Took French in high school. Didn’t do a particularly good job learning it, but it was enough to get acquainted.
Oddly, that one seemingly worthless class has a huge role in the trajectory of my life. I’m now more or less fluent, and I use it regularly.
This is bizarre! Was it because girls are generally better at learning languages (I think I’ve read about real evidence of that – not positive), and so were less likely to need help from formal instruction? I’m guessing that’s not the reason…but ???
constanze: Thank you for your eloquent reply to edward. You were gentle enough to not target him/her directly, but that all-too-typical American attitude (not all Americans, obviously) needed to be addressed.
Nava, the “ice cream” query was in reference to a jokey children’s chant: You scream, I scream, we all scream for ice cream! 
And sometimes the best way to baffle a jokester is to give a straight answer.
Today there’s an article in El País about a novel way of teaching languages being used in Catalonia, experimentally. After the quote, halfway: “languages cannot be taught in isolation and the least important thing is grammar”… it goes on to explain that teachers of different languages are coordinating lessons to build upon each other; it’s not that they’re dropping the grammar teaching altogether, but that they’re examining it as a structure and looking for commonality, not “just learn it”. IOW, they’re using that approach using comparative linguistics which so many of my teachers forbade and Micaela not only allowed but based her teaching on. From my class’ own experience, using it massively has the exact same problem as the rote methods, in that it works for that part of the students whose own learning style fits it. That is: I’m part of the group that loves it, but many of my classmates were much happier and have become perfectly capable of attending and giving conferences in English, with the rote method.
I suspected you knew this…
True. And people who think that way totally miss out on learning about other societies, which is what happens when you learn a foreign language.
Originally Posted by Atamasama View Post
I studied 3 years of Japanese in high school …
One thing that’s interesting is that I’ve retained most of the grammar and syntax rules I learned but it’s the vocabulary that keeps fading.
Someone else already commented on this. In Japanese none of the words are the same as English (except ones borrowed from English). In French a lot of the words are the same or related.
Having studying French in school long ago and now reading fairly often in French (though much less conversationally oriented) and taught myself to read Japanese enough for my purposes (though hardly speak it at all), it’s certainly my experience. Also Atamasama didn’t mention but eventually in studying Japanese you have to learn 100’s of Chinese characters (AFAIK they don’t emphasize this much in first couple years of Japanese classes, Japanese little kids also mainly learn to write in hiragana first). There’s no reference at all to your knowledge of English in remembering those. Fortunately learning those characters opens up Chinese and helps with Korean too (give or take form differences in the character sets used now) so lots of work but multiple pay off. In fact I know the characters’ sounds in Korean mainly, I can make out Japanese texts on my accustomed topics but don’t know how to pronounce most of the words.
But it’s not just a relative difference either: learning French as English speaker is way easier than learning Japanese as English speaker.
Although in that pie Chart, they Count French and Latin seperately, though both are more closely related to each other than to Germanic.
It’s not just vocabulary that’s shared, but the majority of grammar is similar. All Germanic and Romanic languages have verb Flexion and noun declension; English-Speakers think that learning genders of nouns is difficult, but that’s because English dropped it*, along with the formal/ informal (Vouz/ tu) adress form.
But if we look at Turkish, which doesn’t Flex, but agglutinates (adds on endings).
Or at Finnish, which doesn’t have 4/5/6 noun cases, but up to … a bunch, in order to tell you that an object is moving into a house, or the book is lying on the table- what we use Adverbs/ Adjectives for, Finnish uses noun cases for.
Or in Greek, where verbs can be passive = things Happening to the object; active = doing things to the object, or medial = the object is through which things are done.
I wonder if People learning languages far removed e.g. Japanese remember grammatical structures better because they are so completly different that they are interesting and thus more memorable than things with small differences.
Isn’t it similar for phonemes: learning a completly new phoneme in another language can be done, but learning to distinguish two phonemes which Sound the same in your own language ** is very difficult?
