Noted.
My father speaks like a zillion languages - the thing is it is NO effort at all to him. As soon as he is around native speakers he starts picking it up and is extremely gifted at accents and intuitive grammar. The same for my old college roommate, in her words “after the 3rd language it gets easier and easier.” It helps that he travels a great deal and so is constantly exposed to native speakers.
He is natively bilingual (English and Yiddish) and his Spanish is fluent (people constantly ask him if he is Argentinian, when in fact he is a Polish Jew by descent). He often gives workshops on international marketing, entirely in Spanish. He also speaks Israeli Hebrew and Brazilian Portuguese, can dabble in German, Polish, Italian and French, and reads Aramaic.
The thing with languages he doesn’t use often anymore (like Hebrew) is the second he is back in the environment everything comes back to him, within a week or less he returns to prior fluency.
Thanks. I thought maybe the reason was something darker.
As opposed to us sloggers who just have to do the work to learn languages. Some of us may be able to slog more quickly than others, and if I was placed in a total immersion environment with classes for weeks on end, I could probably get to a usable level in a number of months, but what Hello Again described is a whole other level of ability.
Yes – I used to think I was “bad” at learning languages because I have “normal slogger” ability. Turned out I was comparing myself to freaks, and I have more facility for learning language than most people (basically I’m at the high end of “normal slogger.”)
In terms of “attends to form” I believe thinking too hard about formal grammar generally inhibits the ability to speak the language for most people and in casual contexts. It isn’t usually important to making yourself understood on a basic level, and opening your mouth and trying to communicate is more important than “getting it right.” (and sometimes the formal grammar you learned makes you sound like a jackass among your peer group anyway, American teens and college students, for example, are not known for their attention to form in their native language).
Obviously, the more formal the context, the more precisely meaning and therefor grammar must be attended to, I’m talking about “everyday” communication.
Some day, woman, I’ll come over, ask your hubby to turn around, and give you a spanking with a softcover copy of the Diccionario 
You always expect more of yourself than you’d expect of anybody else, cool it down willya?
Do you understand every English accent? Every single one? Nigerian, Indian, Mancunian? If you do, you’re better off than 90+% of native English speakers. I certainly don’t understand every single Spanish accent. I’ve mentioned before my boss from Granada whose accent was so thick and inability to rephrase so complete that even her mother couldn’t understand her on the phone; I once changed a big company’s Internal Help Desk policies by pointing out to their manager that since he (from Philadelphia) didn’t understand accents from India, he could not expect an extremely nervous Eye-talian to be able to do it.
Here, have a box of chillout tosses a box of chillout your way
I appreciate the box of chillout, though I did mean to express the point that lately I have been chilling out a lot more. I don’t worry as much what other people will think of my language ability, because I’ve proven I can communicate in a variety of contexts, and that’s good enough for me. Also, people are always so friendly when I speak to them… they are just delighted someone is making the effort to communicate. Spanish is the funnest most challenging thing I’ve ever done, and I always meet the most interesting and kind people while using it. This is why I want to continue for a long time…
That’s the way I feel about Esperanto, French, and japanese…
Speaking of slogging, though, I’m about a third of the way through a book called The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. According to Doidge, the brain is much more plastic than we had thought, and people can learn all sorts of things thought impossible. The book basically leapt off the shelf at me because I have a friend who essentially taught herself to function again after being in a severe car crash (rear-eneded at a closing speed of 70 kim/h and smushed into a school bus).
Doidge reports on researchers who claim that the ‘plastic’ state that enables rapid learning, including language learning, can be turned dack on again by stimulating part of the brain. They also claim that problems such as autism are caused in part when the plastic state turns off too soon and the brain becomes rigid before functions have fully differentiated.
If this is true, it has huge implications for how we design both childhood and adult learning, among other things. (Repetition is good because it reinforces new pathways in the brain…) And I’m wondering whether we could learn our way around things like face blindness. But I’m also wondering… do people such as Hello Again’s father have that plastic language-learning state all their lives?
You’re fluent. I decree it to be so. That’s a hell of a lot more than I could do in Bulgarian (a language I learned largely by verbal trial and error, with the result that my grammar would no doubt be disastrous), and I know I’m fluent. I know this because I can do anything I would ever want to do in Bulgarian. I would have trouble writing an academic paper, sure, but I have no desire to do that, so it’s okay with me. No Bulgarian would ever think I’m a native speaker (besides my accent, I don’t look like a Bulgarian), but I have been asked if I’m Macedonian, Russian, and Ukrainian. People thought that I spoke a Slavic language as my native tongue! So delighted! Okay, and a woman in Macedonia asked me if I was Bulgarian, which was amazing. (Macedonian and Bulgarian are…pretty much the same language, they’re so similar.)
Sweet! Stand back, world, I’m moving up! By means of Kyla decree!
Being asked that question is pretty much the best feeling in the world.
michael erard thanks for the info, that does make me feel better. I will take your survey now.
If only my decrees always worked so well.
“This assignment is a waste of my time. I decree that it is now optional!”
“This class is a waste of my time. I decree that it is now optional!”
“Calculus is the devil! I decree I not have to take it!”
I sense a pattern forming here.
Hmm. Well, I took the first survey, because like olives, I have a pretty high standard for what it means to “speak” a language, and unlike her, I’m nowhere near that level of fluency in anything but English. On the other hand, I’ve studied French, Spanish, German, and Mandarin, but I don’t actually use any of them on anything like a regular basis. (And I started Japanese, but dropped it after a week when it turned out I was the only one in the class who didn’t already know some Japanese. What the hell does “101” mean, if not “beginner”? Harumph, I say!) There was a time when I could read novels, write academic papers and give presentations in French and Spanish, but that was years ago. I also got mistaken for a native speaker once, although it was by a Spaniard who thought I was from Argentina. But I’m in no danger of that happening now. I can still make myself understood in French and Spanish in restaurants, hotels, pharmacies and such, and I can have slow-paced conversations as long as they don’t stray into the present or future too much. I only had one term each of German and Mandarin, so those conversations are pretty limited to stuff like where I’m from, what I study, and how many cats I have: Ich habe zwei katzen. Wo you liang zhi mao. Beyond that, I know a smattering of greetings, food words, and curses in Polish, Korean, ASL, and Japanese. And thanks to the French and Spanish, I can make out some Portuguese, Italian, and - as I discovered one bizarre drunken night while flipping channels at 2am - a teensy bit of Romanian! But in my estimation, all of that together plus a buck fifty will get you a dirty look at Starbucks. So I don’t think it’s appropriate to call myself anything other than monolingual.
That said, I love to study languages. I do *have *to study; I don’t just absorb them by osmosis like some folks apparently can. But it’s nothing like “slogging” for me. The work itself is easy, and more importantly, it’s fun. Learning languages is how I’ll spend my time when I win the lottery.
So I made sure to leave some comments.