I didn’t speak any English until I was around six. I was brought up in Welsh. Once, on holiday with my parents in Ifracombe as a five year old, I got lost and was rescued by an old chap who kindly led me back to my relieved parents. He apparently said something like “He’s a very talkative young chap, although to be honest I couldn’t understand a single word he said.” Of course, at five, I though the whole world spoke Welsh. Ah, English. TV and pop music taught me the basics. Then school and Philip Larkin did the rest. Now, thoroughly (and somewhat smugly) bi-lingual, I’ve become greedy and want a third. I’ve been learning Japanese for about a year. I get one-to-one zoom lessons every week with Sensei Masato and, my God, I never realized how difficult picking up a language could be. Maybe, as kids, we find it a lot easier because our brains are more of an empty page. Anyway, I’m finding Japanese fascinating as I’ve always been interested in the culture and so I wondered if any amongst our number here were similarly currently engaged in learning a foreign language and, if so, what prompted you to do so?
Anyone here learning a language?
My GF is Polish. I’ve been with her for over 13 years and my Polish skills are still practically zero.
Very early on I went to her baby nephew’s christening in Poland. He’s now 12, living in Norway, and fluent in Polish, Norwegian, and English.
I’m Welsh too. The in-laws were over a month ago, and one of them proudly got a swanky looking translation device out of his pocket. He pressed the button and spoke. I listened to the output and didn’t understand a word. Turns out it was set to translate Polish to Welsh, and I can’t speak that either!
Also Welsh believe it or not, but have never learnt the language coming from the English dominated industrial South East. Lived in German speaking Switzerland for many years so have (had) a reasonable grasp of German. But what they speak there bears little relation to “Schrift Deutsch”. Lived in Montreal when I first moved to Canada and did an intensive French course, but that has lapsed. Should have another go at it
I speak fairly good french having lived there and worked in french but in the interests of keeping it in good shape I’ve started making an effort to maintain/ improve it recently.
As someone who has lived in France for over twenty years and still struggles to spend an entire evening speaking the damn language, what impresses me hugely is the way most sportspeople these days, whatever their nationality, seem to be able to effortlessly reply to an interviewer “It was tough out there but I dug deep and I always remember what Wittgenstein said in his treatise……”
Good luck with the learning.
I came to Japan in the early 1990s with only a handful of Japanese words but was lucky to be placed in a town that had almost no-one speaking English. It was perfect for learning the language and for the first 5 years or so I was full on with the learning. I haven’t formally studied for a long time now, but I speak much more Japanese than English in my work and daily life. I sometimes think in Japanese before ‘translating’ to English. It’s a bit mad when I think about that.
One thing I have learnt over the years is that while the words and grammar are, of course, very important, they are only a part of the puzzle. The foundations.
The way of thinking, culture, society norms, etc, are almost as important. Just translation word for word often absolutely does not work. (And at times, it actually gives you the complete opposite meaning).
I’m guessing that broadly applies to most/all languages, but further guessing that it is particularly so in the case of Japanese.
Gambatte!
Insightful and impressive how you have fitted in by mastering the language. Don’t think I ever thought first in German (maybe sometimes in work meetings),but I haven’t lived full time in Switzerland in 20 years and I still occasionally use a German word for certain things
Thank you. I was certainly motivated and in a good environment to do it, but in a way I didn’t have much of a choice if I wanted to get on. I know people in cities who have lived here for a long time and their Japanese is still really quite basic.
I find myself struggling for words in English at times, trying to dig up ones I haven’t used for decades. Or structuring sentences in a way that sounds more Japanese than English. It can be a bit embarrassing when I’m back in the UK. I realise I might at times sound a bit…. daft. Or ‘foreign’.
My Japanese is very good, though I will never be ‘fully native’ level.
So in a way I find myself not being totally fluent in any language! I look on that as one of those life experience things that widens the mind, and just have a bit of a laugh with it.
Having the 2 in my head though, I think it’s a wonderful thing and would always encourage others to learn a different language/way of thinking.
