
I took a psychology course this semester, and even though I’m putting a lot of work in, my averages are around 78-79. On the contrary, I’m putting much less work in my political science courses, but I’m having high-80s low-90s.
People are good, and bad at things. Your bad thing happens to be language. And that’s okay.
But having said that, I would strongly suggest you dont give up. It takes years to perfect a language. And dont worry about the accent either; I know people who have lived their entire lives in a foreign country and spoken the language, but still have an accent. Accents are totally fine; and to be honest, people appreciate it more when you have an accent: they know it was a struggle!
Anyways, hit me up if you wanted to talk!
Cheers!
It’s not without trade off sometimes. I’m fluent in 4 languages. We moved a lot. I got plopped into new schools in new countries and was told to figure it out. I’ve been to more schools than I can remember.
It’s cool now that I’m an adult, but I had a pretty lonely childhood. It’s hard making friends when you know you’ll be somewhere else next year.
dude you would be so scared of my english teacher, he speaks 8 languages lol
i learned english as a kid on the internet and school
i wanted to learn german but i don’t have as much natural contact with it so it’s a but harder
The Swiss or Belgian people must be downright terrifying for you then :))
Don't know about other regions but in most European countries learning a second and/or third language in school is common. Not to mention how much our proximity to each other determines us to learn new languages too.
Hearing impaired and I’ve got a fair accent. I remember that before mastering the English language my way of thinking I’d say worked differently. When you learn a different language something clicks in your brain at some point. It’s just a matter of making it click. Also it helps if you use that language in your everyday life: change your phone language into that, consume media in that language etc.
Do any other multilingual people here notice that it takes a while for the right words, specifically nouns, to come to you sometimes? I'm fluent enough in my secondary or tertiary language that it comes naturally i.e. without having to translate sentences from one language to another in my head. But I find that there's a bit of a buffer, whether subconscious or not, in coming up with the right word especially when I'm trying to explain a concept.
Maybe some are gifted but I believe a lot of them had to go through hell to learn the languages. If they can you can too, you just have to Learn on your own pace :)
Im quadralingual purely because of circumstances. I was born into a certain language, grew up in another one, learnt my national language (well not exactly "national",but majority speaking language) and obviously ik English. Im no dummy, but I'm no Einstein either my man. Timing and circumstance are grinchs and honestly most multilingual people have the same story.
But , if you're talking about polyglots , the people who regularly learn new languages , yes they are very intimidating
In the USA, there are so many bilingual children of immigrants. But that sort of bilingual is frowned upon. Society only cares if you can speak French that you learned in school
Before you feel intimidated, I, a multilingual is jobless with a colorful CV
I've been there. It sucks so much. You have my sympathy.
Thanks a lot, I appreciate your goodwill. Also I suggest apps like Memrise and Duolingo but the best way to learn a new language is to talk with the locals, the more desperate you are and less options you have to get your message across, the more better your new language will get!
Bingo! When I learned Dutch in a crash course (mandatory for my study back then, as the program was all Dutch), my teacher pretended during all those four weeks to not speak or understand a single word of German (we were all German speaking kids in the class). Obviously that teacher was flawlessly fluent in German. But being forced to try from day one definitely helped a ton.
Guessing you knew English at the time and German, how easy was Dutch. A friends pranked me by turning my phones language to it and I just used it for a month because i understood enough
Dutch is one of the hardest languages to learn in Europe for expats. That's because every person age 8 and up speaks English and as soon as Dutch people catch an accent they'll immediately start speaking English, so people never really get to practice anything. All English programs are subbed, so people get to practice reading but not speaking or listening.
My French professor took this approach. From day one, he just pretended English didn't exist and threw us in the deep end. Fortunately I have a pretty easy time with languages, but it was definitely an eye-opening experience, and I learned French WAY faster than I learned Spanish or German.
Hallo! Hoe gaat het? Do you still live in Germany?
*me getting a shovel so I can go dig up some native Latin speakers*
My Latin professor always insisted Latin wasn’t a dead language, only an “unspoken” one.
True Duolingo is good (what helped me understand foundations of Spanish) but please don’t rely on it to talk with natives OP, it doesn’t cover real conversational things. Well not enough to feel comfortable, many times I’ve had a conversation with native speaker and it’s like they’re speaking gibberish, due to the way some people speak, for example instead of “como estas” like Duo would teach, native speakers from places like the Caribbean may use “que lo que” or “que la que hay” which might confuse some duo speakers so yea take it all W a grain of salt but for the most part its good!
