On another thread a person talked about all the languages she knew.
How do you do that? I mean here in the US, at least where I live, you take foreign languages in school but even 3 years of HS spanish wont make one bilingual enough to have a long conversation with someone from Mexico (or would it?). Doesnt really learning a language well require immersion? I think I’ve learned best only when I’m exposed to a language.
So tell me, how do you all do it?
In bed. 
I learned French in school. We had mandatory French classes up until grade 4, when you were given the option of doing most of your classes in French (“French immersion,”) which is what I did. I took French immersion in high school too.
However, after all those years of learning French, I’m frustrated that although I speak it well, I still can’t speak it perfectly. Although my last job was entirely in French and I managed just fine.
Immersion is the only thing that works for me.
I took basic and intermediate classes in Spanish in high school and college, and lessons and even went to a private tutor when I lived in Washington DC. I was reasonably conversational, but I didn’t become really fluent until I moved to Panama and used the language every day. (I’m still not as good as I would like to be, though, because I didn’t move here until I was in my 40s. I think the younger you are the easier it is to learn a language.)
I took three years of French in high school as well. I can read it, and communicate at a basic level, but would not be easily conversational. (I’ve only really used it when working in Francophone Africa.) I studied Portuguese before taking a trip to Brazil, but despite the similarities to Spanish I found that doing much beyond ordering in a restaurant or checking into a hotel was difficult. I took a year of German in college that has virtually disappeared; I can’t even read it any more.
Well here in the Dominican Republic it is popular for a man to pick up a street girl and pay her the equivalent of $22.00 and she will speak Spanish to one all night long while performing other duties.
Immersion is the only way to learn to speak like a native, but it really helps to have a foundation in verb declension and vocabulary or you end up speaking like a 3-year old. YMMV.
I married a Brazilian–23 years of exposure Portuguese has had a positive effect
Joking aside, the combination of dating a woman who spoke Portuguese and having a job where I could sit down and study the language during working hours made all of the difference.
I was a projectionist at the time, so while all of my films were running I had plenty of time to sit down and study.
I learned all the languages I know using different methods, some not my choice.
**German **- I learned the German language organically by spending my toddler and early school years in Nuremburg, Germany where my dad worked for a number of years. I went to a school with the general German population so I learned German at the same time I was learning English. By the time we left Germany, I was 7 years old and as fluent in the German language as any other German kid my age. My sister, who is one year younger than I, spoke German pretty exclusively to each other for, I’d estimate, another 18 months or so after we left Germany, but slowly and increasingly began using English to express ourselves as we interacted with English-speaking kids and having no other German speakers to interact with. I haven’t spoken German much at all since I was a child and, on a proficiency scale of from 1 to 10, would say that my proficiency in the German language is probably a 3 at this point. I can understand and be understood, but it is a chore and grammar doesn’t come trippingly off my tongue anymore.
**Spanish **- My dad’s parents were from Argentina and he was born there so he spoke Spanish natively. They moved to the US when my dad was a teen. He rarely spoke Spanish around us kids when we were in Germany as he was thought (wrongly, I’d say) that we would have a problem keeping three languages straight. As we got into our teen years, he relaxed a little and began speaking with us increasingly in Spanish, which was actually easier for him anyway. About 15 years later, I met my wife who is also a native Spanish speaker born and raised in Panama. We communicate almost exclusively in Spanish when we are alone, because of which my proficiency in the language has improved significantly. On a proficiency scale of from 1 to 10, I would say that I am an 8 in Spanish at this point, and consider myself fluent in the language.
**French **- I didn’t start learning French until my Junior year in high school, but was very motivated to learn the language, had great teachers who provided a lot of encouragement, and took two class trips as a result of placing in a regional contest, one to Paris and one to Lyon. Although I have an affinity for learning languages, I find that I learn better and faster in a structured, tutored environment, rather than on my own. After finishing high school, I attempted to keep up with my French language studies on my own, but my progress began to slow almost immediately. I had a few friends who spoke French at around the same level as I so we were able to continue our study through speaking with each other, but even that waned after a few years as my friends began building lives and families of their own. Every so often I travel back to France for work and am able to reacclimate myself with the language pretty easily and after just two or three days am almost as conversational as I was at peak proficiency. However, picking it up again becomes a little more difficult each time, especially because I don’t have regular interaction with French speakers when not in France. On a proficiency scale of from 1 to 10, I’d have to say that I am at 3.5 to 4, and possibly a 6 after a few days in France. My French is definitely better than my German at this point, and is a much easier pick-up for me, but I don’t believe that is saying too much.
