Dare we ask?

Guest   Fri Feb 29, 2008 3:01 am GMT
Which do you think?

Barring causes like hearing loss/impairment or physical inability to produce the sounds, why do you think people fail in their goals to learn a
foreign language?

a. No real aptitude
b. Didn't start early enough
c. Laziness
d. Poor method
e. Teacher had poor accent
f. dislike the culture, sound of the language
g. not enough practice
h. Learning languages are not fun
j. other
Guest   Fri Feb 29, 2008 4:05 am GMT
a- No. Anyone can learn a language. I've spoken with the dumbest idiotic ex criminals doing community service related with my work who could speak several languages.

b- Yes. Not so much because adults can't learn languages, but because adults don't have as much time and freedom as young children who can learn it in a nice, not over paced, relaxed way at school.

c- Definitely. Probably the most common.

d- Yes.

e- No. I don't think it matters, provided the teacher knows the language well enough to be teaching it.

f- In some cases. For people forced to learn say English there is often no motivation. They just see it as something that would benefit their work, 'I want to know it but not learn it' type thing.

g- Definitely. I've known many people with degrees in languages who've basically lost a lot of their abilities, either through lack of practice or waning of interest. I've known teachers who don't know the language much better than their students. You get things like "yeah, I spoke it real well back when I travelled and lived all around X, right after my uni days, but well, taht was 20 years ago"

h- Yes. Similar to d and f.
Guest   Fri Feb 29, 2008 5:14 am GMT
I think my big problems were (a), (b), (f), (g), (h), and (j) [insufficient motivation].

Another problem is that English is so simple and straightforward (at least for native speakers) that you get spoiled early on. When it comes time to study the obligatory foreign language, you're overwhelmed by it's ghastly complexity.
Guest   Fri Feb 29, 2008 5:31 am GMT
Ghastly complexity? What language did you study?
Guest   Fri Feb 29, 2008 1:02 pm GMT
<<Ghastly complexity? What language did you study?>>

I guess I'm referring to foreign languages in general. Examples of unpleasant language features:

- Chinese and Japanese characters
- Chinese tones
- Elaborate inflections (Sanskrit, for example)
- Arbitrary gender in many/most languages
- Strange sounds ("rr" 'j/g" in Spanish, "r" in French)
- Subjunctive (Spanish and French)
- Vowel harmony and consonant mutation
- polysynthetic languages
- idioms (all languages, including English)


In comparison to all these difficulties, what troublesome areas does English have? -- only idioms and perhaps suboptimal spelling?
Guest   Fri Feb 29, 2008 1:23 pm GMT
Have you ever learned a language with vowal harmony? I assume not! That feature yields in easy pronunciation, it sounds better with vowal harmony, IMHO! It's quite easy, at least in Turkish!
Guest   Sat Mar 01, 2008 10:22 pm GMT
j. Other:

There are particular languages where outsiders are usually discouraged by native speakers from speaking the native speakers' language.
Guest   Sun Mar 02, 2008 6:55 pm GMT
Which ones?