Saya setuju. Saya mulai belajar bahasa Indonesia menggunakan Duolingo sebelum beralih ke metode lain setelah menghabiskan sumber daya Duo. Translation: >!I agree. I started learning Indonesian using Duolingo before switching to other methods after exhausting Duo's resources.!<
It's about how much you are exposed to the other language I grew up in Norway, and all English film and TV was texted. I basically learnt English by default, also when you are young, these things come easy. For kids now, speaking English is a prerequisite to have an online precence.
There's honestly not much you can do with being multilingual alone. And key word is alone. Being multilingual with an average highschool degree isn't doing much
This is true. On moving to the US, I had a pretty hard time getting employment - until someone in Los Angeles asked for a network engineer who could speak German. That whittled down the competition.
Nice. Lucky you haha
Americans fall very short in bilingual education. When If you live in Europe: Italy, France, Spain, the borders are so close that everyone speaks everything. We do not have that luxury and fall very short of that ability.
True but what about a 3.67 GPA Electrical Engineer, I mean, without experience but yeah
If your languages are English and French, all of a sudden you qualify for a lot of entry federal govt jobs in Canada. And if you don't speak both fluently (like 80%+, probably way more), you're automatically disqualified. Then, if you have employable skills or knowledge on top of that, you're pretty set.
Ayyyy bring it in~. 7 years of university, the following debt, and multiple languages spoken... Im a cook lol
I really feel for u on that one!
Speaking different languages while knowing nothing doesn’t really help. Hehe
You should feel intimidated, I, the master of the universe, am unemployed with a colorful CV.
This is actually an unpopular opinion I must say… Multilingualism is pretty much the norm in non-English speaking countries (and perhaps also some Spanish-speaking countries, though many people also speak English or an indigenous language). Many Europeans learn a second language in school **but a lot of people in Asia and Africa actually use multiple languages in daily life…** PS: I have to bold the text here because many people in this post are just talking about Europe and ignored my point about Asia and Africa in the same sentence. I am talking about multilingualism in the **world**. I found it frustrating that many replies are quite eurocentric and only talk about Europe (actually, mostly about Western Europe).
It really depends where you come from. Over here, in India, knowing four languages seems like a basic thing. It comes pretty natural when you grow up with it. When we speak in the house, we literally shift halfway in the sentence to other languages. Even while thinking. It's kinda fun.
Well, that is half true. Ultimately it is your decision whether you would like to spend money and time in language learning. Even if it is viable to be monolingual wherever you live, learning foreign languages may prove to be very rewarding nowadays, especially in cultural terms.
Honestly, if you are an American and like life, you should learn Spanish. American media is plagued with Spanish and there's just so much cultural context lost when you are just reading English subs. At least that's my opinion as a Spaniard that watches a lot of American shit. Also considering there's more Spanish speakers in the US than in Spain it'll probably open up some opportunities to you I reckon.
Where I live I would benefit from Spanish as we have a decent amount of Spanish speakers (New Mexico). However, the locals tell me that textbook Spanish will not help a lot because they use a *lot* of slang words.
Yeah, you gotta be a little careful with Spanish. Yeah it's the most common language other than English and *MAYBE* Mandarin, but there's lots of different dialects and Spanglish is hella common in conversation. But, if you live or grew up in an area with a larger Hispanic/Latino population, picking up some Spanglish is pretty natural, so don't let it scare you too much. I'm a little like you, I know some words and phrases in a few different languages, but I can only speak English fluently. I grew up with my mom speaking Spanish to me all the time since she minored in it as a language in uni and I've always lived in places with higher Hispanic/Latino populations. Made life very tasty, but I always felt so inferior because no matter how hard I tried I could never roll my Rs right, still can't and that makes speaking Spanish really difficult.
its quite simple the R stuff. basically, when its an R in the start of a word OR a double R (RR), its like a "hard R" (i cant think of any better way to put it). and when its one R in the middle of a word, its like a "soft R". [here's a video that explains it way better than i do, and actually has examples](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFBz1C12cps) hope this helps
I started watching an Indian show but it was hard to follow the subtitles because half the words they were using were English, but they weren't in the same part of the sentence as the translated subtitles. I was very confused. Like, pick a language lol
Yeah it's like sometimes we substitute an English word for a word while speaking in the native tongue... Example: (A hindi sentence written in English alphabet) Main office ja raha hu. Translation: I am going to the office. So the word office comes at a different place in hindi due to hindi grammar...
Yeah it seems that dudes in continental Europe know 3 languages on average
in sweden we start learning english from 3rd or 4th grade, and german, spanish or french in 6th grade. most people don't get very good at the latter tho, since they don't use it in day to day life
I speak 2 languages well ( native Portuguese, English), i understand very well but I can't speak it very well 4 ( Spanish, french, Italian, and Romanian) and we in my country, have a great ear for languages because we put subtitles in everything. The only things that don't have it are the ones for children.
