If so, how did you become fluent? I ask because I have spent almost half my life in Germany (not all at once) and I am no where near fluent. We can’t rule out the possibility that it is because I am really dumb, but I’m thinking that if small German children can learn German I should be able to, too.
I did take German in jr. High, but the German teacher was Romanian and he scared me to death with is Dracula obsession, so I gave it up. This fall I am going to retake German 1, since I have all but forgotten all of the rules of grammar. My vocab is still good, and I estimate that I can read German at about an elementary school level. It is painfully tedious for me to try and speak or write anything but the most basic things.
So…how did you become bilingual (or in the case of Coldfire, quadralingual)? I could really use some help. Thanks!
I wouldn’t say I’m bilingual, but I do speak French. I’ve taken classes in it all through school, but am still not completely fluent. I could carry on a conversation, I guess. People that can speak many languages (I know several that speak 6 or 7 or more) just baffle me. Oh, well. At least I’m fluent in the language of love. Oh wait, no I’m not. Rob goes off, sad and dejected
Yep, that’s where I am, too. I speak enough German to get by, but I could never say post to a foreign language message board and not get mocked by the natives. And it’s so easy to just speak English here! I speak it to store clerks and such, but if I’m trying to do something complicated like compare cell phone plans, it is just so much more efficient for me to do it in English.
I’m sticking LittleTot into German kindergarten this year (if I can get him off the waiting list), so hopefully he won’t have these same problems. I could just kick my parents for not doing the same thing for me when I was young and had more than two brain cells to rub together.
First language was Hebrew, but I grew up in Brooklyn where I quickly learned the proper way to speak English (insert applause from audience), Then learned Spanish in school, and am currently teaching myself Italian.
Seriously now: besides Dutch, I speak English, German and French, in order of how good I speak them. I do, however, NOT consider myself bilingual or fluent in any of these languages. My English is good, but it will never be perfect. Well, maybe it will after I have lived there for a while (I’m moving to London next year), but currently, it is not perfect by far. My German is enough to handle most personal and business situations, but I do make a lot of grammar mistakes because I don’t practice it nearly enough. French is even worse: I used to be quite good at it when I was in school, but last weekends visit to Paris proved again that I am very rusty, particularly when it comes to deciphering what those Parisians (who are becoming more and more annoying by the year, BTW) are telling me.
My English is good because I speak it all day: it is the main language in my workplace. Also, my girlfriend lives in England, so I spend a lot of weekends in London as well. Practice is the only way to learn a language: tater, you need to get off that military base and get your Arsch to die Altstadt and have a few Erdinger Weizen with the locals
I was in french immersion throughout school (kindergarten through grade 12), so I got an official certificate that says that I’m bilingual (spiffy, no?). I wouln’t, however, claim to be fluent in french. I speak it fairly well (I can understand Jean Charest perfectly when I hear him speak french on TV), and have no trouble reading it. Writing in french, however, is very difficult for me (“What the hell kind of stupid language makes all nouns either masculine or feminine with no reliable way to tell without looking the word up in a dictionary?!”). I think french is a funny language; the french term for e-mail is seven syllables long (courier électronique, so I hear). Heh…
Basically, practice, practice, practice. I’m going to be a hypocrite (sorta) and say that you shouldn’t be afraid to speak in a language, just do it. Most native speakers are more than happy when you speak in their language (or so I am told by my teachers).
I do have that little fear of actually speaking Spanish, so I don’t use it around town. I do get in a little practice in chat ( SeaDiver speaks to me. I also kept up a conversation with a German guy who spoke Spanish :)). I can understand quite a bit of written spanish, and I’m decent at listening, if the speaker isn’t going too fast, or doesn’t have an odd regional accent. Interestingly, from learning Spanish, I can decipher a fair amount of written Italian.
My problem is, i get the grammar (Spanish is pretty logical for the most part in it’s grammar, I think), but i keep forgetting vocab, and it trips me up because i’m always second guessing myself (i’m usually correct, but I get a seed of doubt and rush to look up words in the dictionary).
I did sign up for a site called Parlo (www.parlo.com), where you can read their lessons, and join in a chat, but I haven’t had time to really explore it.
The English in your posts is at least as fluent as most Americans (never been to England). Unless yoru spoken English is much more halting and disjoint, I'd call you fluent.
I am learning foreign languages without any effort.
I’m huge into Andrew Lloyd Webber shows, and have
one of the biggest CD collections on the planet.
I specialize in foreign language versions.
I am learning to read, hear and comprehend the
languages (mostly German, Swedish and Dutch)
simply from the CDS. Also some French and Spanish.
It’s really amazing, cause my brain is doing it
all by itself without me even trying.
Doob, I have the exact opposite problem; I am great at vocabulary but the grammar has me all confused. Then again, English grammar has me all confused as well.
Coldy, first of all enough with the false modesty. You do have a point about actually going out and speaking the language. I think I did a lot better when I was in high school and went out more. Nowadays, I have to drag der Jugend along and it makes things more difficult. The good news is if he gets a place in the German Kindergarten, I will be forced to speak a lot more German, since even here very few 5 year olds speak English.
And I am very shy about trying to say anything more complicated than what you’d say for shopping or directions. And it’s so easy to fall back on English…yes, I am lazy.
Coldie dear, if your German and French are anywhere near as good as your English, you are most certainly fluent in all of them!