Mrs F has lived in Britain for 42 years and still sounds ‘foreign’. It doesn’t help that her speech uses whatever word best fits, so a single sentence might contain a mixture of English, Spanish and French.
When she goes back to France, she apparently sounds English.
“Do you know what a foreign accent is? It’s a sign of bravery.”
Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
exactly this but in Norwegian. Landed where few spoke English, think in foreign language, constructing sentence structures ahead rather than translating words on the fly etc. I am taken for a Norwegian most of the time but then I have lived here for over 40 years.
Curiously, when I´m back in England with my old friends, they often say my colloquial English is old fashioned, presumably a result of missing out on the day to day banter. combined with 40 years of simplifying my English in a multi-cultural workplace.
On the other side of the ledger, I find myself getting way more irritated than them when I am instructed to “enjoy” a meal after having it plonked in front of me, often after having offered to “grab” supplementary condiments. Apparently, me declining their offer of sauces is “awesome” so I look forward to their reaction when I cure cancer.
Anyway, grumpy old git mode enabled so time to get out on my bike, those fjords aren’t going to look at themselves.
That ‘simplifying of my English’ comment rang a bell!
I was uninterested (and not very good) at foreign languages at school and am far from being an expert on the subject. And, again, my thoughts apply only to Japanese as that is the only language I know outside English.
But I do feel that in order to progress beyond basic daily conversation competence at a language (with the learnt words/grammar bag of tricks) and become properly ‘fluent’, it is probably necessary to actually think in the language.
Having to translate from one to another is an instant filter/layer applied. All the associated baggage that comes with the original language/culture affects it.
Or something like that.
(I’m very aware that the word ‘fluent’ is often misused. I know someone who claims they are ‘fluent’, but in reality their language skills are basic and conversational. Nowhere near ‘fluent’ in my view).
agree, its not possible to be fluent in another language without thinking in it.
My comment about simplifying my English was because I work for an international company in a multi-cultural environment where the office language is English. After 40 years of “dumbing down” to be understood, I struggle to switch back to native mode when I meet my old friends, which they delight in pointing out to me.
Ah, I don’t speak English as much as I ought to (to be relly good at it) except now and then at work, when I speak to tourists from all over the world and foreigners relocated to Sweden for work, many of them Pakistani and Indian. In the case of tourists, I find myself matching their bad English, simplifying the sentences in an appalling way, but it comes out that way because my immediate instinct is to mimic the person I speak to. So I have to be very careful when speaking to some our regular customers so I don’t end up offending them by doing a bad Peter Sellers impression from The Party…I tend to end up mimicking Swedish accents as well, when Swedes from other parts of the country pops into the shop! I really have to restrain myself for it to not come out sounding like I’m mocking them…
I often think in English (although not necessarily always good English…) from decades of reading English books and watching TV and film with subtitles, and English being a very dominant language globally. Sometimes I’ll forget a word in Swedish, and the way to remember it is usually to think of the English word, then translate it into Swedish! It’s weird how that works.
But since I’ve become my mum’s “librarian”, I don’t buy as many books in English (which she can’t read) anymore, and I’ve noticed that my English is getting a little worse these last few years.
EDIT: To make things perfectly clear to anyone who doesn’t know: I’m Swedish, English is the language I’ve learned to speak/read/write/understand.
A few years ago I struck up a very basic conversation with a couple of Japanese people in Lapland (go figure!). They said my Japanese was very good. I knew it wasn’t of course but I was still thrilled. When I got back to Wales I told my teacher about it and he said ‘ah, when your Japanese gets really good they stop complimenting you and they start correcting you.’ I still haven’t reached that stage. Mind you, in Cardiff it’s not that easy to meet random Japanese people to practice with and I’d be too scared to come over as some kind of nutter if I did manage to stumble across someone and began asking them silly questions in rather stilted ‘polite’ text book Japanese! (My ‘te’ form is just slowly getting there!). In response to my question ‘What’s the best way to become fluent in Japanese?’ this same teacher thought about it for a few seconds before saying the only way to become completely fluent was to be born in Japan to Japanese parents. Oh well. Mind you, the same could be said for Welsh. When I was a kid a man from England moved into my remote North Wales village and even though, over the years, his Welsh became native level and, accent-wise, aurally perfect…people still referred to him as ‘the outsider’…
At secondary school I had to do French for three years and I struggled with it. For O-levels I chose to do Metalwork and, on the first day of the new term, found I’d been over-ridden by the Headmaster and been put in the French class. Cue: the head got the Alex Ferguson hairdryer treatment from my mum, and I was back on the Metalwork course by day two of term. But we did have one term of German and it clicked with me but, unfortunately, I couldn’t do both Physics and German.