**Hebrew **- I am not proud about this, but I learned Hebrew because of a girl I met in Israel named Smadar when I was in my early 20s. She was Yemeni and a bronze goddess with long, curly jet-black hair who I fell head-over-heels for at first site. Her English was passable, but not great. Hebrew was her first language and I spent every waking moment I possibly could with her. I decided to try to impress her in any way I could and so worked really hard to learn Hebrew. She took an interest in my language study and began working with me to increase my proficiency as well as teaching me how to write and read the “aleph-bet.” This was my first experience with total immersion. During much of our time together, we communicated solely in Hebrew. We even purchased a few Hebrew language text books as teaching aids. Even while apart, I consumed entertainment exclusively in Hebrew. After almost a year together, we parted ways. Afterward, my interest in the Hebrew language dropped to almost nothing. I packed up my books and haven’t looked at them since. In the Hebrew language, on a proficiency scale of from 1 to 10, I’d say I am at a 1.5 to 2 at best at this point. I can still read and sound out the characters and words, but my understanding of the words without looking them up, and my overall vocabulary, is pretty abysmal.
**Japanese **- I began learning the Japanese language in early 2008. I initially tried a number of methods on my own:
Rosetta Stone - a complete and utter waste of time, not to mention money. Rosetta Stone is not in the business of teaching languages, they are in the business of marketing and selling their products. Rosetta Stone teaches memorization, not language learning. I defy anyone to actually learn to speak any language using this horrible, horrible tool.
LiveMocha, and other similar computer-based courses - Another complete waste of time and money.
Language learning books - As far as I am concerned, books should be used solely to supplement a live course, not as the primary method to learn anything, much less a language.
The only method that has worked to actually teach me to learn and use the Japanese language has been live classroom training and private tutoring. Since 2009, I have taken and passed two levels of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), and am preparing to take the next level in December. A few years ago, during one of my trips to Japan, I had an opportunity to do a Jikoshoukai (自己紹介), which is a live self-introduction in front of a group during which one tells a story about themselves and their personal experiences. During my jikoshoukai, I spoke about what prompted my interest in the Japanese language and culture and how it impacts my profession as well as programs at my company. A panel of judges asked me questions during my speech and at the end graded me on my proficiency, pronunciation, and understanding. I considered it an achievement. I was taught that the best and most efficient way to learn the Japanese language is to learn to speak, read and write at the same time. In fact, I don’t see how one can easily learn the language unless they do it this way, especially as there are multiple syllabaries in the language, ie, hiragana, katakana, and kanji, and a fourth one, romaji to romanize certain written text. The Japanese language is difficult but, in my opinion, no more so than Hebrew, even with the multiple syllabaries. Right now, I would say that my proficiency in the Japanese language on a scale of from 1 to 10 is about a 6 to 6.5. I am pretty comfortable speaking at this point, and can read and comprehend an average newspaper article without much difficulty.
For an American, travel is probably the best way. Go get some foundation in a language in the classroom, then grab your passport and go somewhere where they speak the language. Did you study French? Go to Quebec. Or France. Or Switzerland. Or Belgium. Or the Congo (do your homework first, some parts are dangerous). See if you can get a work or student visa. Take a class where the language of instruction is French. Get out of town and see the countryside. Talk to rural folk who never saw the need or never got the chance to learn English well.
This is out of line for this forum. You’re starting to collect notes and they will soon turn into warnings (like here) if you don’t dial it back.
Automatically, for the most part. A friend of mine says I pick up languages like most people pick up loose change. I’ve had formal classes in French, Japanese, and German, and a single semester each of Spanish, Arabic, and Navajo. I also used to watch telenovelas when excruciatingly bored over the summers, as I lived in an area that got Univisión as one of the regular over-the-air broadcast channels.
Mostly, though, it just sort of … happens. It’s not that it takes no mental effort to figure any of this out, it’s just that languages are made up of patterns, and picking out patterns is how I entertain myself most of the time. Usually it’s because that language is common in some other field I’m looking into. I picked up bits of Russian when digging into figure skating before the Sochi Olympics, for example.
One thing I do find, though, is that absolutely nothing will stick unless I can also see written forms of the language, ideally a large quantity of them. My one semester of Arabic was useless, because the instructor wouldn’t write anything out transcribed in the Latin alphabet, and also wouldn’t write it out in Arabic until we’d learned all the letters we needed for it. Without seeing the written form I couldn’t make heads or tails of anything anyone said to me. It was all mush.
I also have a terrible time if I can’t get anyone to explain the grammar to me. I need to have a way to work out what the pattern is. Memorization or listen-and-repeat methods like the aforementioned Rosetta Stone software are useless. The real Rosetta Stone would have worked wonderfully. I can recognize things like verb tenses, conjugations, and inflections in languages in which I have zero vocabulary, and reverse engineer words from there. I worked out a decent chunk of Basque once, working from the assumption that even if the grammar was unrelated to anything else I spoke, the people who invented the language still thought like humans everywhere else, and a lot of the broad patterns would be the same. I accidentally deciphered how Thai writing worked by going through a pop singer’s discography in both Thai and Latin script, trying to find a song I’d heard.