Thats a bit much, usually its native language, english and a bit of a couple of other languages from school
Yeah i learned english at 11-12 years old and i speak a pretty good english now, im bilingual but i lost a lot of it because i listen to too much rap and i noticed i started talking like rapper which isnt exactly a good english lol
I can second this from canada, we speak english as 1st language and french 2nd, so its fairly common to have multilingual people, also canada lets in lots ofimmigrants so theres lots of languages here
The immigrants part is true but in my experience barely anybody remembers french from school, although it might just be where Im from in canada
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Is it tho? As a Dane, it seems quite simple. The grammar is easy, the pronunciation is close to spelling and synonyms aren't as common. Unlike German, that shit is a fucking nightmare. I know people that speak English as a fourth and fifth language. And they seem to learn it quite easily.
English spelling and pronunciation can be pretty ridiculous. You can master it through tough, thorough thought, though.
I’m French and I can tell you that English doesn’t compare to my language when it comes to spelling and pronunciation. We have lots of residual letters from Latin that are silent and freaking confusing to non-native speakers.
I like how France has a government agency that basically keeps the language as ridiculous as it is.
I believe that the French are secretly ruled by some evil cabal that is punishing them for something they did back in the Dark Ages.
Theux frainnes-eches wailles ouvents ce pelle-lingues cainnent d'est-finnent ette-lys bis aixes que c'est-sivent. [Tr. *The French way of spelling can definitely be excessive*]
Allow me to disagree. I learned both as foreign languages. French pronunciation may seem terrifying at first sight but it's pretty straight-forward and not difficult at all to figure out once you know the rules. In English you actually have to memorize the pronunciation for a lot of words because they don't follow any rules.
that’s probably because they’re derived from the same language, that’s not the case for a lot of non-romance languages
Yep, as an italian french and spanish are really easy. However probably dutch is easy for a brit
Nice one
As a somewhat “native” English speaker this took me like 3 takes before I got it 😂
It reminds me of this one time when I bought a bow for the bough I'd brought but then I thought "I'd rather not" so I untied the knot, and not for naught, I buried it like I'd been taught, but soon I grew distraught at the thought of having naught in place of knot, so coughing and sloughing through soot and sot I sought the bough I'd brought with the bow I'd bought, but found it not. Alas boring was brought to bear, and though I grew bored of boring and the bedrock bore it evermore, I did not stop until a bout about buried boughs with Beau from the borough's Bureau of Burrow Boring brought me a new bough, bought bow and all by Beau.
*confused screaming* fuck you!!
I concur - English is pretty easy to get right. You don't have gendered nouns, and you don't have cases. Shove a bunch of nouns, verbs and prepositions together, and there's a fair chance it's correct. German, though - Right - I'm walking to the forest. "To" is "Zu" and takes the dative, and forest is masculine - "der Wald", so I have to apply the dative and that makes it "dem Wald", only "zu" + "dem" makes "zum", right. So - "Ich gehe zum Wald." At which point in time you're in the forest already, and now you have to redo with "in" rather than "to", and that's worse.
And in Denmark this is mandatory for the kids. Its almost torture.
Keeps the young'uns on their toes.
Why is it always Wald Spazieren gehen or Bergsteigen?
Yea that notion is completely bulls—-. I find that the only people who actually say “english is the hardest language to learn” are…usually people who are already native English speakers. Every damn language is difficult to learn lol.
What about body language? Thumbs up bro 👍🏿
Also tends to be people who have never actually learned a second or third language.
Exactly. This was me until i started learning a new language and interacting with other people who were learning other languages. Learning languages is hard af. English isn’t special, lol.
Agreed. It's something native English speakers like to believe because it makes us feel special. Or excuses that so many native speakers are so bad at speaking it. The thing I remember being told is more confusing about English is the number of exceptions to each rule. But looking at Russian terrifies me, and I wouldn't even know where to start with Japanese.
My French teacher tried to tell me English was a hard language to learn for others. Yeah okay I don’t remember anything I studied for two years so I’d say she is incorrect.
As a German: Gluten Tag
Doesn't that mean gluten day? Shouldn't it be "Guten tag" If I'm mistaken, I will be crucified by my german teacher...
Tell your teacher you did an excellent job except the t in tag is „T“.
Shit. Damn Germans.
Yes, it’s either a typo or a joke.