After university, I learned German at evening classes for several years. I tried French evening classes for a year, but I was just as crap as I had been a decade before.
Then I met the future Mrs F. She is half-Spanish and was raised in France until she was 18, and is truly bilingual (her English – well, Scottish – came at university in Aberdeen).
A decade or so ago, I learned Spanish during lunchtimes at work, and could – for the first time – chat (slowly) with Mrs F’s family when we visited on holiday.
I still can’t really do French, although we have many rellies in and around Lille. I can just about manage one on one, slowly, but I have to pause and translate in my head, and it makes conversation stilted. It isn’t helped by being utterly predictable, so Mrs F just jumps in while I pause for breath, and speaks for me.
Somehow the German I learned 30 years ago is still lodged in the back of my brain and whenever we visit friends in Frankfurt, I can get around perfectly well – my brain just switches to German within an hour or two of arriving.
We’re planning a visit to Spain in the next year or two, and I’m looking for Spanish refresher classes.
Mrs F worked for Panasonic when I met her, and learned Japanese every Wednesday afternoon. She took it at A-level and spent a couple of weeks working in Osaka. She hasn’t used it since and has forgotten most of it.
I had grand plans to learn the Gaelic when I retired. However it proved far harder a task than anticipated, my soft southern mouth finding it near impossible to find the right shapes required to squeeze out the words. So my Duolingo app is reduced to weeping silently at me, whilst I justify my failures and dream. Plus very few folk to speak it with, other than the merch table at festivals.
I’ve been on the Duolingo Spanish course for 1500 days or so. Like many people the reading and writing part is far easier than the speaking part. I’ve discovered that t here’s a Spanish conversation evening in a bookshop near me, so I’m going to the next one.
I used to speak decent French but language is like a muscle and if you don’t use it it withers.
Several people I know say Duolingo only gets you so far (unless you are indeed gifted at languages ) and have moved to Jumpspeak instead. Just mention my name at the checkout😀
I tried Indonesian with Duolingo and didn’t get that far, which is not a particulary good reflection on me as it’s not a difficult language. My gripe with Duolingo is that it doesn’t explain grammar, just throws new words repeatedly at you and hopes that you eventually remember them. After I stopped, I found out there were some grammatical rules that make things easier, but of course they were not mentioned by that annoying owl or any of his/her pals.
I talk Spanish and Italian pretty well (the former’s a bit rusty), which sounds impressive, but the reality is if you can speak one of them, learning the other one’s not that difficult. In fact I think if you have two of the romance languages you can often make sense of the other ones. I can make usually sense of say, newspaper headlines in Portuguese and Romanian.
Actually on the paid version they do have an explanation of the grammar rule you just broke 😔
I shall check out Jumpspeak, thanks Lodes
Wow, that’s more than 4 years. You must really know the bear, the kid Eddie, the scowling emo girl and the rest even better than me. I’m coming up to one year on the app, trying Spanish. Ahora hablo solamente un poco, y mal. I’m doing it partly because I work alongside so many native Spanish speakers, but mainly because I want to understand the Colombian music that sounds so good when sung.
At home in Bonn, we’re bilingual – swapping at ease and mid-conversation, though my grammar is shoddy and vocabulary not full (and as for my German…).
Now my eldest is learning French, and navigated a week in Lille speaking only that language, I’m dusting off my official second language that previously I would only speak with confidence and gusto when drunk.
At school I learned Latin, and one term each of ancient Greek and modern Russian. I spent 6 months in India after university and learned Hindi for that. There is something quite magical (for those last three languages) about being able to read in a different alphabet – like putting on a pair of X-ray specs.
