I refute the idea that my husband gets his mistakes from me!! But am too tired to argue - and as normal, most of what you say is, well, irrefutable! [quote=“aran, post:45, topic:6324”]
Personally, I’m only really interested in the first two steps - and crucially, I don’t think those first two steps need to be different if your goal is ‘near native’…
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Obviously you’re mostly concerned with the earlier stages of learning, which is fine. I was just being a bit provocative I guess about whether there could be any more specific advice for the later stages - but to be honest, your not particularly copious advice (i.e. ‘read read read’) has stood me in fairly good stead so far!
And your description of the ways in which people differ at what I would call a post-advanced stage is spot on - and definitely worth careful thought about what’s going on there. I know people who have been learning for as long as I have, who are as comfortable speaking as I am, and yet have very clear ‘second language’ markers (even though I’d struggle to list exactly what they are) whereas I will from time to time not be identified as second language. And the difference there certainly isn’t about me having put more effort in - so it is an interesting line of thought.
I will probably fine tune myself on this thanks to you - and suggest that exposure and production are all that are needed to get to absolutely confident usage, but that near-native production might involve something else…
[Mistakes excepted, I said! I meant that the English he gets right might sound very similar to you…;-)]
Can I just put a word in here for those of us who are quite comfortable with being second language speakers and identifiable as such? I really don’t think there’s anything negative about being such a thing. We have no problem with people from Welsh-speaking areas being identifiably second language English, so I’m proud to be a person from an 80% English-speaking part of Wales who has Welsh as his second language.
Yup, it’s a good point. Taken me a long time to make my personal peace with that, but it’s important - sounding like a native is an optional extra target.
I told the Forum before about my friend who learned English in school in SW Wales and always spoke and wrote it very correctly. He had trouble getting to accept that most English people do not speak ‘proper English’!! I’d guess the waitress thought they were a bad advert for Welsh education!
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to belittle identifiable second language speakers by any means. (I may be a bit more critical of members of my own family!) The ‘near-native’ bit is very much an optional extra, and has a lot to do with personality and personal aims - personal choice whether it’s important to someone or not. (But if it is, SSIW gives a pretty good start!)
I just wanted to emphasise that there are a range of different and legitimate ambitions that we can have for our Welsh (and they also change over time, I might add) and we should be comfortable with our own.