I’m also notorious for looking at cyphertext and asking “what does that say?” before anyone else notices it’s not decorative glyphs – I did it to one flatmate with two separate video games that I happened to catch him playing. I seem to just be hyperlexical.
I’ve had the most success at teaching languages by finding out what other tongue(s) my student speaks and drawing as many parallels as possible. Judicious languages choices are sometimes required here. I tried to teach someone some Japanese in French once, and discovered that there’s a catastrophic mismatch in verb tenses almost the entire way through.
Practice and persistence. I have learned different languages in different ways, and while no one would ever mistake me for a native speaker, I can listen to audiobooks and carry on conversations in five languages (including English) and read a couple more.
For most of these, that has been a combination of reading, listening, translating as a leisure activity, and sporadic speaking practice over a period of years.
For me, the key is being willing to look and sound like a fool, patience with incomplete understanding, and patience with slow progress.
Most people seem to fall down on persistence over the long term, unless forced by immersion or a strong external motivation (a partner or relatives).
This point cannot be overemphasized. The only way to become proficient in a language is to use it, as often as possible, among native speakers preferably, not being afraid to make mistakes, because you will make mistakes, plenty of them, but that is simply part of the learning process.
If you are not willing to put yourself out there then your proficiency in a language, regardless how much time you spend learning vocabulary and grammar rules, will remain rudimentary, and you will never approach fluency.
You’ve got it right. Persistence, putting in the time and effort, and using a variety of methods and techniques to cover the different skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing.
Immersion that is not supplemented with study is vastly overrated. I’ve met people who think they are fluent in a chosen language because of a high school year abroad. Their host family praised them and understood what they said, but they spoke, as someone above put it, like three-year-olds. They also couldn’t read much, and couldn’t write at all.
I’ve had immersion in all the languages I am at least conversant in, but except for the Yiddish that I learned beginning when I was very young (and that I cannot read and write), I have also had instruction in the languages. My parents sent me to private Russian lessons for a year before we lived there, and then I lived there for a year, and while I was there, I had twice weekly Russian classes at my embassy school. I took a year of American Sign Language at college, and then I started hanging out with Deaf people, and going to the Deaf club in Indianapolis, and volunteering at the Indiana School for the Deaf. My junior year I spent as a visiting student as Gallaudet University, which is where I had my total immersion experience.
I don’t speak modern Israeli Hebrew. I can read the Torah and understand it, and understand it when it’s read aloud, but I have heard and read it so many times over 47 years, it’s not surprising I understand it. I know what all my memorized prayers mean, and I can write biblical Hebrew with correct spelling and grammar features, but I really can’t produce much that is novel. However, even when I look at something that is not something I have studied extensively, I usually understand it. I can usually puzzle through newspaper headlines in Hebrew, because words that don’t come from biblical Hebrew are loan words mainly from three sources, English, Yiddish, and Russian, in that order. If my first language were say, French, and I didn’t know Russian or Yiddish at all, I would have more trouble with modern Hebrew. If I lived in Israel, I could probably get to speaking Hebrew after a few months, but I think I would need some tutoring in addition.
I studied Hebrew all through Hebrew school, just like every Jewish kid does, but I took it seriously, and my uncle taught it at the university level, so he made sure I did my Hebrew school homework, and took Hebrew school seriously.
I just started learning Spanish about two months ago. There are a lot of Spanish people around my area, and I had my first halting conversation a couple of days ago. I explained to someone that the car I had wasn’t new, it was a rental, and my car was in the shop; it’d be back by the weekend.
My mother speaks 8 languages. She says that the more you learn, the more you know exactly what you need to learn to get by communicating in a language. I think I’m getting to that point. I know that I need the simple past, and some indicator words like “tomorrow,” “last week,” and “yesterday,” more than I need to memorize a lot of irregular verbs in the pluperfect, if I want to get on with communicating, and I can start talking to people after seven weeks, and not seven months. I know the word “car” is more important than the word “strawberry.” And so forth.
Of course, before you can even start such a discussion you need to recognize that there’s a very wide range of “knowing” a language. When someone claims to “know” multiple languages–more than, say, ten–you have to take it with a grain of salt. Only a native speaker of each language, who spends a lengthy period of time with that person, in a variety of language-dependent and interactive contexts, can truly evaluate how much he or she really “knows” the language.
I work with professional interpreters on a weekly basis–interpreters of Arabic, Farsi, Haitian Creole, Spanish, Karen, among others. They’re all native speakers of those other languages; they aren’t bi-lingual, but their English is good enough to do their work professionally, and they do it well. There are ways, though, in which even they don’t “know” English, and I’m not referring to technical language, but with things that may seem to a native speaker very basic. Things like phrasal verbs. Take for example, these various meanings of the verb knock off.