** That’s supposedly where the L/R confusion for Asians come from, that Japanese (don’t know about the Chinese dialects) has only one Sound for both, so learning English, it’s difficult to hear and remember the difference.
Well, first, like I mentioned, today the Internet connects you with native Speakers everywhere. Driving/ traveling is no longer necessary. (And even outside big cities, foreigners are moving into neighbourhoods).
Secondly, there’s quite a difference between saying “Learning languages (esp. the way it was/ is done in Schools) is hard!” - which I immediately agree with, I had lots of bad grades! - and saying “We don’t Need foreign languages, so lets not waste time”.
Even if you had only two years of French in High School and weren’t good at it, you have the possibility to go back to duolingo/ Tandem/ reading French online 10 years later, to broaden your knowledge building on a foundation (which all of high School knowledge really is: “learning how to learn”)
If you never had any contact with foreign languages below Age 20, not only will it be much harder later, without any foundation to build on, the psychological hurdle to overcome in your own mind is higher.
In General (small sizes like Nava’s example not with Standing) studies Show that Girls tend to naturally be better at languages, while Boys are naturally a bit better at 3-D thinking (rotating cubes) and math.
How much of that is socialization - that is, Girls are taught to sit quietly, so they read more; Boys are taught to run around and be wild, so they read less, which builds less vocabulary; Girls are taught to get along, so mediating is important, which requires language competence; Boys are taught to be the Alpha man who is stronger than the rest, so words are less important - and how much is innate is strongly debated.
And even if it were all innate, it’s not 90% of Girls are this way, it’s more “when we test a few scores of 5th and 6th grades across the Country for PISA, Girls are one School year ahead in verbal, Boys are one School year ahead in math, on average”.
Also, Scandinavian societies, including Finns, have Girls almost equal with Boys in Math, whereas in Turkey Girls are only half as good in math as Boys, so the conclusion that a Society strong in gender equality Plays an important part seems a valid hypothesis.
Also also, tests Show that even if a class of Boys and Girls start with noticeable differences, the Brains are not hardwired to be inflexible/ impossible. If extra Training for the weaker parts is given - Girls doing extra math, and getting more encouragement - they can catch up the difference in one or two years.
Thank you. I try to not come across too accusatory, but do not always succeed.
Oh, I think that is a General Problem. I notice 4 Areas of language competency:
listening (difficult in English with so many different dialects)
speaking
reading
writing
I don’t have specific neurological studies at Hand, but based on my own personal anecdotal observations, all seem to be located in different parts of the brain ('s language Center), because it’s possible to read without translating, to write (except for spelling Problems) on a mid-high Level, and yet when the last few years I went to GB, I not only had a hard time listening to British accents *, I found myself translating a lot in my head (which is a hindrance and lower Level of competency than “being = staying” in the language.)
Sure, if you want to practice your foreign language, you can talk to native speakers via the Internet or take classes at Berlitz or wherever. But you have to be motivated enough to seek those out and that’s different from needing your French or Spanish skills because you regularly travel to those countries.
It means direct links to French specifically. And some of the French words certainly have a Latin origin, but might not sound anything like the word it came from, whereas the English word sounds close to the French.
In some limited parts of the US and UK, archaic things like the second person plural/singular are still around, or reintroduced.
Japanese has a sound that is neither an R or an L, and sounds like a mixture of the two with some “D” in there as well. In romanization systems, it is mapped to “R” but there is no reason why it can’t be L.
There is a learning component, but it is strongly innate - e.g. animals have gender differences in many things, with the caveat that animal language is harder to test.
The language female advantage vs. spatial male advantage is strongly supported as a neural difference. Not all things are innate - you are correct that mathematics is largely because it is emphasized more for boys.
Correct, and not anecdotal.
Scottish people are still British, at least until the next election if Brexit fallout continues(?)
Yeah I only learned a relative handful of kanji (what Chinese characters are called in Japanese), probably the most common ones. Often the Japanese writing you come into contact with includes furigana, which are small hiragana transliterations over kanji symbols in writing. Because let’s face it, your average native Japanese person isn’t going to know every kanji symbol even if well-educated; there are just too many.