To the OP: tatertot, some people just have an easier time at learning other languages. I pick them up at the drop of a hat (7 besides English, to varying degrees), but I practically have to check a math textbook to do long division. I guess it’s just a matter of where you have more brain cells or something.
I do believe in most cases the best way to learn a foreign language is to live for at least 6 months in a country where it is spoken. Maybe you didn’t live there long enough at one time to have German “stuck in your brain,” as I like to say. I studied French all my life and had the highest average in the major of any student ever at my university, but I was shocked at how “bad” I was when I went to live in Paris. It took a couple of months to stop having to ask people to slow down - but once I passed that point, just being around the language 24/7 skyrocketed my ability.
Obviously, moving overseas is not practical for most people. So, do as much as you can here - practice a lot - all the time. Read a lot. Speak it as much as you can (try and find someone to practice with) - and don’t be afraid of sounding stupid! Just do it. Read out loud - very helpful for getting your mouth used to the different sounds. Watch and listen to German TV shows, films, and radio programs. It doesn’t matter if you can’t understand anything yet - your brain will absorb the sounds. Read not just your textbooks but also German magazines and books. You’ll never learn how people really speak day-to-day if you only get the language out of a textbook. Try and find children’s books (stories, not textbooks) in German - they’re great for teaching basic vocab and argot.
Max, I would say about 95% of French words are easily identifiable as either masculine or feminine - based on spelling and word endings. There are grammatical rules that explain which endings signify which gender in any grammar book - maybe, being in an immersion program - you learned more how to speak but never really covered the rules behind the language? Just a guess.
P.S. This is weird - when I preview I can see that the font changes. What’s up with that???
tatertot, I didn’t realize you were living in Germany (must check profiles more often!). That’s great - now you just have to practice. If you are on a base (where everyone probably speaks English most of the time), try and get out as much as possible. (I know people who lived on military bases for years and never learned a word of the country’s language because they simply never went out the gates. What a waste.)
And don’t be afraid to speak! Who cares if you make mistakes? Anyone you speak to will be much more charmed by your efforts than horrified by your errors.
Try and make some German friends, if you haven’t already done so, or get into a conversation exchange program with someone who wants to learn English. Take little “field trips” to the grocery store and the Post Office to practice talking. Basically, just get out into the culture as much as possible. It is so tempting to fall back on English - just do as much as you can to place yourself in situations where you can’t do this - where your only option is to speak German.
Miss Bunny, Tatertot has lived in Germany for about half her life and is currently there now.
I used to be fairly fluent in French but really only in the reading/writing department. My aural and oral skills were not up to par. I used to only talk on French chat lines to improve my grammar and vocabulary. At the time I would have to look up one or two words out of every several hundred. Now I think that I could read and write at a mid-elementary level. When I did it regularly I thought it was closer to an adult’s writing but not quite as eloquent.
I can also read and write in Welsh. My reading is better than my writing currently. I don’t think I am ever going to get all the mutations down. I haven’t been practicing my writing lately so I am sure that it has gone downhill.
As said earlier, the easiest way is to actually practice. 10 minutes a day is also significantly better than 2 hours all at once. A cousin of mine learned how to speak Spanish (3 dialects) in about 3 months (he is what I would call fluent since he now lives in Mexico and speaks primarily Spanish). He learned to speak by first learning the question “que es?” (I am not sure of the spelling.) Anyway, he would point and ask “que es” and would make sure to do ten words a day and a few short months later he could speak it to anyone. Since you live in Germany you should be able to do a similar thing. If you do it everyday with new objects then you will eventually get all of your vocabulary up there and the grammar will follow once you are willing to speak it more often.
Thanks, missbunny, you’re advice was very helpful, esp. the part about getting children’s books. It will help both me & my son learn German.
To be clear, I do speak some German, just not enough that I’d be comfortable having an in depth conversation with someone. Going shopping, the post office, train station, ect. are no problem for me. In fact, all my American friends drag me along with them to help. But, I would like for it to be more “natural” for me to speak German, if that makes sense. I do get very anxious about using the proper verb forms and genders.
Maybe I should move to a rural village where no one speaks English (is there such a thing anymore?). That way I’d be forced to practice. The good news is I just flipped through the German 1 textbook and I can read it, no problem. In fact, I can read to the end and I think that they use the same book up to III or IV. Maybe I need hypnosis to get over this mental block?
I learned Korean for survival purposes when I moved to Seoul in 1993. Later, as I became more interested in Korean culture and made Korean friends, my command of the language
increased. Today, living in Northern Virginia, I find ample opportunities to speak Korean and not lose what I learned. I also watch the historical dramas on the Korean cable channels to work on listeninng comprehension.
I live with my mother whose first language is Icelandic, so I understand a great deal of it, but never really picked it up because of the grammar part of it [really hard grammar compared to teh foreign languages I take in school now].
I’ve taken French for two years, and am going to start an honors level 3 class in the fall when I return to school, and am in a level 2 German class also. I can speak little bits of conversational German, but not much, and in my first two years of French, we worked more on writing and grammar, so my ability to speak and think on my feet in French isn’t all that great. I am nowhere near fluent in any language that isn’t my native tongue. At least I tend to pick up the understanding of languages pretty quickly. I’m starting to understand Spanish now that a coworker accidentally talks to me in Spanish every time she sees me because she forgets I don’t speak it [apparently she thinks I look Spanish].