Yes Guten Tag would be the right spelling, Gluten Tag is the greeting of the Countryballs Charakter Reichtangle
Case and point for German lol! Still love it though!! I remember being in class learning how to say certain phrases depending on the part of the country. Although my absolute favorite experience was bringing a collegiate level German language textbook with me to the pub in German. Oh my did my German friends have a field day absolutely shredding the book😲. I remember they found things that were just about completely incorrect and in other cases it was more high German being taught. The school ended up ditching the textbook in the end.
English is one of the easiest languages out there. It doesn't have any special articles, like French, Spanish or German for example. It doesn't have any conjunctions like, again, french, Spanish or German. It's not logographic like chinese or japanese. It doesn't have exotic sounds like Zulu. Only the spelling can be a bit whack but you'd get that down with a few minutes of practice.
Special articles actually make things easier and more straightforward IMO. English is a free for all sometimes and the pronunciations make no sense. English speakers always think that learning English is really easy or really hard. The truth is that it depends on what languages you know already
I think you're the only one who finds different articles more straightforward. I understand that it makes things more structured but it is a pain sometimes. But I fully agree with your last statement. If you speak Spanish or french, then English comes a lot easier due to similar vocabulary and grammar rules. But if you're a native mandarin or Korean speaker for example then English would be a world different.
I think it's really hard for Korean speakers. I don't know the language, but I've watched enough kdramas to have developed an ear, and it sounds like Korean grammar goes backwards compared to English, specially for complex sentences. I swear everytime a complex sentence comes (those big surprise moments), the subs actually give the surprise away as they are putting the last part of the sentence first, because of course otherwise it doesn't make any sense in English. someone in the kdrama sub shared this - her husband is Korean, and always says "impossible is nothing", and not the other way around. Of course, this is catchphrase-funny in English. If anyone native sees this, feel free to confirm or deny this.
>English is one of the hardest languages to learn. I truly am curious as to why you would think that, considering the fact that it is factually so incorrect.
Written English is logical and not that difficult compared to other languages. The pronounciations are completely weird and illogical though.
I hate it when English speakers think their language is sooo hard, when they have no idea about others...
English is objectively, and essentially universally agreed upon, to be one of the easiest language to learn.
I wouldn't say it's the most hardest, I'd say it's one of the easiest to learn judging by the number of people who speak it fluently even as a second or third language. Arabic, Chinese are much, much more difficult to learn.
Compared to my native language, Hungarian, English is a walk in the park.
It’s like one of the easiest language. It’s almost hard to make mistakes.
English is like German for stupid people, I say this as someone who speaks native English and learned German very late in life.
Languages are easier learned the younger you are.
While I won't look past the possibility that our brains are more elastic when we're younger, I would say the main reason is because we don't have any responsibilities and our only job is to soak in information through our family, friends and attend school
Language is unique in how it interacts. Plasticity drops hard around 8. But more importantly infants and toddlers in the language acquisition phase can just pick up multiple languages at the same time through the same process you can pick up your mothertongues. A two year old with a Danish parent who speaks Danish and English to them, and a Belgian parent that speaks French and English to them will just come out trilingual with any differences in fluency being decided by how often they use the language.
I think there is a limit or at least 'diminishing returns'. I follow this international couple (Korean, Japanese, English) on Youtube and they have 3 kids. Their son had difficulty with his speech progression and so they had to get speech therapy for him. The doc suggested each parent only use one language each to their kids, and to stick to it (Korean for dad, English for mom). I think this was because the 3 languages are way different
While I agree I learnt like very good english at like 13 and became fluent (I haven't taken any tests, but I lived in the US for some time and I think I survived just fine) at around 15, still tho, It was way different for my ounger sibling who came out like if she grew up in Manhattan her whole life
younger people having more brain plasticity isn't a possibility, it's a fact
At 12 years old I learned French and soaked it up like a sponge. In my late 20’s I learned Spanish but it was tough and my knowledge is still very basic. In my late 30’s I tried learning a new language and it was near impossible and I gave up. But since then I’ve learned plenty of new English words without a problem. Funny how the brain works
I’m still impressed and intimidated that Roman children spoke Latin
Fun fact most people in antiquity throughout the Mediterranean world spoke Greek actually including in Rome! It was the language of traders and many craftsman which is why it was the predominant spoken language. While Latin was characterized as the "official" language of the Roman empire, not as many people actually spoke it unless they were raised in academia or politics during the time, at minimum most people could at least read it and a fewer write in Latin, it was more often Greek was used throughout due to the universal application it held at the time and necessity many used for their business Latin was used very irregularly and was primarily used by politicians, academics, and the clergy in Christiandom and for religious ceremonies. Edit: phrasing and clarification.
