Thoughts about language learning

[netmouse]

people seem to have different levels of ability with swapping words out of sentences (for some people, changing one word in a sentence is trivial, for others it requires building the whole way back up word by word) - also, people seem to have different levels of facility in terms of producing the language they’ve acquired (some people can go from input to conversation almost immediately, others need significant amounts of time practising reducing the level of prompt before they can start to produce).

Ah well, having started this saga, may as well finish it…

I think that a huge, huge amount of language learning is dependent on techniques that aren’t immediately obvious. People vary as to how easily they can simplify what they want to say to their current level of language / make best use of what they know. Those techniques are just as important (and learnable) as the bare words and grammar - as bootcamp proves, of course.

As far as my mixing up goes, actually I think I’m finally managing to reconcile my two non-English languages, after several years of pain. (Sorry, my post a couple of days ago was already out of date I’ve realised. My German was thoroughly back today and I even managed a bit of Welsh.)

I think the problem may have been that I neglected to allow connections to form between German and Welsh, as well as each with English. Actually I think I deliberately avoided it, in the mistaken belief that it would be confusing. My theory would be that that is an additional technique of a successful polyglot, conscious or unconscious. I think I’ve spent the last few years rebuilding the bridges belatedly.

But anyway, observing myself the last couple of days, I think I use similar chunking techniques in both languages. There are a load of basic building blocks that I need all the time, and I now have the “lego” for them within fairly easy reach for both.

Today we have had a long day of negotiating with hospitals, doctors and people who are hard of hearing… My Deutsch was perfectly fine - the least of my worries. From time to time, the bored kids taunted me by talking Welsh, and I seemed to cope with that too. (They also bonus-discovered that Germans find Welsh-talking kids infinitely fascinating and cute, for some bizarre reason!)

[Baruch]

So it is possible. Better being tri-lingual then mono-lingual.

Our downstairs neighbours: he was from one country, she from another, and the kids were brought up in a third. Kids are all trilingual, grown up now, and have no problem with their triple mother tongues.

[aran]

As far as my mixing up goes, actually I think I’m finally managing to reconcile my two non-English languages, after several years of pain. (Sorry, my post a couple of days ago was already out of date I’ve realised. My German was thoroughly back today and I even managed a bit of Welsh.)

How very interesting!.. And I strongly suspect that you’re right that the ‘avoiding mixing them up’ was probably central to your experience… my own experience is definitely that it takes a bit of time to be able to move comfortably between any pair…

I think you’re right that there are techniques of usage that are important - although I’m less inclined to see them as a huge part of language learning - I think they’re more something that will happen fairly naturally if the learners are put into the right situations and given the right prompts - and that when that happens, adaptation can be pretty quick.

The children where tri-lingual, but it took some years for them to be able to separate the languages.

There’s a lot of good research that suggests strongly that from-birth bilinguals tend to be slightly behind in both languages round about ages 6 to 8, but by 11 to 12 ish are equally strong (or stronger)…