My students often gamely struggle through memorizing vocabulary and basic grammar, but give up when they realize that other languages aren’t just like English with different words and a few quirks. In other words, when they discover that they really do need to learn the grammar, they bail.
Curiously I’ve personally found that the Romance languages are close enough in general spelling and structure that I can read both French, Italian, and Spanish with little issue despite only being anywhere close to fluent in spoken French, but any attempt at learning spoken Italian or Spanish devolves into a linguistic dumpster fire with little delay.
If you’re finding that fluent, native speakers of a language are making mistakes in almost every sentence (something that, when you think about it, doesn’t really make much sense, basically by definition), then maybe the standards for what counts as “correct” need some slackening and widening. Just a thought,
Years ago, I tried to learn Vietnamese because my partner is Vietnamese. Aside from the fact that absolutely nothing is pronounced as written, the infernal vagueness of the language made me crazy. Something as simple as the word “blue,” for example, is something to the effect of “the color green, but like, you know, more the color of the sky.” argh.
I have long thought that language instruction, at least in the United States (as I can’t state it elsewhere) is completely backwards. The idea that we try to teach people the formal written language first, and then halfheartedly back it up with verbal communication, is an utter disaster. The problem is that written language is always and everywhere incorrect to some degree. It does not describe how people think or communicate, and often poorly explains how they pronounce words, much less form sentences.
Many people claim that it’s “hard” to learn languages after childhood. In my experience, it’s the other way 'round. We’re making it hard to learn languages after childhood because we’re going about it a manner designed to confuse and repulse people. Children and adults alike learn communication by communicating. (Just one of my many brilliant insights, and yes that’s meant with all the self-deprecating sarcasm I can muster.) If you had to teach kids how to write first, you’d be lucky if anybody ever mastered speech. And even for adults, there are language-immersion programs designed to get you the basics of a language in a very short time, simply by structuring the environment so you can learn useful, relevant speech.
Yes, some text guides to explaining how certain things work are helpful. But they aren’t required.
I studied Swahili as my “non-traditional” language in grad school. Its grammar is a thing of beauty, the apotheosis of agglutination. Elegant beyond imagination.
Unfortunately, its nouns have fourteen genders.
But wouldn’t that have come up in, like, the second week of the first semester? When were you getting all those A’s?
Anyway . . . before visiting Amsterdam, I tried to give myself a crash course in the Dutch language. Getting absolutely nowhere, I finally gave up when I discovered that everyone there speaks English (I did learn a little, though, just to be polite). I’m convinced that Dutch is the same as German, spoken with a mouth full of herring.
Sort of. The problem is that in every language in the universe, there is diglossia: the formal language is different from the conversational. People need to be able to read because that is the quickest way to build vocabulary and get a feel for the words and grammar in context, but what they are reading has different grammar from what they are hearing. Sometimes it’s pretty close, sometimes the gap is huge: depends on the language. Your notion of “correct” and “incorrect” suggest that you expect them to match, which is naïve.
You can learn a language completely orally, without recourse to writing, and it’s very effective for some skills. The problem is, you cannot then take it further except through conversations and audio/video media, which isn’t always practical.
Also, depending on the language, it may backfire. There was a whole generation of American kids who were taught to just write and not worry about spelling; the theory was that they could learn it later, and we didn’t want them traumatized by rules. Guess what? It was much harder to learn the rules later. For Italian, you could probably learn to write later, as the sound-symbol correspondence is pretty good. Spanish will only give you a few problems. French and Russian will be hopeless.
The thing is, no language is any harder than any other. It all depends on how closely related the target language is to your native tongue.
I’m English, so I found the pronunciation of German and Japanese easy. I also learnt French in school so various parts of that are ingrained in my brain. I also found Mandarin easy to get to grips with - especially the tonal system, but then again, I’m a musician.
Someone Polish would pick up Czech quicker than Spanish, but a Spanish person would find Italian considerably easier to fathom than Polish or Czech.