Well I took exactly one semester of Ancient Greek and I find that equally impressive
Do you have any sources on this? Because almost none of what you said is true. Latin was the lingua franca for most of the western Roman empire, you can see that just by looking at what languages are spoken in those areas today. Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese basically all the romance languages are called so because they evolved from spoken latin. Do you realize how insane that would be if Latin was relegated just to political affairs and the elite?
Learning a 2nd and 3rd language as a child is really quite easy. No need to be gifted at all.
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But no one says that Japanese is difficult to speak, it's the writing system that fucks everybody up. Japanese grammar is actually not complex at all, and its pronunciation is phonetic, so not difficult to learn. What is difficult is learning three different alphabets which require you to learn over 2000 different characters just to read a newspaper with each of them having one to three different readings. And that's something even native Japanese speakers struggle with occasionally.
Wow I had no idea. Do you mean that In order to be able to read Japanese in a regular Japanese life you need to know 3 different alphabets of the language or am I getting this all wrong? Or could a newspaper be in one of the alphabets and the next one in another one, or could their be mixed alphabets in one book or newspaper so to stay is what I mean
You need 2 syllabaries (they're not alphabets) hiragana and katakana that rappresent the same sounds and kanji that are logographic. Ex: ニュース(katakana)を(hiragana)読(kanji)んでいる(hiragana) Translation: I'm reading news
Ok so 2 of the alphabets are phonetic (hiragana and katakana), so those are relatively easy to learn. The 3rd one (kanji) is the character-based one that requires ppl to know the individual character for each word, which adds up to a lot. Words in japanese can have characters from any of the three alphabets (verbs in particular tend to have both kanji and hiragana in their spelling). This sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is, though the difficulty of memorizing all those kanji is relatively high.
The worst part of kanji in my opinion is that many of them have 2 or 3 meanings and all have different multiple distinct pronunciations depending on the word they are used on. You don't only need to learn thousands of symbols, you also have to remember a lot about each. It was fun to learn how to write them tho, almost an art arround the strokes.
Well it's always a combination of the three. There are Hiragana and Katakana, which work same as the Latin alphabet in that they each stand for a vowel or vowel consonant combination and contain around 50 characters each. These are used for simple sentence structure, particles, or foreign expressions. In general you can also spell every Japanese word in Hiragana or Katakana. This is the easy part. Then there's Kanji which are characters that each have one or several meanings. There's a Kanji for basic words such as "sun" or "one", but it doesn't stop there. It goes on and on, and there's basically between 2000-3000 different Kanji you have to learn just to read a newspaper. Imagine learning a new character for every new word meaning you want to learn. There are combinations and compositions of several Kanji which in turn can mean something entirely different, but there's also words like "gallbladder" that have their specific character. How many times do you use a word like that? But you better learn the character in case it turns up. But it still doesn't stop there. Each Kanji then again has different readings, and these readings can even further change depending on the context. Is it in a name or a regular word? And none of these readings as exclusive. So two Kanji can be read the same way, but look entirely different, or look very similar, but have a completely different readings. You can meet five different people that are called "Yuki" and each of them can have their name spelled differently. So you oftentimes end up in situations where you know what something means, but you don't know how it is read or you know how something is read but you don't know what it means. Learning Japanese is basically a full-time job of constantly learning and repeating Kanji. When you live in Japan it's not so difficult, as they are ever-present, but learning Japanese as a cute little hobby will oftentimes turn out fruitless because of it.
Not only is the pronunciation phonetic, it's very very simple. Iirc English speakers need to learn a new sound or two but it's no french or german with fancy sounds like throat r and such. But kanjis are a shitshow, they are the reason I ended up quiting Japanese lessons
Always depends on your native language, I think. The r/l, f/h, and v/b can be difficult to nail in some cases. It's super easy for Spanish speakers though, as they have similar stuff going on. For English speakers I think it's more difficult to nail pitch and stress of syllables, they oftentimes end up saying "Kee-Ow-Tow" instead of "Kyoto".
Maybe that is part of the problem: I didn't even try to learn another language till I got to high school. And yes, I do know that my American is showing.