But yeah Japanese is difficult. If I had to do it again I’d probably take up Spanish because I’m sure I’d be more fluent after the same amount of study and I’d have more use for it.
I know no Korean at all but at least I can glance at something and recognize that it’s Korean, probably because it’s similar enough to kanji that my brain doesn’t just glaze over and declare it to be generic foreign gibberish.
Sorry. I meant the wide difference between scots accent and the different English (“standard british”) accents.
It looks like the latest recommendation for adult fluency (since 2010) is 2,136 kanji should be readable. There are thousands of others which are normally only for people’s names, and most Japanese would not know these.
Korean Hangul is the one with circles/ovals, which don’t occur in Japanese or Chinese. Chinese-type characters (Hanja) is still around in SK (Best Korea stopped its use), but aren’t nearly as common. Hangul is a fascinatingly elegant writing system.
ETA: one difficulty of Japanese is that each kanji generally has at least two pronunciations, usually depending on if it represents a concept in isolation or is part of another word. Sort of like how in English, “water,” “aqua,” and “hydro” represent the same concept, but two of those are from Latin and Greek and only part of other words usually (except in Canada!)
Where did I say anything about the sexes of the people in my sample? If you’re assuming that the inordinate amount of engineers also indicates a lot of males, I’ll make you write 100 times “girls can use a calculator”!
I didn’t mean to imply that the people in your sample were of a certain gender*, I meant that your example illustrates that small sizes can skew strongly away from the norm - the norm in that case that learning languages is easier with vocabulary first and then speaking, instead of learning grammar.
A traditional standard for Chinese characters in ROK education was 800 in middle school, 800 in high school, 800 in college but all three levels have been elective courses in recent decades. Recently the education ministry wanted to re-introduce it as mandatory even in primary school, to controversy though.
And while indeed the Korean alphabet is a neat invention, because it didn’t include tones or variable syllable length (how Japanese often disambiguate Chinese-derived pronunciations), there are loads of homophones. Obviously it still works overall for native speakers/readers but IME makes it worthwhile for serious English speaking students of the language to learn Chinese characters to keep the homophones straight, as a mnemonic to remember all those words (~2/3’s of the language, and Korean has many more commonly used words than English does), by realizing why each means what it does. And again it opens the door to reading Japanese and Chinese too (again give or take learning the different character forms now used in those languages).
As to NK, SK hangul purists have a habit of presenting the NK’s supposedly greater aversion to Chinese characters as at least something they do right. But actually Chinese character education is still mandatory in NK unlike SK. It’s true characters are seldom used in NK signs or official writing (except if ‘friendship’ stuff with China in a few cases).
Also besides modern language use, studying Korean history (even primary documents of say the Korean War, S or captured NK) requires this knowledge. The alphabet was invented in the 15th century but plenty of stuff after that in Korea was written in the Literary Chinese language, not even in Korean at all.
This is absolutely true IME. I learned Russian for two years at high school, and massively sucked at it. I used to say for a long time afterward that the only things I’d retained were the Cyrillic alphabet, hello, goodbye and counting to ten.
Last year I had some work to do where knowing the Cyrillic alphabet was actually very helpful (it involved verifying translations where the translated output was hopelessly badly formatted, and I had to organise and edit it based on the Cyrillic original). After that, I made a concerted effort to regain my Russian, with the goal of being able to read Russian language newspapers as a first step, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how fairly straightforward it has been to get to my goal - more or less there after three months or so of concentrated effort. My school lessons were very much Grammar! Grammar! Grammar! but I’m finding the vocab-first technique suits me a lot better.
IME the worst thing I got out of school language lessons was the impression that there was such a thing as “knowing the language” as a target that you could achieve (after four years high school, and possibly multiple years university study) rather than as a process which starts as soon as you learn your first words, and is already useful even in a limited state.
Not so much like a half-built car (which will do you no good until you finish it) and more like a half-planted vegie garden (which can already start to feed you)