But regardless of your native tongue; if you immersed yourself in a language 24/7, you’d understand it pretty well in a few months, and be speaking fluently enough to get by in most every day situations in 1 year.
And many popular language learning programs attempt to fix this by emphasizing conversational skills. But people claim that it’s harder to learn languages after childhood because it is harder to learn languages after childhood, as that’s when we are cognitively “ready” to learn languages, and no method of pedagogy can fix that.
If you want “nuts” study Irish Gaelic - they have no word for either “yes” or “no”, the number system is as crazy as the French (if not worse), verbs come before subjects, and instead of changing the hind end of words they change the front. And that’s just to start.
I still went at it, and would have continued had I not moved away. Not sure anything about a language would make me tear my hair out if I was interested in said language.
@thelurkinghorror - Truthfully, as a native Danish speaker, Danish has an inaccurate-if-understandable rap when it comes to that. Pronunciation (albeit for some reason neither really vocabulary nor grammar barring a few notable exceptions) varies greatly between regional dialects, and coincidentally the most tourist-frequented areas of Denmark are the ones with the dialects most likely to slur and elongate vowels. There are plenty of widely-spoken Danish dialects with quite clear and defined speech.
The real reason Danish is a pain in the ass to learn is because our orthography is, mildly put, fucking weird and out of touch with actual pronunciation. We have a ton of g’s and d’s in words which are almost never voiced and serve very little purpose other than to obstruct and frustrate new learners of the language.
I made a flowchart for the Welsh “yes” or “no,” which was a thing of beauty. Unlike Irish, Welsh has a couple of words for “yes” / “no,” but only if the question is asked in a certain tense or sentence construction: otherwise, like Irish, they just repeat the asking verb.
Will you eat? I will / I won’t.
Did you eat? Yes. / No.
Have you eaten? I am. / I’m not.
Are you eating? I am. / I’m not.
Is it food? Yes. / No. (but different words from the yes / no above)
Is it red? It is. / It is not.
I enjoy the complexity, but it drives learners mad.
Doesn’t the experience of most immigrants suggest this is not true? Their young children rapidly acquire the local language while the older people do not.
If there is any research that supports this assertion, I’d like to see it. How do you know this?
Right. It’s when we are physiologically most ready to learn languages. The language learning abilities of humans change as they grow up because the brain itself is physiologically changing.
What? How is Russian difficult to write? AFAIK, there are like 3 or 2 words that are not spelled phonetically («его» и «сегодня», maybe one other). Yeah, the pronunciation is a tad muddy, but no by that much.
My theory on that is that the older ones tend to live in an insular environment that remains very much like the culture from their old home, and that the kids have to go to school and interact socially with others outside of their culture a lot more often. Also, kids learn a lot more quickly than adults do, on average.
Russian has a lot of pronunciation weirdness. O sounds like A in unstressed syllables; consonants are voiced and devoiced all the time depending on what surrounds them, and consonant clusters are simplified. In the sentences “Здравствуйте. Сегодня облачно, завтра будет солнце,” look at all the Bs: silent, normal (v), F. The two Os in облачно. Silent л in “sun.” Not to mention the whole e / ë, which still trips me up.
It’s not that hard to learn the rules, but if you learn to speak before you learn to write, you would be constantly tripping over them.
Edit: link for the curious.
Two things:
Prior to puberty it really is easier to learn languages than after, which gives kids an advantage. It’s also why they tend to learn “accentless” languages.
Second, a lot of adult immigrants don’t actually immerse themselves “24/7” - they associate with other adults from their language/culture at least some of the time so they aren’t so strongly forced to acquire the new language.
Hence, most adult immigrants learn the new language imperfectly and retain a heavy accent. But in a year or so most of them learn it well enough to communicate with other people, even if their grammar and pronunciation isn’t perfect. Adults who work outside the home will also tend to better acquire a new language when compared to those that stay at home, because the ones working outside the home have more need and incentive to learn the new language.