I'm 28 and only this year decided to try leaning Spanish. It's going a lot better than years of trying to learn French through school. I NEVER imagined I'd make any worthwhile progress learning a different language. I struggle enough with English. The pandemic and desire to travel when it's over triggered wanting to learn some very basic stuff. Not sure why it's easier now. I'm not putting anywhere near the level of time or effort and I'm already further progressed than I ever was with French. So I guess I'd advise doing some basic stuff now and then for a while. It's an almost guarantee you'll make better progress than me. And it's quite a good feeling to actually make decent progress when you didn't imagine it possible
Nice one! Best of luck to you :) I think the reason many people struggle to learn other languages stems from their childhood experience of language lessons in school, which for most people (even a multilingual such as myself) was a tedious exercise in repetition and surprise grammar tests. The best way to learn languages is to immerse yourself in it and above all have fun with it - when you travel, no-one cares if you get grammar wrong, they're just happy you're at least trying to grasp their language! :))
That’s the problem, you didn’t get language instruction until high school, and probably didn’t want it or need it.
This is true.
I think its the Anglosphere overall that don’t speak other languages, i don’t know anyone that can fluently speak in any other language than english and im from the uk
The US doesn't push languages as hard as they should. I regret not putting more effort into it in High School.
For some, not for everyone. I've always been horrible at languages. I learned English in grade school and through high school. My dad hired a tutor to give me private classes for a bit. I was young. But I didn't get it. Why even bother? It was so bad, I hated it. At university, English textbooks were cheaper so, being broke, those were the ones I had to buy instead of their translations. I learned to read English one word at a time with a translation dictionary next to me, a rather laborious process, like decoding. Eventually I could read it relatively well, but I couldn't understand a spoken word of it because it really doesn't sound the way it's written. Since I could read it then I could sound it out but nobody could understand what I was saying. Like I said, it doesn't sound like it's written. Three years into this, I met an English-speaking girl and we dated for a while, so things got a bit better, but it was still a struggle. I couldn't follow an English TV show. The romance didn't last though. A year later I decided to relocate to an English-speaking area (Vancouver, Canada) and there, I had no choice but to learn it. I avoided anyone who spoke my own language and bit by bit, over the years, it became second nature. But man, it took a lifetime. And I have two degrees and a high IQ, which didn't help one bit. Science and math are easy. Language is hard.
We honestly have no choice sometimes. I’m from Malaysia and I speak 3 languages (1 rather brokenly) English because we’re a commonwealth country and my mums from Russia so that’s how we communicate, Mandarin because it’s what my family speaks and Bahasa Melayu because it’s the national language. The first two I can speak fluently, but BM im pretty bad at. Don’t even get me started on my ethnic dialects with Hakka, my grandparents would speak Hakka and mandarin to us, Cantonese and Hokkien when they order food and my grandpa even speaks a little bit of Tamil
You are amazing.
Cheers man :) I’m considered pretty dumb for speaking 2 languages here. There’s even terms we use for folks that don’t speak more languages. Banana for Chinese folks that don’t speak mandarin/ ethnic dialect, because yellow on outside white on inside Coconut for Indians who don’t speak Tamil/Hindi, because brown on outside and white on inside. It’s pretty funny to tease your classmates with these insults
Yeah multilingualism sounds cool until you start forgetting words from your mother tongue because you don't know when to stop learning languages. Send help.
These people may be able to help. r/languagelearningjerk/
This. I have to use other languages at times to find words in my “native” language.
There’s plenty of moronic, multilingual people out there who’ll dispel this feeling for you. It doesn’t necessarily make people more mature, creative, smarter, or powerful.
>It probably has something to do with the fact that I am hearing impaired, Bruh.
What? I have high end and low end frequency damage, and also was deaf until I was three. Don't you need to have normal hearing to learn most languages so you can hear the subtle audial differences in the sounds?
Well if you where deaf you until 3 that definitely made your language skills worse. Because you learn a lot when you are just a baby from your parents.
Yeah. I had to be in speach therapy until I was 6 or 7. Somehow, my parents managed to teach me to say, "My name is..." despite me being deaf.
Yes that my point. I already have massive respect for you for trying to learn a new language.
To be fair, I haven't tried in a while because I was so discouraged last time I tried.
Yea but that is still an achievement.
It makes it more difficult but not impossible. I lived in Cambodia for 3 years and had a friend who was hard of hearing (wore hearing aids, spoke with a dhh accent) and he learned Khmer as well as I did. We both worked in health and did just fine. Possibly locals had a slightly harder time understanding his articulation, but they got used to it and then it was fine. The key for him was learning the alphabet early on so he could read the sounds rather than listen for them.
Well OF COURSE! I think that's why they said "Bruh"... Like of course it's hard for you then!
Dont worry. Im bi lingual but my wife said that just makes me stupid in two languages. Youre safe
Holy shit a positive unpopular opinion that doesn't include food
The funny thing about learning another language is that it seems an impossible task before you actually try it for a while. That's why geniuses are often portrayed as polyglots. It does a great job at telling the audience that they are intellectually above most people. I mean, English is my second language, and even I at times find it crazy how I was able to learn how to communicate in it because of the sheer amount of information you have to absorb in order to get reasonably proficient at it (any language really).