Although it is harder to train the less neuroplastic brain the decades haver thrust on older people, the ways of learning – by actually talking to real speakers, rather than years of grammar and set text literature like what you get at school – make it a more joyful experience.
I have never been good at languages.
At school when it came to to choosing O levels, I was told (incorrectly) that a language was needed for University and so took French. Once I found out I had been lied to and was refused a change of subject, I basically switched off and just scraped through with a pass.
When I moved to Singapore, with English being the main language there was never an incentive to learn even basic Chinese.I have tried but was told there were 4 tones for the same word and each tone had a completely different meaning – I couldn’t tell the difference in the tones (which may say a lot about my ability to appreciate music!). My kids, being born here, are both fluent in Chinese which I see as a major positive .
That said, we go to Japan a lot and I would love to be able to speak / understand. Maybe one day….
I failed my O level French and scraped it on a resit at my A Level college. I was lousy at languages at school. Welsh was a compulsory lesson for what is now called KS3, despite the fact that the school was so close to the border that we used to sneak out sometimes and go to England for our lunch break. I wasn’t much use at that either, but I still consider it an ugly language on the ear.
I have a smattering of basic Italian, just enough to say something confidently enough that the person I’m speaking to will reply in fluent Italian and then I’m completely lost. My only rule is never to go anywhere without knowing how to say hello, please, thank and beer. You can get a surprisingly long way with that.
Italians don’t actually use “please” (per favore or per cortesia) very much at all. A cultural difference that I’ve seen create problems when they go to the UK and are seen as rude.
I had a choice of Welsh or German. I scraped an O Level in the latter and moved to Switzerland 9 years later. Did it help? Not much
In my experience, attempting to speak Hochdeutsch in Zürich got an immediate response in fluid and fluent English. One might as well have dressed up in an SS costume.
Some truth in that, however many also made the effort to speak “Schriftdeutsch”, saying “Hochdeutsch” can cause problems implying their dialect is low German. As they were also somewhat translating they would speak it slower making it easier for me to understand than Germans speaking it. Of course they would immediately revert to strong dialect in the presence of Germans.
I was once told by an Austrian that my German was pretty good, but I had an appalling Swiss accent!
I once got a cab in Nice and the cabbie said I had a Parisian accent which I was quite chuffed about.
I had a fortnight holiday in the Austrian Alps, then flew to Amsterdam for a work trade show, and answered some questions in German… in what I was told was an Austrian country bumpkin accent. I was quite happy with that!
My daughter first learnt French in a Toronto school that had African teachers. She picked up an African French accent! Then she moved to rural Ontario and apparently started talking like a farmer!
(She went to French language only schools until she was 14)
I think you had more consistent time in Switzerland than I did, dai – I was only really there during the school holidays. That probably accounts for your more reasonable and fair-minded view of the Swiss Germans’ approach to their language. Schriftdeutsch comes up as a term in the book I’m currently reading. As I’m hoping to finish it before the next Takeover blog, I’ll say no more for now.
It’s true many speak near perfect English, French too (and maybe Italian)
My company for a while had its European HQ in Amsterdam. Part of the package was classes in Dutch. Not one single person posted there learned Dutch “What’s the point, I go into the local shop and even the old woman behind the counter replies in perfect English?”
I have in the past had bilingual French, adequate German, and Latin and Ancient Greek.
We lived in Alice Springs for 5 years, and I decided to give Arrernte a shot. I noped out. I couldn’t get the language structure right in my head, let alone the pronunciation.
Like many people I ‘learned’ French at school, but it was the 1970s and even at A-level was still taught by rote with the emphasis on grammar, spelling and written sentence construction. When it came to actually speaking it aloud I floundered, despite being able to explain in exhaustive detail the difference between the pluperfect and the subjunctive. Fast forward 45 years and I still struggle to string a sentence together, have books in French that I can’t read without a dictionary but can just about get the gist of, but I still can’t understand spoken French unless it is played at half speed.