1) The factory crew knocked off another thousand “Coach” handbags.
2) The salesman knocked off twenty dollars from the price.
3) They say the mob knocked off Jimmy Hoffa.
4) The men knocked off work and went home.
They might—though not always—be able to discern each of the various and distinct meanings from context, but even then, this is language they would not produce on their own. (In this case, I’ve asked them.) In other words, they only “know” this English receptively. They don’t “know” it proficiently, and will resort to other, non-phrasal verbs when they wish to communicate the same idea. And by saying, They say the mob killed Jimmy Hoffa, instead of # 3) above, they lose the particular connotation that the term carries.
On the other hand, most native speakers, of course, will not only clearly grasp the various meanings, but also will produce this language when the occasion merits it. Moreover, native speakers will “know” that one may say:
*They knocked off Jimmy Hoffy, * or They knocked Jimmy Hoffa off, as well as, They knocked him off.
But one may not say: *They knocked off him.
On the other hand, in what is essentially an arbitrary constraint, they know that while one may say, They knocked off work early,
one may not say: *They knocked work off early.
Native speakers also know that you can’t say, *The force of the wind knocked him off. (That is, they “know” that it requires a locative–e.g., knocked him off the porch, etc.–that this is not really a phrasal verb.)
The point of all this is that, without need for study, native speakers, purely by way of spending their formative years in the language community, can correctly and automatically produce this kind of complexity in language—the varied meanings of phrasal verbs (not just the example above) and how that governs their separability. The lexicon of phrasal verbs in English, which is essential, is too vast, with too many distinct meanings, presenting the same complexity as this one single example, to be something acquired through word-by-word study. By the same token, for a learner of English it would simply require too many hours looking at a dictionary, and very few language learners retain true proficiency with language in that manner anyway. A non-native speaker can choose to target some of them to study, but never the vast number native speakers "know.’ They really can only acquire this kind of proficiency, to any degree, through long-term engagement with the language, such as that which comes with long-term immersion–and usually much more than a “semester abroad.” Even then, because the “language organ” diminishes significantly after childhood, for adults we’re taking about a limited lexicon compared to that of a typical native speaker.
Obviously this kind of facility is not necessary, but it demonstrates how wide the range is of “knowing” a language–ways of knowing a language that is neither about studying nor “grammar.” It’s no different with other languages. Every language has something like this – levels of complexity (beyond grammar) which rarely can be acquired purely through study. So when someone says they “know,” say, 15 languages, you have to wonder just how well they know them, (for what purposes they can use those langauges effectively), and by which means they acquired this “knowledge.” How much time did they spend in those language communities?
The more I learn about native language facility in general, the less I’m inclined to say I “know” any language other than my own.
Well, of course you can never become an educated native speaker of a second language. Anyone who makes that their goal is doomed to failure.
You can, though, become fluent in a second, third, fourth, or fifth language to a very high level of proficiency, to the point where native speakers accept that you are as good as they are. I haven’t hit that level yet, but it’s in sight for one second language.
Also, your active vocabulary is always going to be less than your passive vocabulary. But I think you’re holding individuals to communal standards: you can only strive to be as good as an individual speaker is, not the larger vocabulary of the collective. Although I understand all four of your sample sentences, I wouldn’t say any of them. The closest I’d come is to say The salesman knocked twenty dollars off the price. The other expressions are ones I just don’t use, though I do use the noun “knock-off” for imitation goods.
I don’t know, I’ve entirely given up. Every chance I’ve had to try and go abroad and be immersed has been met with failure. I’ve tried 6 different ways to go to Japan and got denied on all of them. I’m a PhD student now so I don’t think I’ll ever have another chance to try in my entire life. 
Especially since I don’t even have time to take language courses anymore.
I’m also just plain too stupid.
To me that doesn’t work until I have the framework firmly in place. In fact, one of the worst disservices any of my language teachers did to me was teaching us grammar wrong :mad: How can you teach grammar wrong on purpose?
For languages close enough to mine, I already have the structure, so basically it’s a matter of picking up the pronunciation and vocabulary.
By framework or structure I mean: grammar (word order, basic verbal forms), how to read/spell and those words which make up the biggest bulk of a text. Articles, common prepositions (or equivalent), conjunctions.
Being with people who are willing to help is also key. If the people you’re with mock your pronunciation but won’t tell you what’s wrong about it, you won’t get better. If they stare at you like you’ve got horns but don’t tell you what did you just say and what should you have said instead, you won’t get better. A single native speaker can do more for a stumbling foreigner with a few well-timed explanations than all the language tapes in the world.