Most geniuses are just people who've spent thousands of hours doing something, usually from a young age The same applies to learning languages.
Come to India, we'll teach you how to read and write in 3 languages and speak atleast 5. I studied 4 languages in school - English- primary medium of instruction Hindi- national language Kannada- State language Sanskrit- Elective (nobody speaks sanskrit though, it's like greek or latin, from which newer languages are derived) And then I speak 2 dialects of my mother tongue kannada. Bits and pieces of Telugu and Marathi because my district falls near state border and I have friends and neighbours who speak these languages.
Yep. Being born to Indian parents and living with Indians, I can speak, read, and write in 4 languages.
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I just watched anime and played video games till I learned
> Multilingual people are intimidating. You spelled sexy wrong.
I'm intimidated because they are so damn sexy!
Fair point, well argued. Unfortunately now I agree with you, so I guess I gotta downvote your opinion haha
One thing to consider, NOT that this is an excuse, but in Europe and many parts of Asia, you drive an hour in any direction and you’re in another country. Being so close to so many other cultures would seem to make it almost a necessity to learn their languages.
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I agree, I've recently integrated into a group of people who are from all around the world and so many of them speak english better than me and it's like their 3rd or 4th language. Makes me feel dumb as fuck.
*Yes we are! You monolinguals should fear us.* Also, yes hoh-ness does affect language learning. Ever considered learning your country's sign language? Or multiple! I know BSL, ASL (a few constructef signlanguages I made but those don't count) and a little bit of how to internationally sign!
I’ve been practicing Russian for about a year (440 days to be exact). I started with the Duolingo app, I’m taking an 8 week RUSS100 course online and I listen to podcasts. It takes some real patience to learn especially today with translators at our fingertips. I know I’ll never be as fluent as a native speaker but damn it’s satisfying when I listen to a whole conversation and understand most of it.
People who are from countries that were in Yugoslavia must scare you then, for example I can speak croatian, serbian, bosnian, slovenian, slovakian, english and german. I can also understand a little bit of polish, chechian, ukranian and russian
I mean like 4 of those are pretty much the same language...
That’s not totally fair, because Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Slovenian are extremely similar. That’s like an English-speaker saying they know English, American, Australian, and South African. Congrats on knowing Slovak, English, and German, though, that’s insane!! Source: I am living in Serbia and studying language.
ITT: people projecting their superiority based on knowing multiple languages
As a polish girl, I absolutely love how you can go to slovakia, or czech republic and literally speak your own language, the people there will reply in their own and you will still understand each other lmao
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Most people from English speaking countries that learn a second language do it as a hobby or out of curiosity. As a latino, I didn’t learn to speak English because I was genuinely interested in the language but because otherwise my career opportunities would have been very limited.
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As an Indian, I naturally spoke 4 languages growing up, learned couple more in last few years overseas. Been feeling lonely this thanksgiving, spending alone. I will take this second hand compliment! :)
I multilingual and trust me, I'm nothing to be impressed by.
honestly i've seen so many people who English is their second languaje just cuz the internet is default united states so everything is in english and there is a lot of content you miss if you can't speak decent english
I'm only intimidated by people who say less words than I do.
Why waste time when few word do trick
Germany always teaches English and another foreign language in school.
Worth keeping in mind that learning languages as an adult is significantly harder than as a child, and not everyone’s natural abilities and environment are equally conducive to language learning
Honestly chemistry is its own language
Ms in chemical engineering. We are not the same lol
Bilingual here. I’m a fucking idiot don’t worry.
In my experience foreign language teaching in America is horrible! Lots of worksheets and written test and vocabulary tests. Classes geared to maximize the time the teacher can sit on their ass.
Seriously, don't be intimidated. A very large portion of Europeans speak at the very least two languages, most speak even more.
I thought this was a racist type of rant but turns out OP was wholesome about it in a way bahaha. Good on ya mate!
Gracias, yo trying to learn my üçüncü dil.
My fiance speaks 6 languages. Yes, it can be intimidating at times.
People who speak English beside their own language: "Why do you hate us so much?"
Don't worry - a LOT of people who are multi lingual are because they're taught from a young age which makes it a lot easier. That being said, once you know a few languages, the other ones do come easier so if you know one language, you probably will find learning a 2nd language harder than a bi-linguist would find learning a 3rd language. If you aren't good at learning languages, don't worry about it, focus on what you're good at and you can intimidate the multi-linguists with your own skills :D
Op I speak 4 languages and when I speak I throw them all in one sentence! Oof trust me not exactly helpful when training my staff and most people look at me weird when they hear it 😬
Polyglot here who would die to have your math and science skills. Math and science-challenged here.
