I do agree with you. I speak Spanish fluently and can only understand bits and pieces of Portugues, same goes for Catalan. I just wonder how much it has to do with the fact that Portugues speakers are faced with Spanish more often that Spanish speakers are faced with Portugues. Kind of like all people in Cataluña/Barcelona are bilingual in both Spanish and Catalan, but not all Spaniards can speak or understand Catalan.
Hey Palacios!
?Que hace un pez muerto en agua?
!Nada!
It all depends so much on what you mean by “speak”, and how easily languages come to you.
If you asked a Scandinavian person what it means to speak French, they would answer that it means being able to communicate fluently: conduct a negotiation, make jokes, discuss current affairs, understand a movie without subtitles, etc.
On the flip side, I know some Americans who claim they speak French when all they can do is count to 6, say “comme ci, comme ca” and mispronounce two types of wine.
Agreed, too many Americans think they are fluent when in reality they only know some very basic vocab and would never be able to carry a conversation of any depth in that foreign language. I think it is a wasted effort for someone to try to learn Chinese, or any foreign language for that matter, unless you plan on living there for many years or are able to use it on a fruequent basis. They only reason why I am fluent in Spanish is because my grandparents spoke to me in Spanish as a kid and becuase I lived abroad in Spain.
Most Americans only “think” they’re fluent but would realize very quickly that they are not if they lived in a foreign country for 5 days. They only way to develop real fluency is to speak it on a daily basis with natives. You’ll never learn a language by Rosetta Stone or in a book. Find people in your area who are natives and would like to do a language exchange where you take turns speaking each other’s languages.
This is an interesting conversation because i now understand how native English speakers think vs non-English speakers think about language.
I think because most people here on this forum are Americans and Canadians, they grew up learning only one language so to them, learning a completely different language (not latin originated, not using the “alphabet”) is very intimidating… regardless of how useful those other languages would be, they are less likely to venture out of Spanish, perhaps French or Italian.
For me, i am one of the lucky few Japanese who grew up in a very westernized environment and learned English very young, i already speak two very different languages. So for me, to learn a 3rd language, i wouldn’t necessarily judge how similar that language is to Japanese or English, i just look at it as another language.
To me, i wouldn’t shy away from Chinese or Russian because they are “difficult”, as long as they are useful and i am interested in the language and/or culture, i am mroe than happy to learn!
NANA
Les Canadiennes apprennent le Français aussi. Si n’est pas dans l’école, puis pour les cartouches de céreal de petit dejeuner.
Though my French is pretty rusty… yay, Google translate.
From what i’ve heard, only some parts of Canada speaks French and most do not??
But still, even if you speak both French and English, you may not necessarily be adventurous enough to take on Japanese or Punjabi, you are more likely to take Spanish as a 3rd language, no?
I disagree, i think everything is possible if you WANT it enough.
I see so many westerners speak Japanese because they like watching Japanese comics and anime, and most of them do not even live in Japan (they may travel to Japan a few times).
Same goes for Chinese, if i start listening to Chinese music, watching Chinese films, hang out with Chinese people, i am sure i will pick it up.
Don’t set boundaries for yourself, it’s not “natural” to know finance as well, if you spend thousands of hours you spent on CFA on a second language, i’m sure you’ll do fine.
Québec primarily, though its neighbors can have quite a few who speak French (Québécois?) as well.
In Canada, most of the provinces operate in English, but pretty much everyone gets taught french in schools, sees it all over daily products, and anyone who wants a government job has to be able to function in both French and English adequately. I used to joke in Vancouver that everyone learned French from their breakfast cereal boxes.
That said, plenty of people in English-speaking Canada forget French as soon as they graduate, and many probably were never very good at it to begin with. Most Quebecois I’ve encountered speak English well but are noticeably annoyed every time they have to use it with other Canadians (Americans and other tourists get a pass)
But it’s different than the US, which is devoutly monolingual, execept in places where there is no real choice because of concentrations of immigrants. Some people think this is a bad thing. I personally think it can be a bit inconvenient at times, but makes the world a far more interesting place.
I have a French friend who just got back from Quebec and said he ended up speaking English most of the time because the Quebecois accents and idioms were too strange for him to understand.
That’s why i think if i only speak one language growing up i may as well learn a language that is foundamentally different. I think research says bilingual people are better at multi-tasking and think more outside of the box.
To your second question, Rosetta Stone is the most popular I’m sure, but you should check out Pimsleur. After a trip to Paris this summer I was motivated to try and learn French, and I’d heard good things about Pimsleur so I purchased the most comprehensive package they had. I’m only about 15 lessons in (there’s around 200 total) but so far it’s been great.
As with many statistical inferences, I’d question the premises.
Does this mean that if the average person were to learn a second language, their multi-tasking ability and thinking-outside-the-box-itivity will increase, or does it mean that people with greater skill at multi-tasking and thinking-outside-the-box have a greater tendency toward bilinguality than those with lesser skills?
I suspect the latter.
(Recently, there has been a slew of commercials in the Los Angeles area about how enrolling your kid in preschool will improve their chances for going to university and so on. I think that they make the same cause-and-effect error there. But I don’t have enough money for a commercial.)
There are thoughts that work better in one language than the other, indeed sometimes there are ideas in one language that you can’t have in others. I think it was Kant who pointed out that people who think in different languages effectively see the world differently, or even live in different worlds.
I know from my experience, that the word order and verb selections in different languages that I know allow me to verbalize and see connections between things that are either harder or impossible to see in others. I can see how this would translate to “out of the box” thinking for those who operate in only one language.
As for multitasking, I’m not sure where the connection would be.
It’s also true that if the research sampled just Americans, that out-of-the-box thinkers might be more inclined to learn other languages, and so it could be a causally prior connectoin rather than language causing out-of-box thinking. You’d really want to test it on Europeans too, because they tend to be forced to speak multiple languages, and so out-of-the-box-ness would in some way be the “default condition” for them if the hypothesis is true.
I agree that being able to think in different languages can expand the profundity of one’s thoughts. One thinks within the constraints of one’s language.
I don’t know about the Kant citation.
Actually the research was based on kids who studied a second or third language as subjects (like in many countries it is mandatory to speak more than one languages in school).
so i don’t know, are they born with multi-tasking abilities or trained to have the abilities…
As I say, there have been recent TV commercials in the Los Angeles area saying things like, “going to preschool increases your child’s chances of going to college by 80% (or whatever)”.
What I wonder is whether the children who are more likely (from the get-go) to go to college are also more likely to go to preschool. I suspect that they are. More affluent, and all that.
I’d love to see a study done on, shall we say, underpriveleged kids: half go to preschool, half don’t . What’s the percentage who make it through high school? On to university? Successful in business?
It’d be interesting.
I think that research has probably been done?
But just from my experience, kids who go to school earlier and interact with others at a younger age are better behaved socially. they are more curious and more confident at the same time… which makes them perform better later in life?
One thing for sure, it’s way easier for kids (under the age of 5) to pick up a language than any other age in life, so if i were to have kids, i would definitely have them learn 2-3 languages before primary school.
NANA: I can see that you and I would become fast friends.
I agree that younger children can pick up languages than older children/adults. I wish that I’d been exposed to other languages at a younger age. I’d probable speak six languages fluently today.
(In elementary school, I was in an after-school Spanish class. And apparently I speak French (what little I know) with a perfect Parisian accent.)
I started studying English in primary school too and i am so glad i did. if i start in highschool i don’t think i can learn as quickly.
then again, nothing is impossible.
you too, best friends forever~!!