I learnt French whist living and working there and the company paid for one to one French lessons. I was lousy at school many due to laziness but did do a few night school classes over the years so I had a base. My french teach at work encouraged speaking as much as possible, and not too worry about making mistakes, and I told my team that if I didn’t understand, slow down a bit and try again. Within 18 months I was reading and speaking quite fluently. My team were frustrated that they wanted to practice their English so we settled on English Friday where everyone spoke English all day.
Mrs T had paid for French lessons too though had little opportunity to speak it so we ended up with me full of confidence and fluent but only if the subject was business related – she had great vocab, grammar, written french etc. Combined we had all bases covered.
Having, as of friday, pretty much retired, learning conversational Spanish is on my list of things to do, as I want to travel a bit and it seems the most useful language for where I want to go. I bought a basic book a few months ago and started off ok before life and work got in the way. I was hopeless with French at school and I have trouble with the speed people speak at as well as hearing the small differences in pronounciation. Should I try an app then maybe a local conversation group?
Unless you are naturally gifted at languages (like what I’m not, five years at school to scrape an O-level Spanish, needed to get into University) apps only get you so far. I’m guessing this is not an option for you, but time spent in the country of your choice and you refuse to do anything in English is by far the best way to grasp, and keep, the basics. Just remember, you don’t have to be grammatically correct in everything you say. There’s a Dutch guy in our village, totally integrated in the French community who early on thought “No way I’m doing all that feminine/masculine stuff, everything in my world will be masculine. ” Nobody gives a shit.
Yes, my German tutor’s husband is English. His adaptation to the Der/Die/Das problem is his own compound “Derdidas”. I like his style.
How decontructive of him.
Congrats, Dave. The day before we went to the seaside for a week, Mrs F’s boss called to say she was going to hand her notice in, and would Mrs F like the job? Cue one fraught week. Thankfully, she decided that going up the greasy pole for a year or two, despite the financial incentive, wasn’t what she wants.
Now the question is retire at the same time as the boss (thus avoiding having to adapt to a new boss), stay until end of March (and qualify for some quarterly incentive) or stay until the end of May (and pocket the annual bonus).
I’ll probably carry on part-time, earning my pocket money, until it interferes with our holiday plans.
In answer to your question: local conversation group. Our local 6th form college does adult Spanish lessons, which might also be worth looking at – any language class I’ve ever taken usually continued in the pub afterwards.
Thanks Steve. I’ve started selling kit (32 channel LS9 anyone?) and I plan on keeping a pair of laptops and doing a few days a month of PowerPoint at a couple of sites where the kit is permenantly installed although, like you, I expect I’ll get bored of that too at some point.
Just as I was about to retire “new European HQ in Switzerland. Tax free salary, big pension boost, exec car of your choice, you can knock off early on Friday to go skiing”.
Fraught week followed but having more or less worked on my own in my home for the past five years, the thought of arriving in the office at 0830 each Monday and sitting through week after week of endless, pointless meetings finally made the decision easy.
Stupid financially but 100% correct life quality-wise.
HQ would have become the USA – it is bad enough when Mrs F goes to Madrid, or Paris or, er, Cork for a week…
Our campervan is due to be delivered next March. We intend to use it.
I think I’ve had a similar experience to many people. Passed O level French 50 years ago, had no reason to speak it for a long time, went stale, and since then have gone back to refresh it three times, managed OK on trips to France, then promptly forgot it all again. Since retiring at the end of last year I’m having another go, this time with the Babel app (still making up my mind over that), with the aim of reaching conversational level. No idea how that is going to turn out but at least I now have the time to do it every day.
And an aside. One of my mates was refreshing his command of French in his early thirties, advertised for a fluent speaker to help his conversation, found a young French woman living in London, and wound up marrying her.
I passed (barely) my O Level French at school but have never had reason to try and speak it.
I lived 12 years in West Wales (Welsh-speaking, mainly) but only ever picked up the basic words for stuff and how to tell if I was being insulted or mocked, to my embarrassment. Should have put in some effort.
Learning The Language of Luuurve might have been useful, about 50 years ago.