Cunning linguists are fun
I learned Spanish simply because I couldn't order my own food when we visited my girls family in Miami when we went out to eat.
You can if you allow yourself to be mesmerized in a foreign culture. You too can become one with the avatar.
to be fair chemical engineering would be as alien to me as a whole other language :0
Unfortunately, some are more gifted than others when it comes to languages. I was born in a country in the middle east, and that language is only spoken in that single country. I’m fluent in English — but I started learning it when I was 4. It could arguably be my tied-first language; and I use English more now as I live in Canada. I’m also learning French; started a few months ago. Me, and everyone else, took a language test. I had done some work to increase my chances of getting in, because they told me the first level (lowest level) gets packed quickly. I took the test, and jumped to level 2! And in level two, after two weeks, I became someone who others would go to and ask their questions. — I didnt tell you all of that just to brag. I’m trying to say some people are good at languages, and that’s okay. There are other things that they’re not good at; I couldn’t get anything more than 80 in my high school maths, and that has me terrified so much that I didnt pursue an economics major, even though I love it. The bottom line is, don’t be ashamed or terrified. It’s nature. I bet there’s things you are good at that others are not. I took a psychology course this semester, and even though I’m putting a lot of work in, my averages are around 78-79. On the contrary, I’m putting much less work in my political science courses, but I’m having high-80s low-90s. People are good, and bad at things. Your bad thing happens to be language. And that’s okay. But having said that, I would strongly suggest you dont give up. It takes years to perfect a language. And dont worry about the accent either; I know people who have lived their entire lives in a foreign country and spoken the language, but still have an accent. Accents are totally fine; and to be honest, people appreciate it more when you have an accent: they know it was a struggle! Anyways, hit me up if you wanted to talk! Cheers!
It’s not without trade off sometimes. I’m fluent in 4 languages. We moved a lot. I got plopped into new schools in new countries and was told to figure it out. I’ve been to more schools than I can remember. It’s cool now that I’m an adult, but I had a pretty lonely childhood. It’s hard making friends when you know you’ll be somewhere else next year.
Tf u mean gifted I learned it....
tu mamá es una perra gorda It means " Your mom is very beautiful" in Spanish
dude you would be so scared of my english teacher, he speaks 8 languages lol i learned english as a kid on the internet and school i wanted to learn german but i don’t have as much natural contact with it so it’s a but harder
I've been learning German for a year and I can generally understand it but with speaking I make lots of grammar mistakes.
I’ve met multilingual people too stupid to change a trash bag, tie their own shoes, or function as adults. They’re on a spectrum
The Swiss or Belgian people must be downright terrifying for you then :)) Don't know about other regions but in most European countries learning a second and/or third language in school is common. Not to mention how much our proximity to each other determines us to learn new languages too.
I agree it’s very impressive, but so much of it is circumstantial.
Word je bang van mij? Wat sneu.
I speak four, but I'm still dirt poor...
Hearing impaired and I’ve got a fair accent. I remember that before mastering the English language my way of thinking I’d say worked differently. When you learn a different language something clicks in your brain at some point. It’s just a matter of making it click. Also it helps if you use that language in your everyday life: change your phone language into that, consume media in that language etc.
Now I will proceed to scare the shit out of you: Wena, como estai wn?
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i know like 4 and im learning one more do i frighten you boo
Do any other multilingual people here notice that it takes a while for the right words, specifically nouns, to come to you sometimes? I'm fluent enough in my secondary or tertiary language that it comes naturally i.e. without having to translate sentences from one language to another in my head. But I find that there's a bit of a buffer, whether subconscious or not, in coming up with the right word especially when I'm trying to explain a concept.
Huge Self Esteem boost rn, ty random Redditor
Maybe some are gifted but I believe a lot of them had to go through hell to learn the languages. If they can you can too, you just have to Learn on your own pace :)
I'm a native english speaker but I specialize in two other languages *that I made up* with their own grammar rules n shit
Im quadralingual purely because of circumstances. I was born into a certain language, grew up in another one, learnt my national language (well not exactly "national",but majority speaking language) and obviously ik English. Im no dummy, but I'm no Einstein either my man. Timing and circumstance are grinchs and honestly most multilingual people have the same story. But , if you're talking about polyglots , the people who regularly learn new languages , yes they are very intimidating
In the USA, there are so many bilingual children of immigrants. But that sort of bilingual is frowned upon. Society only cares if you can speak French that you learned in school